From The Dissident Voice
By Ian Williams

John Bolton’s political body lies a moulderin’ in his grave, and Condoleezza Rice’s state department is jumping all over it. The rebarbative former unconfirmed US ambassador the UN has spent his time since leaving attacking the Bush administration’s softness on foreign policy in terms that would make him a poster boy for the John Birch Society.

And now the administration is backtracking on Bolton’s self-proclaimed proudest achievement — the “unsigning” of the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court. John Bellinger, state department legal adviser told scholars at DePaul University: “We do not disagree over the statute’s end goals, and we are prepared to work with those who support the court in appropriate circumstances.” If not exactly a ringing endorsement, it signals an end to the war of attrition waged by Bolton and his ilk.

These palaeocons viewed the court as a direct threat to American sovereignty, and they used the Bush administration to fight it in every way. One was to refuse military cooperation to any country that ratified the treaty and refused to sign a bilateral agreement with Washington that uniquely protected Americans from being extradited.

The treaty itself, at least before Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, had so many defences built in against “politically motivated” prosecutions that Bolton and company feared that foreign observers could never really see what the problem was. Never mind that this was like developing air-fresheners for astronauts in case the moon was made of green cheese. The administration harassed small countries to sign bilateral agreements. Underlining the element of bullying already inherent in trying to exclude Americans uniquely from the court’s jurisdiction, Washington did not apply the rules to its major allies, all of whom were among the 106 ratifiers of the treaty.

In fact, many of the so-called bilateral agreements extorted from small countries were as substantial as the “coalition of the coerced” that Bush pulled together for the invasion of Iraq, not ratified by parliaments, and in any case, according to many legal experts, illegal.

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