Charging a former US president (or any first world nation) with war crimes could not happen overnight. As such, it would be a situation that would grow over time, brewing and bubbling, with plenty of rhetoric all around. Certainly if the tide were turning against the former president, he would make sure he didn’t put himself in a position to be charged.
But suspending that disbelief, if you imagined (only for example) that on the very morning of a Bush trip to France, a videotape was released that showed Bush gleefully planning genocide on the Iraqi civillians and an instant tide of anger was created, I still don’t think it would happen.
I don’t think there is a single leader of a first world nation, active or retired, that would want this precendent established. Each would use all of their leverage to prevent or undo the situation, using all of their economic, social, and political tools of persuasion.
The health and strength of the first-world countries are tightly coupled, at least in the short-term. And seriously angering one country (and possibly some staunch allies) would have a detrimental effect to all of them. I think this kind of “aggression” is much more divisive than the disagreements on say Iraq and as a result, each country would be willing to go that much further to apply pressure. The pressures probably wouldn’t even be millitary. A country could apply tarriffs, drop out of world organizations, drop treaties and agreements, even send back all of its imports. None of these actions would be good for anyone and they would all be in the realm of possible responses.
I believe that, yes, there would be a howl and cry. Imagine, if you will, Bill Clinton was suddenly taken prisoner by, say… France. His secret service agents killed in the process. (They’d pretty much have to be.) Would you really think that even W would stand for it? The demand would be for his return. If he was not returned, the demand would be to get him back.
Oh, fer the love of… look, potato potah-to. If he was being arrested for smuggling some pot into Japan, fine, he’s been arrested, but the op is referring to a former President being arrested for war crimes for actions taken while serving in his official capacity that we haven’t seen fit to indict him on. Call it kidnapping, call it arrest, call it hostage-taking, call it you’re-grounded-mister, it doesn’t matter what you call it. He’s in custody against his will and our reaction is going to be the same.
First, we’re not talking about some unnamed crime. Again, if he’s picked up trying so score with a prostitute in Thailand, fine, them’s the breaks, enjoy Thai prison, the food’s nice. If he’s arrested for actions such as war crimes he allegedly performed in his official capacity as President, them’s a diffrent kettle of fish. I say yes, even a Republican controlled White House would go to war over Bill Clinton, or any former president.
It’s like when Brown v. Board of Education was handed down: Eisenhower was uncomfortable with the decision and expressed his disagreement privately to Earl Warren, but when the south threatened to thumb their noses at the decision, Eisenhower didn’t hesitate to send in the National Guard and 101st Airborne. Agreement or disagreement is irrelevant; deliberate widespread defiance of a federal court order was a threat to the sovereignty of the federal government and the rule of law. Take a former President into custody for actions he undertook while serving in his official capacity, and it wouldn’t matter if it’s the future 47th President and least competent and liked of all time, Drunky McBombalot. It’s not just arresting someone, it’s a direct challenge to American sovereignty.
What law might foreign police be breaking? Are former Presidents immune to foreign laws? Or, to put the question more baldly, are you just making things up?
Lemur866 and pravnik somehow seem to think that distinguished American civilians being apprehended by law enforcement in other countries is kidnapping. It sounds like John Mace does, too, but he hasn’t said it directly. I’m responding to them, not your OP.
pravnik: why does it matter if the President was acting in an official capacity? If, say, President Wilson had ordered a genocide of millions of German people during WW1, are you saying that the only court in which he could possibly be tried would be an American court? But that if Wilson stole a snickers bar while visiting the Continent some years later, he could be thrown in the clink? What sense does that make?
Read my above post. I’m using “kidnapping” colloquilally, not in the formal legal sense of the word. Sheesh, you might as well argue that it’s not kidnapping because it doesn’t meet the asporation requirement. Can we just substitute a neutral “taken into custody” for any mention of “kidnapping” and drop it? It’s a tangential issue.
