Threading the Needle at the ICC

Prosecutors at International Criminal Court in The Hague are requesting arrest warrants for Muammar Qaddafi and two of his relatives, the NYTimes reports. The men are said to have “crushed peaceful demonstrations and ordered the use of live ammunition and heavy weapons against protestors.”

In another act of shameless self-promotion, here is an expanded version of the comments (which have not been “highlighted” — yet) I left at the Times:

If the warrant is based on the accusation that Qadaffi “crushed peaceful demonstrations and ordered the use of live ammunition and heavy weapons against protestors,” then why has not a similar warrant been issued for Bashar al-Assad of Syria? Assad has responded similarly to protests in his own country. I expect the U.S. to base its rhetoric on political considerations, but while it may be in America’s best interest to have a stable (albeit autocratic) Syrian regime, the ICC can hardly justify such hypocrisy. The court in the Hague should be above such realpolitik considerations, but in singling out Qadaffi without also citing the leaders of Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, it shows that politics has infested every level of international justice.

Is it hypocritical to accuse the ICC of hypocrisy while not leveling the same charges at the United States? Maybe. But the U.S. government has its own interests to look out for; the ICC is a supposedly neutral arbiter of justice. Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court is also meant to be neutral, but Scalia and his fellow strict-constructionists (gee, let’s pretend we know what Thomas Jefferson would think of gay marriage) are about as neutral as the billionaire Koch brothers in the Citizens United case.

Further Notes from Foggy Bottom

Photograph by Martin Schoeller/August

“Clinton Toughens Tone Toward Syria.” (NYT)

“The Consequentialist.” (The New Yorker)

“The Obama Doctrine: Leading from Behind.” (Washington Post)

The New York Times reports today that Hillary Clinton “moved the United States a step closer to calling for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria” Stating that Syria cannot return to the tight control of previous years, Clinton raised the issue of tougher sanctions. “Tanks and bullets and clubs will not solve Syria’s political and economic challenges,” she is quoted as saying. “Tanks and bullets and clubs will not solve Syria’s political and economic challenges.”

Still, Clinton’s rhetoric that “treating one’s own people in this way is in fact a sign of remarkable weakness,” not strength, is belied by the fact that Assad’s regime appears to be gaining the upper hand in its battle to suppress rebellion. Sanctions are a notoriously blunt and inefficient tool with which to pressure a dictatorship, especially considering that Assad is already something of a persona non grata in the western world. The U.S. has few business dealings with Syria as it is, making it difficult to predict the effectiveness of more sanctions. Furthermore, the Obama administration has not yet even frozen the assets of Assad himself, choosing instead to focus its efforts on henchmen like Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother.

On another note, Ryan Lizza’s piece on foreign relations in the Obama era — “The Consequentialist,” in the May 2, 2011, edition of The New Yorker — reinforces the (possibly overstated) idea that the Department of State under Hillary Clinton has become “something of a haven for the ideas that flourished late in the Clinton Administration,” including the use of “‘soft power,’ the ability to bend the world toward your view through attraction, not coercion.” In a way, this supports the male vs. female dynamic that others claim to see in the current government. Lizza notes, however, that Clinton is able to wield soft power because she is also willing to employ the harder, more realistic tactics that until the Libya split had put her in alignment with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Anne-Marie Slaughter, Clinton’s director of policy planning, compares her boss to Madeleine Albright and Condoleeza Rice:

“Secretary Clinton can push the agenda she pushes because she is tough and people know she is tough,” Slaughter said. “It’s very interesting—you’ve had three women Secretaries of State, and she’s the first one who can stand up and say publicly, ‘We are going to empower women and girls around the world.”

Lizza summarizes the supposed gender split among Obama’s advisers: “The realists who view foreign policy as a great chess game—and who want to focus on China and India—are usually men. The idealists, who talk about democracy and human rights, are often women.” He notes, however, that the White House has called that formulation “outlandish,” and points out that it was Clinton who pushed Obama to take a harder line on democracy in Iran.

The New Yorker article has been held upby conservatives – see Charles Krauthammer’s distortion of Lizza’s thesis that President Obama “leads from behind” — as a critique of Obama’s reluctance to make the U.S. a spearhead for democratic change in the Arab world. But Lizza points out that Obama’s positions are continually evolving, that he is wary to commit his country to a one-size-fits-all Middle East policy. Criticizing dictators makes for nice headlines, but what does it do to further or protect American interests in the region? Obama has learned to “talk like an idealist while acting like a realist,” and his emissaries — Clinton in particular — are denounced in Egypt for insufficiently supporting the revolution while they simultaneously push for intervention in other countries (see Libya).

Key to Clinton’s philosophy is this paragraph:

“I get up every morning and I look around the world,” she said. “People are being killed in Côte d’Ivoire, they’re being killed in the Eastern Congo, they’re being oppressed and abused all over the world by dictators and really unsavory characters. So we could be intervening all over the place. But that is not a—what is the standard? Is the standard, you know, a leader who won’t leave office in Ivory Coast and is killing his own people? Gee, that sounds familiar. So part of it is having to make tough choices and wanting to help the international community accept responsibility.”

It’s true. America could be “intervening all over the place,” but for political as well as practical reasons — how large an army would it take to invade six or seven countries in Africa at once? — it chooses not to. Leading from behind does not play well with the bumper-sticker crowd, but it is at least a realistic doctrine, as opposed to George W. Bush’s policy of overthrowing whichever dictators he could convince the public were a terrorist threat. (Or, it should be noted, whichever dictators had offended Daddy.) An Obama adviser, nameless in Lizza’s story, says that leading from behind is “so at odds with the John Wayne expectation for what America is in the world . . . . But it’s necessary for shepherding us through this phase.”