I see that phrase thrown around a lot, “<insert American President here> would be found guilty of war crimes if he was actually given a fair trail in the Hague.”
For some examples I’ve seen people use, Trump’s pardoning of actual war criminals, Obama’s knowingly civilian killing drone policies, George W Bush’s illegal war in Iraq etc. But pretty much every President since JFK I’ve seen accused of war crimes, even Carter for a lot of his shady foreign policy decisions involving Indonesia, Iran, and Afghanistan.
So can anyone think of a “modern” US President that hasn’t committed war crimes?
William Henry Harrison might not have committed any war crimes while President, but he campaigned as a successful military general, famous for his victories against Native Americans. I’d be shocked if there weren’t any war crimes in there, given the typical treatment of Native Americans at the time.
He supplied weapons to do them to use against the then legitimate Afghan government even before the Soviets invaded and replaced it with their own puppet government.
War crimes are typically stuff like murdering POWs, attacking civilians, torturing, pillaging and raping, etc. Selling people Stinger missiles and rusty M16s is probably considered “maintaining the balance of power”.
‘Accused of’ or ‘committed’ as if objective fact? You mix the two. I think the answer is basically that it’s a fashion in recent decades to make disagreements about military actions out as ‘war crimes’ (if you don’t like the actions) but it didn’t used to be the fashion. But if you apply the recent fashion all the way back, then yeah you’re probably talking only about presidents who had no military actions while in office*, and as mentioned if you take presidents who were previously military officers then you could probably apply the modern fashion to that previous military service and accuse them of ‘war crimes’ one way or another.
*and non-declared war military actions aren’t new. If you closely researched the Barbary Wars, the Sumatran Expeditions of the 1830’s, Shinmiyangyo (Korean name of the small war with the US in 1871) etc. you might find examples of incorrect conduct of US forces that wasn’t punished, or just call the actions ‘illegal wars’. Besides military actions against Natives going on in most admins of the 18th/19th centuries.
The US Congress last declared war in 1942; any undeclared military attacks since then have been unconstitutional. Presidents are almost required to order the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Which have NOT conspired with such crimes? Maybe some of the Presidents of Congress under the Articles of Confederation.
Well, if that is a criteria, I would like to point out that Congress did not declare war in 1941. It recognized that a state of war existed between the US and Japan. Germany and Italy then did us a favor by formally declaring war on the US.
I am not sure when the last time Congress passed a declaration of war-WW I? 1812?
More interestingly, when was the last time any country had declared war on another?
On 25 April 1898, the United States Congress declared war upon Spain. The ensuing Spanish–American War resulted in a decisive victory for the United States,
2)Declaration of War: The U.S. Enters World War I. On April 6, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson signed this joint resolution,
That’s a pretty bold statement. The Constitution gives the Congress the power to declare war, but nowhere does it require that it do so in order to deploy the armed forces. You may have an argument that the spirit of the clause requires congressional approval first, but why wouldn’t authorizations to use force be good enough?
Even Jefferson, not even twenty years after the Constitution was ratified, took action against the Barbary Corsairs without a declaration of war and I’ve not seen any historical evidence that people who were intimately familiar with the Constitution’s ratification process objected.
Just like letters of marque and reprisal have fallen out of favor, countries like to use the polite fiction that, for example, we are not declaring war against Iraq itself, but only are liberating the people from the corrupt regime currently in power.