Biden is right to investigate Putin’s war crimes. He should investigate American war crimes too
If the US is to have a shred of moral credibility in calling out war crimes in Ukraine, it must also allow international bodies to evaluate the prolific war crimes of the American military
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Your support makes all the difference.The US and the rest of the international community are right to condemn Vladimir Putin and the Russian army as war criminals. Russians have targeted civilian areas, hospitals, and humanitarian corridors. They’ve used prohibited munitions like cluster bombs. They’ve killed thousands of innocents and sent millions fleeing as refugees.
“Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this week, noting that the US is “documenting and evaluating” such abuses. “After all the destruction of the past three weeks, I find it difficult to conclude that the Russians are doing otherwise”.
Russia’s conduct has prompted a war crimes investigation from the International Criminal Court (ICC), as well as sharp condemnation from President Biden, who labeled Putin a “war criminal.”
Atrocity anywhere should be treated as atrocity everywhere. That’s why, if the US is to have a shred of moral credibility in calling out war crimes in Ukraine, it must also allow international bodies to evaluate the prolific war crimes of the American military.
In Afghanistan alone, US forces held prisoners in secret jails at facilities like the Bagram air base, where they were tortured and sometimes kept naked and deprived of sleep. US allies like Afghan special forces have conducted extra-judicial killings with shadowy commando teams. The American military regularly conducted combat operations in dense urban areas, harming numerous civilians. The final act of the US war in Afghanistan was a drone strike in Kabul that mistakenly killed a family of ten, including seven children.
But the US has adamantly opposed the ICC’s long-running attempts to investigate its conduct in the country. In 2020, the Trump administration even sanctioned the ICC itself. Many observers believe this American pressure successfully strong-armed the ICC to drop US forces and their allies from a revived Afghanistan probe in 2021.
Such actions deny long-deferred justice to victims of war crimes, and sustain the valid perception that human rights law and the bodies that enforce it are “institutions set up in the west and by the west” and are “just instruments for the west’s political agenda,” as Shaharzad Akbar, who chaired Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission until the Taliban takeover, told The Intercept.
Not that the US has ever been particularly keen to have its world-swallowing armed forces under much scrutiny. Unlike Russia, the US is not a signatory of the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the ICC in the first place.
This disparity — of the US seeking to be both the armed enforcer of world norms, and the sole exception from them — is a propaganda boon for those who wish to join America and avoid accountability when they commit war crimes.
"Such statements by Mr Biden are absolutely impermissible, unacceptable and unforgivable," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said this week of US criticisms of Putin as a war criminal. "The main thing is that the head of a state which has for many years bombed people across the world... has no right to make such statements."
He’s right. The US position on war crimes seems to be something like that famous statement from Richard Nixon, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
One of the astounding things about the global response to the invasion of Ukraine has been its moral clarity and international unity. Nations across the world have sanctioned Russia and its leaders, and, unlike in past conflicts, a variety of private-sector companies have joined them, forgoing billions in Russia to do the right thing. It’s a level of cohesiveness and urgency that has escaped us even in the face of other moral and humanitarian catastrophes in our midst, such as the climate crisis.
Much as Vladimir Putin alone holds much of the power to end the war in Ukraine, only the US really has the power to allow the American military to be investigated. One of the perks of being a superpower is you get to decide which rules apply to you. But if we want to live in a world where such arbitrary and hypocritical uses of power are a thing of the past — in Ukraine, Afghanistan, or anywhere else — Americans must move beyond half-hearted commitments to international justice.
Recent reports that the Biden administration is reviewing its ICC policies are encouraging, but policy reviews aren’t enough. The people of countries like Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, and numerous other countries are waiting on the US to reckon with its past deployments, and its past mistakes. It’s the least these people deserve, when the US has already taken so much from them.