More on Power's "The Problem from Hell"

I have so many questions. Power writes that the US resisted, for decades, signing the Genocide Convention, or for that matter being a signatory to any international mechanisms for trying crimes that do not impede sovereignty, because these things are, as some Southern senator had put it, "vicious communist perversions." Basically, many American politicians do not want to expose Americans to being tried by an international court.

But at the same time, wouldn't it relieve the US of the regularly recurring pressure of humanitarian intervention in different parts of the world to have a court with its own mechanisms of deciding when genocide obtains? From Power's description of the American policy debate during every genocide, it seems the main issue is always whether to call the thing "genocide." Apparently, once the government does that, public opinion holds it accountable for intervening. If US policymakers were relieved of this power of nomenclature, and if whatever body that received it lacked the power to commit US troops, wouldn't that take some of the pressure off? Now that I've written this, I see how simple it is to interpret this idea as a horrible constraint on American Sovereignty.

But the picture Power paints is pretty awful. Basically, policymakers can always say, "we don't have proof it's genocide," do nothing because no "proof" within government ever gets collected unless the principals or whatever they're called order it, then argue they don't want to kill American boys and defuse the option of intervention by this mere mention of casualties. But she writes, there are many other means of influencing a country. Freezing bank accounts and travel of foreign dignitaries, trade sanctions (granted, maybe even more difficult that military action), simple diplomatic pressure and public censure, tracking movements of weapons within the country and publicizing it, and doing same with location of concentration or killing camps, bombing roads to such places after all. Also, I don't know anything about the international criminal court or the UN one, but don't they ever simply arrest people while killing is going on? With so much supposedly ethnicly-motivated violence, the arrest of one or two main instigators, these "ethnic entrepreneurs," can prevent so much. But musings of utopian international cooperation aside, why does the US so rarely deploy painless sanctions against other countries for humanitarian reasons?

Mm, confusion. Reading about foreign policy, when you don't know that much about it, is a funny thing. It seems so simple, primitive and "shkurnaya" (have no idea how to translate this). At the same time, the multiplicity of powerful interests that intersect to make it render it complex, often ridiculous.