Earthborn said:
So you admit it plays a role? Interesting.
Please. Your attempts to make this sound sinister are amateur. Yes, it's partly about oil, but not for the reasons most people think it's about oil. It's about oil because oil lets failed societies prop themselves up, buy weapons, and encourage violent, irrational ideologies because they don't actually need to produce anything themselves. This makes oil-producing countries very dangerous places (there is no worse curse for a developing country than vastly rich natural resources). So yes, it's partly about oil. But it isn't about the US controlling that oil. If we wanted to do that, we could have cozied up to Saddam, and he would have been quite willing to sell us all the oil we wanted on the cheap. The mullahs of Iran are basically asking us to do the same thing. But of course, you hear "oil" and you immediately think it means we'll sell anyone out for a few drops of it. Guess again. It was the UN, with it's corrupt and unaccountable food for oil program, which made billions off of prolonging the suffering of the people of Iraq. And billions of that money is unaccounted for, and I'm not even talking about the kickbacks and payoffs outside the program's control. It was France and Russia whose foreign policy bowed down before their desires for cheap oil, not us.
What was that other thing again... Oh, yes, Weapons of Mass Destruction, because 'we must act now before Iraq becomes an imminent threat.'
Actually, I quite like this quote, and agree with it. Maybe you need help parsing it. The quote makes it quiote plain that Iraq is not yet an imminent threat, but is likely to be in the future. And that is completely correct. Nobody has given any evidence to contradict that, and it was the safest bet going.
A pariah state? I would think that if the international community would want to make the US into a pariah state, it would prefer it to be outside the ICC instead of in. And it would make sure it would still have jurisdiction over it. But the opposite has happened.
Nobody is going to agree to an ICC with jurisdiction over countries that don't agree to it, and if that's not obvious to you, you're simply not getting it. But there is no single "international community" with a single will an intention, that's a fantasy only the Europeans seem to fall for. Some of our European "allies" want us in the ICC because they hope it will limit our actions, that we will need to tread more lightly for fear of prosecution. France explicitly calls for opposing the US not because our course is wrong but because they think we are too powerful. These countries do not want us to be a pariah, but merely hobbled. It's the corrupt little countries in Africa and the middle east that would want to turn us into a pariah state. And there's no reason to think that France etc. wouldn't let them.
Yes, I see it now. All those enemies of the US cheering: "Hurrah, people in the United States can now be prosecuted for war crimes! All they have to do now is peform some war crimes as defined in the Rome Statute, and one of their most loyal allies to arrest them!"
Not exactly. All they need to do is get a majority of judges on the panel (and here's where the plethora of tiny dictatorships comes in handy). They don't need an actual war crime to happen, they only need something they can CALL a war crime. And you can bet your house that the Iraq invasion would qualify.
After all, it can't be a 'crime of aggression' if he had a darn good reason to go to war with Iraq, right? And he did have a darn good reason, right? (No, I don't know what it is either.)
You simply haven't been paying attention, have you? Actions that don't resemble terrorism are regularly labeled as terrorism by people who blow themselves up to kill children, and much of the middle east media follows along with the rhetoric. It's quite easy to call something a war crime even if it isn't, all you need is the judges stacked against you. Where, exactly, is the mechanism to keep that from happening?
