The following letters were sent to the NYT editorial board in response to Stephen Krasner's "A World Court That Could Backfire," Op-Ed, Jan. 15.

Dear Editor:

Stephen Krasner's illumination of the possibility that a Nazi war criminal could be freely riding a Berlin bus is not the best way to win converts to his view in opposition to an International Criminal Court. Furthermore, none of us, including Mr. Krasnow, are able to give concrete analysis on the effects that an ICC would have had in post-war Germany, as opposed to the Nuremberg tribunals.

Mr. Krasnow also argues that an ICC would only worsen the death and destruction carried out by despotic rulers as they would never surrender when faced with prosecution by the ICC. He fails to mention the deterrent effect of the ICC.

Hitler, and the genocidal planners that surrounded him, could have never carried out the Holocaust among themselves - it required the participation of tens of thousands. What if those tens of thousands of German soldiers knew they were to face prosecution at an ICC for murdering Jews? Would all of them have committed murder anyway? There is no way to know for certain.

What we do know is that those German soldiers lived in a world without international justice. In such a world it is possible for a young soldier to murder innocent men, women, and children with the knowledge that he is likely to one day be an old man freely riding a city bus. Humanity would do best to reject the arguments of those, like Mr. Krasnow, who can accept such a world as a harsh political reality.

Timothy Rieger