roachboy

well that's too bad, the circle-spinning...

before this thread dies altogether--and to clear up misapprehension of my positions--what bothered me here was intially was what i saw as a replacement of the question of the icc with reference to the prosecution of war crimes with either:

what i took to be an irrelevant issue of sovereignty (that i find it irrelevant does not mean that it is not persuasive to folk, including those in power, so legally the question is moot, even if politically it is not) or:

more curiously a series of general statements about american troops, which seemed to come down to whether you could at once claim affection for the american military as a huge collection of people on the one hand, as an idea more generally, and entertain the matter of prosecution for war crimes at the international level. one seems to preclude the other. i wonder, reading through the thread, whether i underestimated the extent to which my own position was caught up in a reversed version of what i criticized others for. i find that curious.

so i adopted the tack of trying to force debate back onto the question of war crimes.
which put me in the place of talking about fairly inflammatory matters. whence the appearance, i guess, of "negativity".

so there were really two matters: that at hand and another, of what either prevents of enables someone to look at the military as potentially capable of the commission of crimes against humanity. on the first, the debate was fairly straightforward: on the second it was (predictably i think) less so.

one strange side-effect of working as a historian (which is what i do) is that you end up finding out a mountain of ugly things about what the united states has done in the world politically, militarily, etc... initially it puts you in a difficult position vis-a-vis your own committments---later it puts you in a strange position relative to some kinds of conversation because you find it difficult to understand how others do not find themselves placed in a strange position vis-a-vis their committments by this information as well...inside of this is i guess an unspoken assumption that everyone knows the history of american foreign policy since, say world war 2 (the history of the american empire) and that arguments that remain uncritical of american actions are built around a repressing of that information.
because this assumption creeps in, arguments take on a particular kind of edge: the "you cant be serious" tone comes from here.

i still maintain that thinking about this issue by emphasizing the question of war crimes in themselves, and pushing the possible linkage between opposing the icc and the condoning of war crimes if and when they are committed by american troops (who have no monopoly either on their commission of their avoidance--but this was a particular argument, so american troops were the focus) is interesting, maybe important.

but there we are.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite