1 Boring Old Man

^{League of Nations}

Despite Wilson’s efforts to establish and promote the League, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1919, the United States did not join the League. Opposition in the U.S. Senate, particularly from Republican politicians Henry Cabot Lodge and William E. Borah, together with Wilson’s refusal to compromise, ensured that the United States would not ratify the Covenant.

In contrast, the UN, founded after World War II gradually spread to encompass the entire world, surviving the rise and fall of World Communism. It must’ve been time:

The … United Nations (UN) is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and the achieving of world peace. The UN was founded in 1945 after World War II to replace the League of Nations, to stop wars between countries, and to provide a platform for dialogue. It contains multiple subsidiary organizations to carry out its missions.

Ratified, Signed but not Ratified, Not signed

US opposes ICC bid to make ‘aggression’ a crime under international law

^{The Obama administration has resisted efforts by the International Criminal Court to include ‘aggression’ as a crime, mainly because it could impact US military operations abroad}

Christian Science Monitor
By Howard LaFranchi
June 15, 2010

^{The United States under the Obama administration has developed an increasingly close working relationship with the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But that growing engagement with a controversial institution of international law was unable to prevent the ICC from expanding the scope of its work to include the murky crime of “aggression,” a move the US had vehemently opposed. At the 111-nation ICC’s first review conference that wrapped up last week in Kampala, Uganda, delegates decided to expand the international court’s purview to include the crime of aggression – a crime that only the US has successfully tried, in the post-World War II tribunals in Nuremburg and Tokyo.}

^{State Department officials say the US, which is not a signatory to the ICC, was able to mitigate the drawbacks of such an expansion of the court’s reach, primarily by putting off any prosecution of the newest international crime until at least 2017. But some critics say the US failure to stop the enshrining of “aggression” as an international crime demonstrates the limits of President Obama’s multilateralist vision – and sets the US on a collision course with the ICC when the issue comes up again later in the decade.}

^{“The fact remains that the Obama administration’s vaunted ‘engagement’ strategy was only able to check the ICC’s move towards defining ‘aggression,’ not stop it entirely,” says Brett Schaefer, an expert in international institutions at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “And it sets the US up for another battle in 2017 when the ICC’s advocates will make another push to activate the ICC’s jurisdiction over ‘aggression.’”}

^{The US confirmed its new footing with the world’s first permanent court for trying war crimes and crimes against humanity, US officials say, although they acknowledge that the US did not get everything it wanted in Kampala. The Rome Statute establishing the ICC was finalized in 1998, but the court did not begin to function until 2002, when the minimum 60 countries ratified it.}

^{US participation in the Kampala conference “reset US relations with the court from hostility to positive engagement,” says State Department legal adviser Harold Koh. He says the US focus at the review conference was on efforts to “strengthen justice on the ground” in countries so that eventually their judicial systems will be strong enough to take on the kinds of human-rights work the ICC addresses…}

^{One of the main US concerns in seeing “aggression” added to the ICC’s jurisdiction was the impact it could potentially have on US military operations abroad. But Koh says the US successfully negotiated the “aggression” statute’s wording so that US forces won’t be susceptible to it. “No US national can be prosecuted for ‘aggression’ while the US is not a signatory” to the ICC, he says.}

While we don’t necessarily like to think of ourselves as war mongers, but we are prone to fight [UN sanctioned in blue]:

Dates	War	Dates	War
1675 – 1676	King Philip’s War	1861-1865	U.S. Civil War
1689-1697	King William’s War	1898	Spanish-American War
1702-1713	(War of Spanish Succession)	1914-1918	World War I
1744-1748	(War of Austrian Succession)	1939-1945	World War II
1756-1763	French and Indian War	1950-1953	Korean War
1759-1761	Cherokee War	1960-1975	Vietnam War
1775-1783	American Revolution	1961	Bay of Pigs
1798-1800	Franco-American Naval War	1983	Grenada
1801-1805	Barbary Wars	1989	Invasion of Panama
1812-1815	War of 1812	1990-1991	Persian Gulf War
1813-1814	Creek War	1995-1996	Bosnia and Herzegovina
1836	War of Texas Independence	2001	Invasion of Afghanistan
1846-1848	Mexican-American War	2003	Invasion of Iraq

Our wars between the end of World War II and the fall of Communism were part of our foreign policy of "containment" [the only success was Grenada]. Since that time, the wars have been about "rogue states" – two under the UN auspices [Persian Gulf War & the Invasion of Afghanistan], and one a humanitarian war with NATO [Bosnia and Herzegovina]. But if Aggression is the topic, the US is close to the top of the list.

I personally find it sad that the US is a major opponent of the new world court having jurisdiction over the Crime of Aggression. While I can somewhat understand our wish to maintain our options, the last time we played an option was a major league disaster. We can do without another Iraq until the end of time. The Bush Administration basically wanted to dis the UN and take on the job of world cop. I see no reason to protect our right to do that again.