US wants war crimes tribunals for the Russian invasion, but ...

 

The US has always prided itself as supporting and enforcing the concept of a “rules-based order” of international law. But when it comes to enforcement by any kind of international organization, it has adamantly excluded itself from their jurisdiction. If there were a Nobel Prize for hypocrisy, the US government and its compliant media would be the overwhelming choice (except that the US government would, of course, veto the selection).

The war in Ukraine presents an example of this hypocrisy, both in terms of its coverage by the media and the demands that the aggressors be tried as war criminals. While the horrendous actions of the Russian government and military should be condemned, in many respects they pale in significance to actions by the US and its NATO allies in the last 20+ years (and, if we go back further, to the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and the use of nuclear weapons on Japan at the end of WWII, all of which resulted in massive numbers of civilian deaths).

As reported in a recent article by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies in Nation of Change,

“Mosul in Iraq was the largest city that the United States and its allies reduced to rubble in that campaign, with a pre-assault population of 1.5 million. About 138,000 houses were damaged or destroyed by bombing and artillery, and an Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report counted at least 40,000 civilians killed.

“Raqqa, which had a population of 300,000, was gutted even more. A UN assessment mission reported that 70-80% of buildings were destroyed or damaged. Syrian and Kurdish forces in Raqqa reported counting 4,118 civilian bodies. Many more deaths remain uncounted in the rubble of Mosul and Raqqa. Without comprehensive mortality surveys, we may never know what fraction of the actual death toll these numbers represent. 

Yet neither of these (and there are many, many more) clear cut violations of the “rules-based order” are mentioned alongside of the coverage of the Russian atrocities in Ukraine. In fact, the U.S. and its allies have dropped over 337,000 bombs and missiles on nine countries since 2001 alone. Lost in the “fog of war” promoted by the US media is this comparison: the first 24 days of Russia’s bombing of Ukraine were less destructive than the first day of U.S. bombing in Iraq in 2003. To the media and much of the American public “Shock and Awe” was a beautiful sight, much like the fireworks on the 4^th of July, not a deadly violation of “rules-based order”.

We are rightfully horrified when we see civilians killed by Russian bombardment in Ukraine, but not quite so horrified, when we hear that civilians are killed by U.S. forces or American weapons in Iraq, Syria, Yemen or Gaza. The Western corporate media play a key role in this, showing us corpses in Ukraine, but not equally disturbing images of people killed by U.S. or allied forces. Most of these atrocities fly totally under the radar, to use a military metaphor.

While it is the media’s hypocrisy that creates different reactions to the crimes committed in modern warfare depending on the nation involved and the color of the victims of these crimes, it should be stated that it is even more hypocritical for a nation that refuses to sign international treaties for the prosecution of war criminals, to demand that other nations be charged with war crimes. The US has steadfastly refused to ratify the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court which is where war crimes would be tried. It has demanded exceptions for itself with regard to the Genocide Convention, which was the first human rights treaty adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, and other international treaties that define a “rules-based order”.

It is the only country that has rejected a decision by the Word Court. When the court ruled that the US was guilty of unlawful use of force in Nicaragua in 1986 and ordered it to pay reparations, the US government responded by ignoring the court AND escalating the conflict. Then in the American Service-Members' Protection Act of 2002 (aka the Hague Invasion Act), Congress, with the support of both Republicans and Democrats, authorized the President to use the American military to free its service members or those of any allied country who might be taken for trial in the Hague, Netherlands.

Conclusion: the “rules-based order”, one which the US had a major hand in defining and has been demanding others abide by, does not apply to the US. Why? Because the US has the power to enforce it on the others and to prevent it from being enforced on itself. That power is guaranteed by spending almost $800 billion dollars or more of our tax dollars on “defense”, defense not of the American homeland and its citizens, but of the US “Empire of Liberty”, not to mention US corporate interests  abroad (or are they one and the same thing?)

The question remains, how did this come about. The standard explanation is that world leadership was thrust on a reluctant United States by the fact that it was spared the devastation of WWII and by the expansion of communism. A recent reading of an excellent book by Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow the World, has inspired the historian in me to look once again into the rise of the US “Empire of Liberty” and its true nature. I will share my musings as I go along the path – starting in the beginning, the year 1607.