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Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Laura Rozen and Matthew Yglesias discuss the possibility that Bush administration figures could one day face war crimes charges. Indeed, at this point the prospect of George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld being tried some years hence for crimes against humanity seems fairly plausible, and it is this very plausibility that must force us to ask: are crimes against humanity really crimes to be prosecuted at all?
In the wake of 9/11, it became a given that the United States would have to take quite extraordinary measures in defending the Free World against the creeping threat of Muslinazification. Preventive, unilateral war, arcane democratic domino theories, a certain eagerness to strap electrodes to the genitals of any Arab male over eighteen - most of America's more squeamish global neighbors were bound to be alienated by these necessary steps. In fact, given the rest of the world's generally weak and out-of-touch stance on the war on terror, any measures which offend, shock, and horrify our closest allies are bound to be generally on the right track. Thus, if America is right when it is angering Europe, Asia, and the Mideast, how much more right is America when those same areas of the world are indicting American leaders for war crimes? Americans cannot wait for the approval of humanity before it burns a naked detainee with cigarettes or beats, molests, and shoots a prisoner in an oil drum. By the time the human race realizes the immense favor the Bush administration has done for it, it may already have been too late.
posted by the Medium Lobster at 3:39 PM
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