First, there’s the decline in his approval that’s been in progress over the period of the last year and newly substantiated by Gallup, which reports a 39% approval rating. Then there’s this. Writing at The Guardian, Jeffrey Bachman outlines the case that President Obama is a war criminal or, more precisely, that the basic strategy of the Obama Administration’s anti-terror policy is itself a war crime:
Outside of a defined conflict zone, international human rights law is the applicable law. This is important because human rights law demands significantly more stringent rules for the use of lethal force than does humanitarian law.
If the United States is only involved in an armed conflict in Afghanistan, international human rights law would be the regime that regulates the use of lethal force in Pakistan and Yemen.
[…]
If we accept the argument made by the Obama administration and the Bush administration before it – that the United States is involved in an armed conflict with al-Qaida and associated forces wherever they are engaged – international humanitarian law is the lex specialis in Pakistan and Yemen. Yet, even with less rigorous limitations on the use of lethal force under international humanitarian law, there is mounting evidence that the Obama administration’s use of drones constitute violations of international law in the form of war crimes.
I think that this needs to be taken with a grain of salt. IMO any U. S. president, so long as he or she pursues the highly interventionist and overwhelmingly military foreign policy we have been following for some time, will inevitably be guilty of war crimes. That may go some way to explaining why we’re not a participant in the International Criminal Court.
Bah, are categorization disputes criminal? If so, its the weakest of charges to make; its the jaywalking of war crimes. The underlying conduct is fine and peachy, drop bombs and walk across the street, just do it within the white lines. The charge is even less serious in the context of war, because states have some freedom to expand the lines by making its actions more clearly “war.” And of course, HROs don’t get to draw the lines anyway.
Since only states have standing with the ICC, it’s even weaker. I guess the question is how much influence human rights groups have with actual states.
There are, however, actual states, namely Pakistan, Yemen, and so on that may see fit to take their scripts from these human rights groups. IMO that will pose some dilemmas for the European states who are the Court’s primary champions.
I think the long-term problem is a desire to move beyond the AUMF framework to a law enforcement model, while retaining the same flexibility, which is probably impossible, at least according to the HROs. I think it would be more helpful, instead of dealing with legal abstractions, recognize that states will do what they will do, and try to find more humanitarian approaches to the use of violence.
Amerika may not have joined the ICC, but just wait until we catch Henry Kissinger et. al. in South America.