Saddam's Trial of Tears

On his weblog, Thomas Barnett offers an interesting analysis on the Trial of the Century (and no, I'm not referring to the Michael Jackson debacle). In his November 10 post "Why Saddam's trial in Iraq is a mistake" he writes,

Saddam should be on trial in the ICC. Doesn't matter the hassle. Doesn't matter what bad things might be exposed about our intervention or occupation.

You want to use the Leviathan, you have to submit to the global rule set. We set that process in motion, getting a lot of authorship in the process (meaning, getting our way), or that process is imposed on us, and we won't like the outcome.

I agree with what he says, that Saddam should be on trial in the International Criminal Court, but there's a serious problem with us making that claim. We don't right now have the moral authority to demand that. The idea of the ICC, the idea of the Leviathan, is a concept that all people of all nations in this economic, political, and ideological state of "interconnectivity" submit to a single, universal rules set. Institutions like the ICC, the UN, the IAEA, and the World Bank are attempts to establish that universal rules set, a "new world order" if you will. As are the Geneva Conventions, the Kyoto Protocol, the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, ad infinitum.

But there's one problem with us insisting that others adhere to these rules sets. We consistently do not.

Under an autocratic regime such as Saddam's, a dictator is not guilty of "breaking the law," because there is no law in his nation that binds him to not act in any certain manner. The state of Iraq cannot try him for crimes that he committed if there were no laws on the books prohibiting his actions. I could be wrong; I'm not a scholar of Iraqi law. Maybe in the case of Saddam he is guilty of breaking Iraqi law. I'm just trying to make a point about autocratic regimes in general.

So we need another set of Laws. Not just feelings about how things should be, but on-the-book, honest to god Laws. War, chemical weapons, nukes, genocide, and systematic oppression of gender/racial/religious groups are all reprehensible, but are they illegal? According to whom?

The United States of America has a shrinking window of opportunity to be the most dominant player in the international dialogue. We, right now and for a limited time, have more of a say in the international community than just about anyone else. What we do with this time is critical to the way the world will look in the next twenty years.

This is what I submit to you, my loyal readers (all three of you): We have a choice, right now, to create the Leviathan in our image and insist that everyone jump on board, or to let it, and us, and the universal rule of law (something that our founding fathers would have been proud to see as their progeny) slip by the side of the road.

We have a fundamental obligation to bind ourselves to the rule of international law. We have a fundamental obligation to subject ourselves to the burden of releasing some of our autonomy in service to the ideal of something greater. Right now the fact that we are bucking the system in so many ways serves to embolden our critics, who make the claim that we are hypocrits in demanding that other states submit to international restrictions. We want the IAEA in North Korea? Excellent idea! So why don't we let them in here? We want international human rights observers to witness elections in Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia? Great! But why can't they evaluate our elections? We want Iraq to stop using chemical weapons? Why don't we agree to the same international definitions and descriptions of chemical weapons and agree to not use those things that are internationally accepted? Do we need Napalm and Willie Pete so badly that our troops will get slaughtered if we don't have them at our disposal? How about depleted uranium?

Or is it just easier to invade than to "let the French tell us what we can and can't do"?

Well, I guess that's a moot point. We invaded and shut down that line of dialogue.

Don't get me wrong here; I don't think that signing the international convention against torture (and then ADHERING to it) would stop Mubarak from using his old tactics. But let me say this: we're on the cusp of a new international balance of power. The last one was dipolar, the US and the USSR. This new one is going to be tripolar, the US, the EU, and China. We ALL KNOW about China's ideas on "human rights". We share a tradition of rights and laws with Europe. If we don't band together with Europe now and set the framework for the future, if we continue to play the part of the morally grey actor, we're going to find ourselves in a future where we are unable to get Europe to cooperate with us when we need to counterbalance rising Chinese military and economic might.

We've lost the moral high ground. We "had to play dirty to defeat the commies". Now, we need to regain that moral high ground. We should be sending a hundred thousand troops into Darfur to stop the Janjaweed, who have the support of the Sudanese government, from killing another couple hundred thousand black Muslims. We should do it not because we want their enormous natural resources (you can make glass out of sand, right?) We should do it because it's the morally right thing to do. But until we get an international system in place to share the burden, and to agree on when and how we should act, anything we do is going to be criticized and undermined.

If we want the world to be held to a universal standard of right and wrong, we must subject ourselves to that same standard.