Stop Making Sense (ICC Edition)

This is interesting. At Commentary Magazine's blog "Contentions," Max Boot argues that it's time for conservatives to make their peace with the International Criminal Court - which, he suggests, has actually been a pretty good thing:

Conservatives love to hate the International Criminal Court. Elaborate scenarios have been conjured up about how it could be politicized and turned into an instrument of anti-American animus. Fears have been raised that Henry Kissinger or Donald Rumsfeld could soon find himself in the dock. John Bolton spent an inordinate amount of time and energy when he was Undersecretary of State trying to coerce American allies into signing treaties pledging they would never send Americans for prosecution to the Hague.

So far such alarmism has proven groundless. The ICC seems to be doing exactly what it ought to be doing—trying to hold real war criminals accountable for their actions in places where the local legal system does not function effectively.

Boot points out that the court has been proving useful in prosecuting perpetrators of the Darfur genocide - and he regrets that the Bush administration wasn't willing to send Saddam Hussein to the ICC for what would have been a far more legitimate trial. While "this was a missed opportunity," Boot argues that

[I]n the future, American officials, whether Republican or Democrat, should put aside their qualms and make use of the ICC wherever possible to promote the international rule of law, a longstanding American cause.

I'll admit I haven't followed Boot's work very closely. The only other time I've cited him he was making equally level-headed points about the need for conservatives to honestly assess the evidence for climate change. Should we worry that somebody is going to revoke his VRWC credentials?

Labels: conservatives, Contentions, ICC, Max Boot

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:22 AM 0 comments

  Everything I Say Is a Lie

I've finally remembered to check out Commentary Magazine's new blog, "Contentions." Commentary has long had its own special brand of high-gravitas loopiness, so I expect great things from the blog.

And there does seem to be some promise. Witness Kevin Shapiro and Max Boot stumbling and tumbling over global warming and the right's standards of evidence.

Boot starts it out almost rationally:

Conservatives like to think of themselves as hard-headed, flinty-eyed realists who draw conclusions based on the way the world actually works, not on the way they would prefer it to work. They deride liberals as sentimentalists who never let facts interfere with their preferred policy prescriptions, whether in favor of the minimum wage or arms control. Yet there are some issues on which conservatives will not let any amount of evidence shake their own faith-based politics. Global warming is a prime example. [...]

[T]oo many on the Right still refuse to acknowledge the basic reality that the climate is changing in potentially dangerous ways due to human activity, and that we need to reduce carbon emissions to address this looming crisis. Skeptics can always dredge up a rogue scientist or two to buttress their case, just as liberals can always find an economist or two to make the case for raising the minimum wage. But why should a few fringe figures dictate governmental policy?

I would think supporters of the invasion of Iraq would be more sympathetic to arguments for preventative action based on the best available intelligence.

Indeed: we don't want the smoking gun to be the climate equivalant of a mushroom cloud.

Sensing a chance to dramatically up the surreality quotient, Kevin Shapiro fires back:

I thought that Max Boot’s analogy between the conventional wisdom on climate change and the pre-war intelligence on Iraq’s WMD’s was an apt one. But I’m not sure why he concluded from this that conservatives should abandon their skepticism about efforts to “fight” climate change by curtailing CO2 emissions. It seems to me that one should logically draw the opposite conclusion—namely, that we ought to be wary of the “consensus” of “experts” on matters where the uncertainty is large, the stakes are high, and political pressures are at work.

Ah-ha! Thus, the neoconservatives' own bamboozlement of Americans - based on manipulated intelligence, shoddy or even faked "evidence," and the testimony of experts who all agreed that they couldn't actually find any WMDs in Iraq - is now used as justification, by those same neocons, for global warming denial.

Shorter version: "The fact that I lied to you proves that I can't trust you to be honest."

Labels: Commentary, Contentions, global warming, Kevin Shapiro, Max Boot

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:04 AM 1 comments