No, I’m saying that if he were arrested in Germany for American troops’ use of land mines and mustard gas during wartime, we would not be cool with it. We’re clearly not talking about what happens if a U.S. President goes apeshit and pulls a Khmer Rouge on the populace, because we don’t know what happens in a fictional universe. As per the op, we’re talking about what happens if a certain current President is arrested in another country for waging an illegal war of aggression under false and possibly fabricated pretenses. The answer to that question is we would offer the other nation a chance to hand him over peacefully before we bomb the living fuck out of it.
Any “war crimes” committed, so far, by the POTUS was lawfully done and sanctioned by the US Government. Even if presidents change, the US Government does not. Unless the US charges the president with a crime, any charges the president would get from a foreign country would, at least theoretically, be a charge against the entire US Government. It would behoove even a rabidly liberal future government to fight such a charge to maintain the dignity of the office.
Also, could you imagine the fits our national security apparatus would be having while a former president, with all of his national security knowledge, was in the custody of a foreign power? That alone would place a restriction on trying a (ex)president soleley by the US.
Hmmm… Indeed, it’s highly unlikely. Taking him to trial, in theory at least, shouldn’t be a problem. Once an enquiry about a crime is opened, the state has no more say in who is charged or taken to trial.
The difficult part would be to have him arrested. Though it’s theorically possible, I indeed doubt that a police officer would accept to arrest a former head of state, even if ordered to do so by a judge, without the green light from someone very high in the police food chain, and eventually of the government. In theory, it could (and should) happen. In practice, I’m going to agree it’s not realistic.
Legally speaking, there’s zero difference. And I’m still not at all convinced that the USA would go to war over such an issue, except if, say, the charges were just made-up. I really can’t see the USA declaring war on say, Belgium (I picked Belgium due to their former “universal juridiction law”) if it detained Bush.
Why do you assume false pretenses? I was more thinking about the line of an actual war crime being commited and him being indicted on the basis that he’s suspected of having ordered/allowed it.
I still don’t think it would happen. Actually, I don’t believe for an instant it would happen if he were taken in custody in a first world nation. The only part I find unlikely is that he would be taken into custody at the first place. But even that could happen if a serious case was made against him, and the public opinion supportive. Well… it could happen if Bush insisted on visiting the country where he could be arrested, which is also very unlikely.
What makes you think that the United States would so quickly resort to war against, say, Germany, and thereby singlehandledly destroy NATO, the most important alliance probably in history; show ourselves to be a warmongering nation incapable of securing the release of a private US citizen through any other means but invasion; probably face economic sanctions ourselves; and just generally behave in a way more in line with Kim Jong Il than the foremost promoter of democracy and liberty?
Also, do you believe that Chile has a right to bomb London because they arrested Pinochet in 1998?
If you can’t see a difference between the mistake of attacking an international pariah like Iraq under false pretenses, and attacking a Western European country for a dumb reason, I’m not sure that I would be able to explain it to you.
I don’t mean that the arrest was under false pretenses; I mean the charge he would be arrested for would be starting the war under false pretenses, i.e. the whole “Saddam has WMD’s” thing. I’m sure the arrest would be in earnest.
As BrainGlutton says, recent history. A cynic might say that over the last half of the 20th century and the first portion of this one, we haven’t exactly been shy about resorting to military options. To turn the question around on you again, why would Germany endanger NATO and itself with what could be considered an act of war against a superpower to put one man on trial? The reason that we would be willing to go to war is that we simply would not stand for a foreign power putting a former U.S. President on trial for what could arguably be considered “acting as the U.S. President.” It’s not the sort of precedent we want to see get started.
I never said anything about anybody’s “right” to do anything at all. The op’s question wasn’t what should be the appropriate response if Bush were arrested by a foreign power, it’s what would happen if he were. A former head of state, privy to every state secret the American government has, arrested in a foreign country for actions he took while acting as President? We’ve gone to war for much, much less.
Yes, there’s no reason why Germany would act so stupidly as to arrest a former President. I emphasized that point in my first post in this thread. And there’s no reason why the US would act even more stupidly by going to war over it.
