ElBaradei wonders whether ICC should investigate U.S.
According to this AP report, Mohamed ElBaradei’s new memoir will include some pointed speculation on whether U.S. leaders shouldn’t face justice for the Iraq war: In such a case, he suggests, the World Court should be asked to rule on whether the war was illegal. And, if so, "should not the International Criminal Court investigate ...
According to this AP report, Mohamed ElBaradei's new memoir will include some pointed speculation on whether U.S. leaders shouldn't face justice for the Iraq war:
According to this AP report, Mohamed ElBaradei’s new memoir will include some pointed speculation on whether U.S. leaders shouldn’t face justice for the Iraq war:
In such a case, he suggests, the World Court should be asked to rule on whether the war was illegal. And, if so, "should not the International Criminal Court investigate whether this constitutes a ‘war crime’ and determine who is accountable?"
Formidable political and legal barriers would seem to rule out such an investigation. But ElBaradei, citing the war-crimes prosecution of Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic, sees double standards that should end.
"Do we, as a community of nations, have the wisdom and courage to take the corrective measures needed, to ensure that such a tragedy will never happen again?" he asks.
"Formidable political and legal barriers" puts it mildly. There are numerous problems for those hoping to see senior American leaders in the dock for the Iraq war. First, the U.S. is not an ICC member and so jurisdiction would have to be through the territorial state, in this case Iraq. But Iraq’s not an ICC member either. That leaves the possibility of the UN Security Council referring the case or Iraq itself giving the ICC authority through some special instrument. The latter is highly unlikely, given that the current Iraqi government owes its existence to the invasion, and the U.S. could of course block the former.
Even leaving jurisdiction aside, there’s the problem of the crime with which to charge America’s wartime leaders. Aggression would seem to be the most plausible, but that was only recently defined by the ICC member states and can’t be the basis of a case based on events in 2003.
ElBaradei’s ruminations no doubt make for good politics in Egypt, but not much more than that.
A reader writes:
Baredei no doubt wants to go after Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell et al. But, of course, the war carried over into Obama’s term and the U.S. still "occupies" Iraq as part of the fruits of our original "aggression." Therefore, we have to assume Obama, Biden, Gates, Clinton et al would also be the subjects of the investigation.
I’m not sure about this. The current force is blessed by a UN Security Council resolution while the initial invasion force was not. If the question is aggression, that’s a critical distinction.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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