The Economist has an article on the wrangling between the US and its allies over the International Criminal Court. It provides an interesting perspective in favor of America submitting to the court’s jurisdiction, but I’m still not convinced. (I had written a much longer item, but it wasn’t particularly coherent. I’m still thinking hard about this issue.)

Steven Den Beste lays out the fundamental argument against the ICC, and I find it to be persuasive. He accurately expresses the nagging doubts I’ve had about it since the beginning.

One thing that I meant to comment on yesterday was how two news stories that were in the headlines correlated. The first being our resistance to the ICC, and the second being an attack by US aircraft on a wedding party in Afghanistan. We don’t really know what happened in Afghanistan, but what we do know is that one or more American aircraft unleashed an attack that killed a pretty large number of Afghan civilians — more than the IDF did in their assault on the Jenin refugee camp earlier this year. In any case, the case seems ripe for a war crimes trial in front of the ICC. Maybe the attack resulted from criminal negligence, or maybe it was an awful mistake. The question Americans have to ask themselves is whether we want that to be decided by a panel of unknown makeup in Europe? I don’t think I do.

Another thing that this reminds me of was the caning of the American teenager in Singapore in 1994. I was strongly opposed to our government allowing the teenager to be caned, because no matter how stupid it was for Michael Fay to spray graffiti on a luxury car, I didn’t feel like America should allow its citizens to be subjected to punishments in other countries that we wouldn’t impose upon them here.

I’m just kind of mulling things over here …