The ICC at Georgetown Law

Campus Report ^ | April 16, 2008 | Malcolm Kline

[bs9021]

The ICC at Georgetown Law

by: Malcolm A. Kline, April 16, 2008

If you wonder where new bureaucracies come from, look at their nurseries—colleges and universities. That is where such notions not only are procreated but polished and promoted as well.

Knowing that their birthplace is usually on a college campus also aids in understanding why they usually fall prey to the law of unintended consequences. Paper theories usually don’t work out even as well as equations worked out on the back of cocktail napkins.

An example of the latter is the Reagan tax cuts that gave the United States a decade of record economic growth after 10 years of stagflation. An example of the former is the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Sometimes such ideas even look good out of the gate, although they may quickly give way to mission creep. Even the United Nations in its infancy could take credit for ratifying the state of Israel and okaying America’s defense of South Korea from communist attacks.

Ironically, the ICC is in part an attempt to remedy failures of the UN. “On September 18, a foreign inquest from the Sudan met at the UN and no one discussed justice,” ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said in a seminar held at Georgetown Law on April 8.

Of course, public officials and scholars would try to ameliorate the failures of one multilateral institution by creating another. “The ICC is not just a court,” Dr. Moreno-Ocampo said at the seminar that was co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress. “It’s a system of justice.”

Dr. Moreno-Ocampo’s predecessor counted 180 people from 40 countries working in the Hague, the ICC headquarters, during his tenure there earlier this decade. The ICC’s goal in the Sudan is to “stop crimes now and prevent future crimes in Darfur...

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

An acceptable principle of internationalism has become “defining success down to bureaucracy.”

That is, bureaucracies are created with high and noble ideals that are utterly impractical in the real world. Then they are populated with the faceless drones from the participating nations, mostly patronage jobs and nepotism. Eventually they end up accomplishing nothing but their own sustainment.

And from that point on, they define their mission accomplishment solely by the fact that they have created and maintain a bureaucracy. Otherwise, they don’t actually *do* anything at all, unless it is both popular and extraneous.

That is why the two most popular resolutions at the UN are voting fried grasshoppers as their favorite food, and condemning Israel.

All the serious business of the world is conducted by the major powers, in multi-lateral talks that exclude those who never did, and probably never will, matter.