Joe Biden's prior support for International war crimes tribunals complicates his current position on Israel.
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Biden bitten by Balkan war crimes ghosts in Israel
January 31, 2024 6:00 am
It’s a platitude among America’s foreign policy elite that their goal is maintaining a “rules-based international order” that’s ultimately grounded in the post-1945, Western-led global settlement.
Last week’s decision by the
United Nations‘s top court on
Israel‘s military actions in Gaza therefore comes as a rude awakening to our foreign policy establishment. South Africa appealed to the International Court of Justice in The Hague to investigate Israel on charges of perpetrating genocide against the Palestinians in their military campaign against
Hamas after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. The ICJ’s decision last Friday was at least a half-win for South Africa.
While the court made no official demand of Israel to cease its military campaign, it ordered the Israeli military to prevent unnecessary death and destruction, and above all genocide, in Gaza. This cannot be viewed as anything but a stern rebuke of Israel and, by extension, its American benefactor. It has been U.S. munitions, after all, that have enabled Israel’s Gaza campaign and whose diplomacy has protected Israel at the U.N. The door to future war crimes prosecutions of Israelis has clearly been opened in The Hague.
The Biden administration quickly insisted that the ICJ’s ruling will have no impact on U.S. support for Israel and its campaign against Hamas. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the ICJ and its decision as a “mark of shame that will not be erased for generations.” He insists that Israel will stop at nothing less than total victory in Gaza and, for good measure, brushed off the ICJ and its “ridiculous claim” amid denouncing Hamas as “the new Nazis” while holding up a copy of
Mein Kampf in Arabic.
Subtle Bibi is not. Yet his comments are typical of Israeli “us against the world” attitudes and negative views of the U.N. The U.S., a superpower with global security obligations, does not have the luxury of acting in such a cavalier fashion regarding the U.N. Not least because American support for U.N. prosecutions of war crimes has been a hallmark of the post-Cold War era. Yugoslavia’s wars of succession in the 1990s created a standing U.N. justice system, with Washington’s imprimatur. U.N. prosecutors at The Hague sentenced dozens of Balkan war criminals to long prison terms, many of them having been apprehended by U.S. and NATO special forces.
This effort had full American support. U.S. military and intelligence personnel (I was one of them) aggressively hunted down Balkan suspects for The Hague. There was always humbug surrounding this enterprise. U.N. prosecutors seemed considerably more interested in jailing Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats than Bosnian Muslims, even though all sides committed war crimes (just as today the U.N. is focused on Israeli, not Palestinian misdeeds). U.N. justice deemed the Bosnian Serb siege of Sarajevo, which lasted nearly four years and
killed some 5,000 civilians, to be part of a genocidal scheme which several Serb leaders went to prison for. In contrast, the brutal Russian siege of Grozny during the 1994-96 First Chechen War killed several times more civilians in just a couple of months, but U.N. prosecutors never showed any interest in that mayhem.
There was the rub. Just as the Pentagon made certain that American troops will never be prosecuted by the U.N. for war crimes, major powers were de facto exempt too. Mid-1990s Russia was an impoverished mess, but it was still a significant power with nuclear weapons, so indicting Russians for war crimes in Chechnya was a nonstarter. Little Serbia was another matter.
Israel is a small country, but it has nuclear weapons and America stands behind it. Can Washington shield Israel from U.N. justice indefinitely? So far, the Gaza death toll stands around 26,000, according to local authorities (i.e., Hamas). Privately, Israeli officials concede that over 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, two-thirds of them civilians. To compare, the killing of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims around Srebrenica in July 1995 — which brought NATO intervention in the Bosnian War — was deemed to be genocide by a U.N. tribunal, even though many of the victims were uniformed military.
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Intent matters greatly, but all of this raises awkward questions for the Biden administration, including the president personally. Back in the 1990s, when he was a senator sitting on its Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden was an ardent hawk regarding the Balkans. He was one of the loudest congressional advocates for military intervention in Bosnia, and even castigated the Clinton administration for its alleged inaction. Sen. Biden repeatedly called for bombing the Serbs. He
claims to have even predicted the Srebrenica massacre, which Biden blamed on the U.N., which said was “definitively discredited.”
Perhaps 1994 Joe Biden can have a chat with 2024 Joe Biden. Regardless, if his administration’s position is going to be that it’s not genocide when our friends do it, that will create diplomatic headaches for Washington around the world. The Global South is already anti-Israel over the Palestinian issue and the ICJ’s ruling seems certain to exacerbate a worsening situation.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.