It should come as no surprise that the United States remained essentially silent when the International Criminal Court recently issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For the two decades since the ICC’s inception, the US has avoided involvement in the Court’s mission regarding the effort to seek justice for the perpetrators of crimes against humanity throughout the world. Facing probable indictment by the ICC for a variety of misdeeds in Iraq including but not limited to the illegal nature of the US invasion itself, the lies upon which the invasion was based, the torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib, the mass murder of hundreds of civilians (many of whom were women and children) in Fallujah, the revenge inspired massacre of civilians in Haditha, the program of Extraordinary Rendition (resulting in the subsequent torture of civilians suspected of terrorism in ‘black site’ locations around the world), and the construction of the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay wherein suspected bad actors (from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere) have been detained for decades without recourse to due process.
In light of these transgressions, it is no wonder that the Bush/Chaney/Rumsfeld regime rigorously fought against efforts by the ICC to include the US as a probable target for further scrutiny. What is less understandable is the reluctance of the Obama Administration (aside from agreeing to join the ICC in the limited capacity as an observer) to seek substantive accountability of the previous administration for their actions in the mid-east and beyond. The main justification for this inaction was the declaration that ‘it is now time to look ahead; not behind as we proceed into the future’………words that rang hollow and possibly presaged the subsequent tolerance of staggering levels of mendacity that has followed in recent years. During the Trump years, antipathy for the ICC increased dramatically as typified by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo instituting sanctions against the Court including the banning of passports for its governing members. This marked both the nadir in our relationship vis a vis the ICC as well as a sadly predictable consequence from years of neglect in terms of seeking/achieving accountability and resolution arising from past foreign policy decisions and their accompanying actions.
Fair play to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes who devoted an entire segment of his All In program for implicitly stating that the devolution of the American political milieu and discourse as well as the fracturing of a sense of national unity may very well have arisen from our inability/unwillingness to honestly come to terms with the reality of our actions in the decades since the tragic events of 9/11. Authentic healing is a result of genuine and open confrontation with the truth; not from an avoidance or denial of its existence and essential meaning.
