The International Herald Tribune

Tuesday, July 28, 1998

A GOOD IDEA, BUT NOT FOR AMERICANS

By Thomas W. Lippman

Washington - Suppose, at the time the My Lai massacre in Vietnam was revealed, there had existed a free-standing international war crimes court and an independent prosecutor with the authority to indict suspects. Should such a prosecutor have been able to go after Lieutenant William F. Calley's superior officers, or individual troops under his command at My Lai?

What if such a court and prosecutor - some global Kenneth Starr, from South America, perhaps, or Africa - had been empowered to investigated "aggression" as a war crime when U.S. troops entered Grenada in 1983 or Panama in 1989, unbidden, and changed their governments?

In the end, such questions forced American negotiators to reject the landmark treaty negotiated in Rome this month that will establish just such a court and prosecutor.

They rejected it even though the United States had long favored the tribunal's creation.

It is a classic "Seemed like a good idea at the time" story.

If Bosnia and Rwanda are symptomatic of the wars of the post-Cold War era, the Clinton administration originally reasoned, would it not be more efficient to have a permanent court with judges and prosecutors at the ready than to create a new one for each atrocity?

Perhaps it would, but the price for efficiency was more than the United States was willing to pay.

As a condition of support for the court, the United States sought ironclad guarantees that no Americans would ever be subject to its jurisdiction. It argued that it stood in a class by itself as the only world power with troops on the line in dozens of countries. Even close allies declined to bow to this American sense of exceptionalism.

The American also wanted the prosecutor to be controlled by the UN Security Council, where the United States has a veto. The vast majority of countries as the conference, with no veto, insisted on diluting the authority of the council.

And the United States resisted encroachments on its sovereignty, an attitude that did not impress Europeans, who "are in the business of giving away sovereignty" to organizations such as the European Union, as a Republican observer of the conference put it.

The Americans argued, in effect: "We're the ones who respond when the world dials 911, and if you want us to keep responding, you should accommodate our views."

The American demand for institutional recognition of the U.S. role in the world, based on the assumption that American troops always do the right thing, seemed only to stir resistance.

As American objections to the treaty's text were trounced in one overwhelming vote after another, delegates from other countries who rejected American arguments and chafed at American negotiating tactics stood and cheered.

The American negotiators were chastened, but had they yielded, they would have faced certain rejection of the treaty and the court by an U.S. Senate in which American sovereignty and the protection of U.S. troops are as sacred as motherhood and apple pie.

The Washington Post