BDS: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

There's nothing like a whiff of George Bush to drive lefties over the cliff. As Right Wing News' John Hawkins noted, bobthedrummer at Democratic Underground -- the nuttiest of the net-roots -- launched a poll yesterday:

Using the definitions of International Crimes of the International Criminal Court
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/International_War_Crimes/
InternationalCrimes_ICC.html

George Walker Bush is a War Criminal, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was his crime.

Agree, disagree, or do you have a different opinion?

As of this evening, the tally was 79 yes to 1 no.

This is nonsense to the nth power--as Hawkins notes (hyperlinks added):

[T]he resolution to invade Iraq was approved 77-23 in the Senate and 296-133 in the House.

Among the senators who voted in favor of the Iraq war resolution, which was for all intents and purposes, signing off on the invasion of Iraq were Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Tom Daschle, Richard Gephardt, Max Cleland, John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, Diane Feinstein, and Harry Reid.

Of course, I disagree with DU's claim of illegality--and courts to date have avoided that question. But I was amused that bobthedrummer used what purports to be the International Criminal Court's definition as a metric for war crimes. Why amused? First, contrary to the DUmies, the ICC can't yet prosecute crimes of aggression. More importantly, neither the United States nor Iraq is a party to the court's Rome Statute. I know: another example of Bush Administration unilateralism, right? Actually, the decision to reject the ICC was made in 1998 by the Clinton Administration. Because neither Iraq nor America has subjected itself to the court's jurisdiction, ICC involvement would require a referral from the UN Security Council (see Art 13). And to refresh your recollection, the United States is a permanent member of the SC with veto power. (The U.S. likely would not consider debate on such an issue a "dispute" and, in any case, Security Council permanent members in practice rarely abstain.) So ICC "elements of crime" will never be applicable.

Yes, I understand bobthedrummer's poll was only a hypothetical. But his post is more proof that today's left has slid into the uncaring isolation of solely hortatory opposition, and an unsupportable presumption that America's always wrong. On top of all that, "illegal invasion" proponents rarely seem to have heard of, much less consulted, the just war doctrine. Or even, though uncertain and almost impossible to drag before a court, Article 51 of the UN Charter.

For all the noise about Bush's illegal acts, progressives never seem to know the applicable law.