The Washington Post published a despicable editorial in response the International Criminal Court’s warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant:
But the arrest orders undermine the ICC’s credibility and give credence to accusations of hypocrisy and selective prosecution. The ICC is putting the elected leaders of a democratic country with its own independent judiciary in the same category as dictators and authoritarians who kill with impunity.
If the ICC had not issued these warrants in the face of the overwhelming evidence that the Israeli government was using starvation as a weapon, that would have been devastating to the Court’s credibility in the eyes of most nations. Everyone would have concluded that the ICC had bowed to American political pressure by letting these officials off the hook. It is a victory for international law that they didn’t allow fears of the insane backlash from Washington to influence their decision.
One of the problems that the Court has had since its inception is that Western and Western-backed governments always seem to get a pass when they commit war crimes. Many critics did complain about hypocrisy and selective prosecution in the past because for many years it seemed as if the ICC only went after African leaders. That started to change when the ICC issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest last year. The Post was singing a very different tune then, saying that the Court had taken an “important step” when it did that. There were no complaints about the wrong “venue” at that time. The Post had no objection to the ICC going after a war criminal leader that they oppose.
It will come as a revelation to the Post’s editors, but democratically elected leaders can be guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The ICC did not put Netanyahu and Gallant in the same category as dictators and authoritarians. They did that themselves with their brutal and atrocious policies. If they didn’t want to be classed with other rogue leaders, they shouldn’t have committed such terrible violations of international law.
Spencer Ackerman explained recently that the ICC struck a blow for international against the so-called rules-based international order. International law isn’t just for one’s enemies or the world’s pariahs, but it has to be applied to all equally if it means anything. As Ackerman put it, “It’s sufficient to observe here that international law requires universal application, while the Rules-Based International Order preserves American and allied Exceptionalism, making war crimes less about barred conduct than about who gets to commit it.” Cheerleaders of the rules-based order assume that some people and some states are above the law, and these warrants are a direct challenge to that. That is one reason why there has been such an angry reaction in Washington.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.