RE: (Fwd) Jesse Helms is Sparking a Real Constitutio nal Crisis - T

[Mikalac Norman S NSSC <MikalacNS@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

i don't get it: why is this a constitutional crisis?

norm


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From: phillp2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:phillp2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2000 10:00 PM
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>Subject: [PEN-L:5647] (Fwd) Jesse Helms is Sparking a Real
Constitutional Crisis - T



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Date sent:      	Tue, 05 Dec 2000 15:20:17 -0800
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From:           	Sid Shniad <shniad@xxxxxx>
Subject:        	Jesse Helms is Sparking a Real Constitutional Crisis
- The
 	Boston Globe

The Boston Globe						December 5,
2000

Jesse Helms is Sparking a Real Constitutional Crisis

	by James Carroll

	Worrying about a potential constitutional crisis coming out of
Florida,
we hardly noticed a creeping constitutional crisis that showed itself in
New York last week.
	At the United Nations, representatives of more than 100 countries
are
at work, until this Friday, on negotiations aimed at implementing the 1998
Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court. Arising from American-
backed tribunals in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the ICC will
adjudicate genocide and other crimes against humanity. Replacing
vengeance with law, the court represents a major step toward a new
world-structure of peace.
	Recall that, out of concerns for sovereignty, the United States has
yet
to sign this treaty, a demurral that puts us in the company of Iraq, Libya,
China, and a few others. The Clinton administration, which supports the
court in principle, has been working in a delicate process to obtain side
agreements that address its concerns, and there have been hopes that
the president would sign the treaty by the Dec. 31 deadline that would
keep the United States actively engaged in the shaping of the court, even
without full ratification.
	But last Wednesday, in a clear violation of the American way,
Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina preempted the
administration's transcending responsibility to conduct foreign policy by
dispatching his press spokesperson to the United Nations, where he held
a press conference to spotlight his diehard opposition to the treaty. (An
Associated Press story, my source, reported on this event, but it was not
covered in the Globe or The New York Times.)
	Helms will make his ''American Servicemembers Protection Act'' a
''top legislative priority,'' the spokesperson said, referring to a bill
that
would not only spike US participation in the court, but would punish
countries that ratified the treaty, and would severely restrict future
American support of UN peacekeeping.
	Thus Helms was not only inserting himself into an international
forum,
contemptuously intruding upon an American president's delicate and
time-sensitive effort to shape foreign policy. He was threatening other
nations with retaliation - a military aid cutoff - if they go forward with a

court he doesn't like.
	And that is not all. Against the present administration, Helms
produced a chorus of former officials to echo his intervention at the UN.
On that same Wednesday - a coincidence? - a letter supporting the
Helms bill was released by a dozen foreign policy heavy hitters, including
Henry Kissinger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, George Shultz, and James Baker III -
a sad demonstration of how far we've come from the post-World War II
generation of internationalists who, in fact, gave first expression to the
idea of an international war crimes tribunal.
	Helms and his supporters claim to be speaking for ''American
servicemembers,'' but how do the military men and women who might find
themselves subject to the ICC feel about it? In a phone conversation last
Friday, I put the question to retired Major General William L. Nash, who
commanded Task Force Eagle in Bosnia, a multinational division
supporting the Dayton Peace Accords, and who has just returned from a
stint as a UN administrator in Mitrovica, Kosovo. These responsibilities
have given General Nash a clearer view of these complexities than
almost anyone.
	He said, ''My experience from Vietnam to Desert Storm to Bosnia
tells
me that you behave within the laws of war. The treaty does not change
that. It is an endorsement of what we believe in.'' Indeed, by deterring war

crimes, the ICC would be the true protection of Americans, along with
everyone else.
	General Nash is author of ''The ICC and the Deployment of US Armed
Forces,'' a chapter in a study of the court published recently by the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The academy's program
director for international security studies, Martin Malin, watched events
unfold last week. The Helms intervention, he told me, ''was timed to
sharpen the divisions between the United States and other nations,
threatening them by saying, in effect, `If you support this court, you put
your military relations with the US at risk.' Senator Helms is way
overstepping the right of Congress to exercise authority in foreign
policy.''
	That James Baker is a party to the Helms campaign signals that an
incoming Bush administration would prefer to be shackled by a
xenophobic Congress than to be constrained by multilateral and equitable
agreements with other nations - a preference here for the old cycle of
violence to a new structure of peace.
	Jesse Helms is an exact epiphany of the mindset, at once parochial
and triumphalistic, that will guarantee not America's supremacy, as he so
foolishly thinks, but its irrelevance. If, growing impatient, you thought
there was nothing serious at stake anymore in whether Al Gore prevails in
Florida, think again.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

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