Thoughtful piece by Jeremy Rabkin in The Weekly Standard (subscribers only, but I’ll quote generously) on how the Bushies should proceed on the issue of the ICC:

Congress has been considering bills to authorize the president to take retaliatory action (including military action) against any country that seizes or holds Americans for trial before the ICC. Majorities in both the House and the Senate have endorsed such measures. The administration ought to be taking the lead in getting some measure of this kind on the books.

Is that too unilateralist? It is the ICC which is, in the relevant respects, ‘unilateralist’ by imposing new conditions on independent states without their consent. The fact that several states do this in collaboration doesn’t change the underlying fact that a new authority is being imposed on others without their consent.

As it happens, the non-consenters include the overwhelming majority of U.N. member states and a still more overwhelming majority of the world’s people (with China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, and other large states among the non-ratifiers). On the whole, the 70 or so states that have ratified are essentially Euros and their former colonies in Africa, along with a sprinkling of nice little states like New Zealand and Ecuador.

If the administration is afraid of appearing ‘unilateralist,’ it should be trying to rally non-ratifying states to a common position against the court. All non-ratifying states have a common stake in resisting the notion that ‘international justice’ can be imposed on them because European socialists think it would be nice to do so and their client states have signed on to the project.

Now is not the best time to do this, when the United States is already trying to rally international cooperation for a war on terror. The truth is that the war on terror makes it essential to act against the ICC. The United States wants to hold states accountable for sponsoring terror. It is acting and should be glad if others act to hold terror sponsors accountable. Accountability means military action. In the midst of a war on terror, the last thing we want is an international arbiter of ‘aggression’ or ‘war crimes,’ handing down moral judgments from his cozy perch in Euroland, where they do no fighting but are only too happy to pass judgment on those who do.

There’s a big world out there, beyond Europe. America should be part of it. The administration should spend less time worrying about the moral vanities of Europeans and more time building what Secretary Rumsfeld used to call ‘coalitions of the willing.’ In the coalition to contain the new Euro-court, there are plenty of ‘willing’ partners. They don’t have the refined sensibilities of the Germans and the French? That’s okay, too. Let the Euro-court offer justice to Botswana and Nauru, Mauritius and Mongolia. The United States can stand with Australia, India, Israel, Mexico, Russia, and other self-respecting states.

Well, like my dad always said: if you don’t like the rules in my house, boy, you can always go build a house of your own.

Not such bad advice, ‘t turns out.

—–