Further, like it or not, there’s ample precident for former heads of state being charged with war crimes. I’m not sure why those precidents would presumably apply to every other country on earth save the United States.
However, there’s one point you keep alluding on which I absolutely agree with you: George Bush didn’t take the US to war in Iraq alone. Any culpability for the initiating the war in Iraq should apply across the US government, including the members of Congress who voted to authorize the war. Yes, Bush gave the orders to invade, but nearly every Republican in Congress and half of the Democrats voted to give him permission to do so.
To focus personal culpability on one person for a considered national policy of war is a rewriting of history. I have been thoroughly against the war from the beginning, but if Bush were indicted for the crime of aggression against Iraq, I think it stands to reason that about 70% of Congress should be indicted for conspiracy. Which just seems to empahsize how silly this whole let’s indict Americans for Iraq thing really is.
I would argue that it’s generally because those former heads of state/government are arrested at the end of their failed regimes, whereas we have a continuity of government, such as it is. The current U.S. President (and U.S. government in general) has an interest in maintaining the legitimacy of the Presidency, which extends to the legitimacy of past presidencies as well.
Dude, we can’t debate if you’re going to agree with me.
Any country stupid enough to try it doesn’t have nukes.
I doubt the first reaction of the US would be nuclear strikes - that is a straw man. The usual escalation would apply.
I would recommend the first step being a strongly worded request that the former President be immediately released.
Dated from downtown Kabul, and a copy from Bagdhad.
Any country that did this, or to which the former President was transferred, would be signing its own death warrant. The US isn’t going to accept this, and we aren’t going to waste a lot of time fucking around either. The Taliban didn’t cough up bin Laden quick enough, and I don’t remember us sitting around twidding our thumbs for a couple years.
Sorry to disturb anyone’s fantasies, but this isn’t going to happen.
Historically, war crimes tribunals are conducted by war winners and the defendants are the war losers. Charles Taylor, the Khmer Rouge, Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein all lost power because of armed campaigns aimed directly at them. (Taylor hasn’t yet been tried for war crimes, but his situation is dicey at the moment.) Mao Tse Tung, Kim Il Sung, Josef Stalin and Idi Amin never stood trial for their war crimes (or crimes against humanity, which is an entirely different thing to everyone but the victims) because they either didn’t lose the war or, as in Amin’s case, couldn’t be captured by the victors.
It is one thing to rhetorically declare a U.S. president a war criminal, quite another to ever be in a position to actually try him for the alleged crimes. This would not be a civilized thing – courtly gentlemen and ladies would not exchange legal documents resulting in the quiet arrest of a U.S. president, sitting or otherwise. Heads of state are hauled into court only after horrible armed conflict.
Imagining that a former U.S. president would be “peacefully” kidnapped while traveling abroad is a fantasy that belongs in Hollywood. (On the other hand, even Hollywood never imagined that terrorists would drop the two biggest office buildings in North America with a couple of hare-brained hijackings!) Whatever the scenario, unless the United States were militarily devastated first, the kidnapping of a retired president would quickly involve heavily-armed, grim-faced men, and I’m guessing bombs and cruise missiles would be deployed at some point. I’m not saying they should be involved and deployed, mind you, but there are some things a functioning government just won’t tolerate, for its own self-preservation.
We went to war, once, because a larger nation was press-ganging our sailors. It was legal by their rules.
(Yes, I know things are always more complicated than that.)
A president, even as an ex-president, is a special individual, having been privy to things that other countries should not know.
Is it possible that he could be arrested after special negotiations? It is. It is very unlikely that it would ever happen, but it is possible.
Is it possible he could be snatch-and-grabbed? Only at risk of war. And I think it would be one of the occasions where nuclear weapons are not off the table.
Yes, I think the other side of the negotiating table would have to present something so very compelling that we would consider it in our national interest to allow them to keep the president. And I cannot imagine what that would be. (Again, my lack of imagination keeps me from serving at the highest levels of government!) It would have to be almost extortionist in nature, wouldn’t it? I just can’t think of a scenario in which violence or the threat of it wouldn’t be involved.
