The International Criminal Court, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio complains in a July 13 Wall Street Journal op-ed, styles itself “a standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the U.S. and other sovereign states — and to prosecute and arrest our citizens.”

Accepting that, he claims, “would mean the death of the U.S. as a sovereign and independent nation.”

He’d be right … if the ICC resembled his description of it. But it doesn’t.

The ICC’s jurisdiction — its “reach” — is strictly limited to crimes of specific types, and applies only when those crimes are committed on the soil of, or by citizens of, its 125 member states.

Each of those member states have, pursuant to their own “sovereignty,” ratified the Rome Statute, granting the ICC that jurisdiction.

Rubio’s problem with the ICC isn’t that it can “override the courts and constitutions of the U.S. and other sovereign states.” It’s that when an American allegedly commits a relevant crime on the soil of an ICC member state, the ICC, rather than US courts, adjudicates the matter.

To put it a different way, Rubio’s demand of ICC member states is “global sovereignty for the US, no sovereignty for anyone else.”

The whole idea of “sovereignty,” as codified in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, is that the world’s various regimes possess “legitimate” authority over their respective turf claims. That’s why the courts in Peoria don’t try people accused of reckless driving in Pakistan, or vice versa. And if some of those regimes choose to outsource prosecution of crimes on their respective turfs or by their respective serfs to an “international” court, that’s their prerogative.

Rubio wants it both ways.

The US regime routinely prosecutes — or, in the case of recent strikes on ocean-going vessels, just murders — foreigners for alleged crimes not even committed on US soil. Sometimes it even kidnaps the alleged criminals FROM foreign soil, as with former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

But if an American soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine allegedly commits a crime in, say, Afghanistan (an ICC member state), he whines that charging, trying, and potentially convicting that American is an outrageous violation of US “sovereignty.”

The real solution to Rubio’s complaint is simple:

If the US government doesn’t want its military personnel charged with crimes, it should stop sending them abroad — or at least not send them to ICC member states — to commit crimes.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On June 9, Graham Platner won the Democratic Party’s nomination for US Senate from Maine with 72.1% of the primary vote. On July 10, Platner withdrew from the race, presumably due to popular demand by the same voters who nominated him.

I’m tempted to a bit of schadenfreude toward those voters.

This was not a case of “seems like a really good guy, very consistent, upright citizen … oh my God, I had no idea!”

Platner’s entire short political career — his whole adult life, in fact — resembles a locomotive, on fire, pulling boxcars stuffed full of dynamite, accelerating down tracks that terminate at a children’s playground.

While the final straw was an allegation of rape, it’s not like he hadn’t already been credibly and multiple times been accused of poor behavior toward women, ranging from marital infidelity to physical assault.

Until the rape allegation, he was able to shrug that kind of thing off with a plea of PTSD from his military career. Speaking of which:

As a candidate, Platner told his opponent, US Senator Susan Collins, “You voted to send me to Iraq. Did you not learn anything from that experience?”

It’s a reasonable question, but it rings a little hollow from someone who wasn’t drafted, who joined up after the wars he fought had begun, and who kept coming back for more. Platner spent four years in the Marine Corps, then returned for four more in the National Guard, then worked as a mercenary (“security contractor”), for a total of three combat tours in Iraq and a six-month deployment to Afghanistan.

I’m sympathetic to veteran regret (got a bit of that myself), but it seems to have taken that regret a long time to develop despite  severe negative consequences, including the PTSD he tries to blame all his bad behavior on.

I guess Platner is a slow learner. It supposedly took him 19 years to figure out that he had a Nazi tattoo on his chest.

Or maybe, just maybe, Platner is an opportunist who figured, correctly, that Maine’s Democratic voters were gullible enough to overlook the obvious flaws in a candidate who sold himself as an “outsider” and a “populist.”

And that worked out … for a little while, anyway.

There’s an old saying: “You can’t cheat an honest man.”

Are voters honest? They keep falling for politicians who turn out to be even worse than average … and then complaining endlessly about it.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“The United States and Iran exchanged fire for a second consecutive night on Thursday [July 9],” the New York Times reports, “extending a pattern of hostilities that has all but collapsed their fragile truce and left the Middle East suspended between war and peace.”

Let’s be honest here: There was no real “truce,” “fragile” or otherwise.

Sure, there was a bit of a lull for further negotiations after US president Donald Trump signed the instrument of US surrender (“Memorandum of Understanding”), but we’ve seen continuous minor flare-ups ever since and it was clear before the ink dried on the MOU that the US had no intention of surrendering the spoils of victory — in particular, control of the Strait of Hormuz — to the winners.

As for even a supposed “ceasefire,” Trump now says that’s “over.”

According to US law, it’s the war that’s over — and the law clearly says so twice.

The initial US attack on Iran was wholly illegal. Per the US Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war, and it had (and has) not done so.

But Congress waffled instead of acting … until June 23, when it passed a concurrent war powers resolution which again — above and beyond the requirements of the Constitution — formally and legally ended the war, clearly and unambiguously requiring Trump to withdraw all forces from the conflict.

Yet there those forces remain, continuing, illegally, to engage in hostilities with the Iranian regime over territory that is not and never has been a US possession of any kind.

If Congress owned anything resembling collective spine, every signpost along this road to fiasco would have read “this way to Trump’s impeachment and removal.” Waging an illegal war is, by any plausible definition, a “high crime” requiring that.

Yet there he remains, sitting in the Oval Office, flying on one version or another of Air Force One, hob-nobbing with (and insulting) fellow “world leaders,” etc.

He claims the Iranian regime is ringing his phone off the hook, begging for a “deal.”

In reality, I suspect any Iranian phone message summarizes as “بازنده میگه چی؟”

In English: “Loser says what?”

Every American continues to pay at the gas pump and the grocery store for this idiotic, illegal war. Some Americans have paid, and more may pay, with their lives before it’s over.

And when it’s over, the US will be worse off than before.

End this nonsense now.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY