Especially if they are running for President...
Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor for the first of the
Nuremberg trials, addressed the Nuremberg Tribunal with these words:
If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes,
they are crimes whether the United States does them
or whether Germany* does them. And we are not pre-
pared to lay down the rule of criminal conduct against
others which we would not be willing to have invoked
against us. We must never forget that the record on
which we judge these defendants is the record on which
history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defend-
ants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips
as well.
*Substitute Germany for the nation of your choice since WWII. Whether
it be the Soviet Union, Cuba, Libya, Iraq, Panama, North Korea,
Venezuela, etc.
Not since the Reagan era (and with few dissenters then either) has
anyone brought up the obvious point that we have no right to condemn
nations for things that we are doing, and sometimes doing in a far worse
way. Has anyone in the "opposition" said that we are hypocrites for
threatening to attack North Korea or Iran, even with the "nuclear
option" for them having even one nuclear weapon that can't even shoot
straight or for building a nuclear power plant. We want to try Saddam
Hussien and his henchman for crimes against humanity and war crimes, but
we oppose an international war crimes tribunal and say that we will
never allow our war criminals to go before one. We condemn dictators
and terrorists but then we sup****t others, and has this not gone one
since the Cold War? Even in 1946, President Truman sets up the
Nuremberg trials when he himself committed one of the single worst
crimes against humanity in history--the atomic bombing of Japan. Now we
have Barak Obama criticizing GW Bush's war in Iraq, but saying he would
do essentially the same thing re: Iran and Pakistan--attack them
unilaterally and unprovoked without regard to world opinion or the
opinion of the people he hopes votes him into office.
Sadly enough, the U.S. is more than prepared to "lay down the rule of
criminal conduct against others" and "not be willing to have it invoked
against us."
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