by Jeffrey Laurenti
The decision by the judges of the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for president Omar al-Bashir of Sudan places a time bomb under the rickety regime that rules Africa’s most sprawling country. The aftershocks, however, will also reverberate in Washington, where vilification of the court by the capital’s once reigning conservatives long made it taboo in American political circles ...
Strikingly, while the United States had been the one country on the Security Council that refused to support the criminal court’s investigation of the Darfur atrocities, in its last days the Bush administration became one of the strongest supporters of pressing ahead with the Bashir indictment, bucking up even the briefly vacillating British and French. President Bush’s administration had moved very far indeed.
In its snarling early years, the Bush administration led a worldwide campaign to "slay this monster," in Jesse Helms’s words. That effort failed miserably, as 108 countries became parties to the court’s statute. Still, hysterical Washington conservatives vowed to deny it any legitimacy and even passed legislation authorizing the president to use force to "free" any accused American war criminal who might ever fall into the court’s custody — the so-called "Hague invasion act" ...
With the indictment of Bashir .. President Obama will have to decide whether the United States will actively support the international court, or continue to keep its distance. He was ambiguously noncommittal about it during his campaign. But if he is serious in declaring that one of his top foreign policy priorities is strengthening international institutions, he must press for Bashir’s arrest, roll back all his predecessor’s obstacles to the court, and move smartly to U.S. ratification.
http://takingnote.tcf.org/2009/03/arrest-warrant-in-sudan-may-force-obamas-hand.html
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