Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [114]
Another Defense official said, “Osama bin Laden is a poor measure of effectiveness.”
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, said, “I wouldn’t call [getting bin Laden] a prime mission.” In April Myers said, “The goal has never been to get bin Laden.” Donald Rumsfeld said, “He could walk in here tomorrow and al-Qaeda would go on functioning.”
In July Bush said, “Osama bin Laden, he may be alive. If he is, we’ll get him. If he’s not alive, we got him. We haven’t heard from him in a long time. I don’t know if the man’s living or the man’s dead. But one thing is for certain: the war on terrorists is a lot bigger than one person.” This from the man who said bin Laden was “wanted, dead or alive.” When bin Laden did finally reappear, the administration greeted the news with all the excitement normally reserved for the Hula Bowl.
In May 2002 the Bush administration “unsigned” the Rome treaty establishing an International Criminal Court and announced we would provide neither information nor cooperation. The court took jurisdiction over cases of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes on July 1, 2002. Our withdrawal particularly shocked European public opinion but, as usual, went almost unreported here. The court is an outgrowth of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague in which Slobodan Milosevic is being tried; the irony is that the United States paid Belgrade millions—some would call it a bribe—to turn Milosevic over to that court. The court was established with generous input from the United States. Bush then attempted to destroy the court not only by refusing to sign but also by threatening to veto all U.N. peacekeeping missions unless the Security Council overrode the treaty and gave blanket immunity to all Americans engaged in peacekeeping. This did not go down well with the allies. There are only 700 American peacekeepers, of the 45,000 total currently on duty, and the ICC had already made numerous concessions to American sensitivities. After a huge international brouhaha—which got almost no attention here because the American media are engaged in serious investigative reporting, such as the television special about Michael Jackson—Bush agreed to put off the decision for a year.
The folly of the move is self-evident: we need international cooperation in the pursuit and prosecution of terrorists and other political criminals. The move also had weird consequences, since later the same year the administration was talking about the possibility of trying Saddam Hussein, and/or his top echelon, for their various heinous crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, we cannot have them tried in the court created for this purpose since we have already announced we will provide neither cooperation nor information to that court. Our fall-back position then became that Hussein et al. could be tried under the same kind of ad hoc tribunal for crimes against humanity set up by the United Nations in Sierra Leone, site of some truly horrific crimes in the course of a civil war. But the United States, under the Bush administration, has urged that similar tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia be disbanded. This was the point at which the word incoherent began to be used about our foreign policy.
At the same time we reneged on the International Criminal Court, we announced that we were no longer bound by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which sets out the obligations of states to abide by treaties they have signed but not yet ratified. This means we are no longer bound by several, including the 1989 Convention on Children’s Rights. The Pentagon has stalled that one because they want to continue to induct seventeen-year-olds,