It seems like it was a big week for not very big news — war still on in Gaza, the President of Harvard discovered that demanding genocide will get your school a lot of bad publicity even when it's just the genocide of Jews, and buried in all this was Merrick Garland announcing that the Department of Justice is filing war crime charges against four Russian soldiers in Ukraine under a 1996 law — the first time anyone has been charged.
Garland didn't, as far as I can see, suggest how these war criminals would be taken into custody for trial.
But war crimes have been big this week. Henry Kissinger died, and was predictably eulogized as a "war criminal" by Rolling Stone and The Independent, among others.
Honestly, there's no point in arguing with them. The same people are defending Hamas while asserting that Israel is committing war crimes.
When we consider Hamas, though, we see:
- 16 years of shooting unguided rockets into Israel: war crimes.
- Combatants who wear no distinguishing uniform: war crimes.
- Combatants hiding among civilian non-combatants: war crimes.
- Building military facilities under and in hospitals, mosques, and UNRWA schools: more war crimes.
- Storing weapons and matériel in hospitals, mosques, and UNRWA schools: yeah, you guessed it, war crimes.
- Kidnapping, raping, torturing, and murdering captives: yes, more war crimes.
This all is over and above the more conventional crimes, like fraud, embezzlement, and outright theft that seem the only plausible explanation for the Gauleiters of Hamas becoming billionaires living in luxury in Qatar.
Of course, like "Kissinger the war criminal", we see that the accusation of war crimes is very heavily weighted to whose side you want to blacken. So bombing an active enemy is a war crime, but the Viet Cong and NVA are blameless, and their own war crimes are washed in the blood of their victims.
There are a few people who haven't completely lost their senses on Israel.
In a Reuter's story, the ICC War Crimes prosecutor said:
[A]trocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 were "some of the most serious international crimes that shock the conscience of humanity," and said his court was ready to assist Israel in investigating them and prosecuting those responsible.
Of course, it being a Reuters story, even though most of the story is about Hamas' war crimes, the headline is "ICC prosecutor says Israel must respect international law." The whole of what they accuse Israel of is some settlers on the West Bank dealing harshly with Palestinians, while laying out in detail some of the Hamas crimes — beyond rape and murder, things like performing surgery without anesthetics on hostages.
This whole notion of war crimes seems to be largely a 20th Century invention, with by far the majority of trials and convictions being Nazi war criminals, although there's a smattering of others. With one exception — pay attention, there's a pop quiz coming — there's one common factor about the people charged, tried, and punished: they are all on the losing side of their associated wars.
So we come to the "punishment" part. When even the ICC is citing Hamas' war crimes, and Reuters being forced, however grudgingly, to note that Hamas has committed the worst war crimes in decades, it might seem like the next question would be: "what are you gonna do about it?" The answer from history is "bomb the crap out of them until they surrender."
Now for the pop quiz: which country tries their own people for war crimes? It's the United States.
