More sparks Here’s Gary J. Bass in the New Republic, with a piece that argues against our withdrawal from the International Criminal court, and does so on the specifics:

[O]pposition to the ICC revolves in part around fear of renegade politically minded prosecutions […] Slobodan Milosevic, for example, set up his own bogus war crimes trials for NATO’s leadership after the Kosovo war—a war in which NATO worked hard to choose and hit legitimate military targets, while Milosevic did his best to hit Kosovar Albanian civilians.

But the ICC is built with safeguards to prevent these kinds of farcical prosecutions; most importantly, it can only prosecute if a national prosecution has already proven to be a joke or a flop. So any American soldier accused of war crimes charges would, if America were part of the ICC, almost certainly just wind up facing an American court martial, just as he or she would without the ICC. Taking the sober and responsible jurisprudence of the United Nations’ ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals as a model for the ICC, one would hardly expect trouble for American soldiers.

Despite my post previous to this one, I don’t actually have a firm position on this issue—as opposed to some opinions about what does and doesn’t constitute a good argument. Bass’s conclusion strikes me as a good argument:

[T]he ICC debate has been a resounding example of framing an issue the wrong way. Rather than pointing out that America tries to put itself on the side of human rights, and that the American military goes to great pains to fight its wars in a just manner, the Bush White House has once again opened itself up to accusations that it is simply allergic to multilateralism (ABM Treaty, Kyoto Protocol, land mines treaty, child soldiers treaty, etc.). Rather than pointing to Milosevic’s trial in the Hague—a man on trial for genocide against Muslims, in the dock in large part because of American power—as proof of how American power can help the Muslim world, the Bushies are fleeing from it. Instead of having the debate about the ICC be focused on the dictatorships that commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, the Bushies have changed the subject to America.

[12:13 PM]