Originally published on the CGS blog on June 21, 2007.
Detached from reality; surely that is the only explanation for the conduct of the member of Congress and/or their staffer when they added language to the House Foreign Operations Appropriations bill that would limit economic aid to some countries supporting the International Criminal Court (ICC) .
Yes you did read that correctly. At a time when the U.S. image in the world is seemingly at an all time low; at a time when we have profound foreign policy/national security challenges to face from Iraq to Climate Change to Darfur , a member of Congress decided to win political points with a few dead-enders who think we can still afford to bash globally embraced international institutions like the ICC. Forgive me for saying that the responsible (or should I say irresponsible) individual seems to be living in a time warp! We are not living in the 1990’s when it was “the economy stupid” and the ICC existed only on paper.
I could spend the entire morning writing about why the United States has nothing to fear from the ICC ; that the ICC in fact embodies core U.S. legal values and traditions ; that it is supported by all of our close democratic allies and has, by its actions, shown that it is oriented towards the prosecution of war criminals from the DRC to Darfur. It would also be easy to spend several hours systematically illustrating the massive foreign policy and national security costs associated with the fatally flawed BIA policy pursued by our government in recent years.
But I’m not going to take either approach. The information required to make a national security and foreign policy case for constructive engagement with the ICC and a reversal of the BIA policy exists (here are a couple of links) and has been, and continues to be, widely disseminated on Capitol Hill. The problem here is not a lack of information, it is a lack of awareness, a disregard for the consequences of ones actions, and it is, frankly, a reckless approach to foreign policy that is harmful both to the United States and the international community. Let us hope that the U.S. Senate can save the House of Representatives from itself?..again.
