Victor's Justice

A few weeks ago it was announced that Muammar Gaddafi and his family were going to be indicted by the International Criminal Court for their various misdeeds. Gaddafi, like all politicians, is a vicious criminal thug who deserves to hang, but the timing reveals what his real 'crime' was- being on the wrong side. What Gaddafi is doing to Libyans who want to free themselves of his tyranny isn't any worse than what the Bahraini government is doing to Bahrainis seeking their own liberty, but curiously no indictments of the al-Khalifa family have issued forth, nor are they under investigation. Bahrain is, of course, home to the United States's Sixth Fleet, but I am sure their cozy relationship with the world's power elite has nothing to do with their free pass to repress with impunity.

International law, like all law, is simply a club in the hand of the powerful. In our country, our institutions and culture have gone some way towards turning justice from another word for the vengeance of the powerful into a meaningful concept, although a long way remains to go. What passes for international law, however, contaminates the very idea of justice. If we were serious about international law, Barack Obama, Hu Jintao and George W. Bush would all find themselves in the dock next to Ratko Mladic today in the Hague. If the trials at Nuremberg that birthed the misbegotten abortion that is our notion of international law had been truly just, all sides would have found themselves facing the gallows.

A long time ago, I imagined that international law could be used to bring government malefactors to heel. What a food I was. International law simply grants the imprimatur of 'justice' to the gang wars that characterize foreign affairs.