George Bisharat, writing in the Wall Street Journal, makes some noises about Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.

A question to those out there that are supporters of international justice: do you think that prosecuting Israeli soldiers, generals and/or politicians will bring us any closer to a long-lasting peaceful solution for the region? I would argue that in fact any such prosecutions will only further poison the atmosphere. As I wrote a few days ago, the main lesson of Nuremberg is not that evil is best punished through international justice, but that international justice is the best way to punish the loser in a war, kind of like the final thrust with a wooden stake through the heart of a badly beaten, prone and defenseless vampire.

Here’s an elegantly-put provocative thought which I happen to agree with:

The United States government has always engaged in war crimes and human rights violations. What’s different this decade is that, under the leadership of a terrible president, our elites have become vociferous advocates of the goodness and rightness of war crimes and human rights violations.

As Mr. Henley suggests, this newfound frankness is all to the bad. I’ve come to appreciate in the past eight years how important duplicitousness in foreign policy talk actually is.

Discuss.

Former war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte claims in her recently-released book that in 1999, while NATO’s bombing campaign was underway, Kosovar Albanians abducted up to 300 Serbs and proceeded to surgically remove their kidneys before killing them. The kidneys were then sent off to wealthy Arabs in the Middle East in need of organ transplants.

Though it is the Balkans where anything’s possible, it sure sounds like horseshit to me—it has all the Big Lie characteristics of Jewish blood libel. Carla Del Ponte has gotten a deservedly bad reputation for her highly politicized and self-aggrandizing style, so the source of the story doesn’t add confidence. Regardless, I do hope there’s a proper investigation carried out so that this kind of stuff can be verified one way or another—there’s already enough rumor and mythology poisoning the air in the benighted Balkans.

The war crimes trial of Croatian general Ante Gotovina got under way yesterday. For a backgrounder on the unseemly politics of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, take a gander at my article in The American Interest from a few months back:

After Dayton, the international community turned its attention to prosecuting war crimes as a further means of forcing reconciliation. Again, the underlying assumption was that all sides were guilty; Serbia was perhaps quantitatively, but not qualitatively, more guilty than the other parties, but this was not important for practical purposes. For example, the fact that Serb civilians, fearing retribution, were fleeing in front of advancing Croatian and Bosnian armies was also viewed as “ethnic cleansing”, even though the Croats and Bosnians were not engaged in the methodical slaughter of innocents and forced deportations perfected by their Serbian adversaries over the years.

Doubtlessly atrocities did occur during Croatia’s “Operation Storm”, and Tudjman and his generals certainly weren’t terribly concerned that thousands of Serbs were fleeing their homesteads. This was not, however, “the single largest event of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the 1991-1995 wars” as the NY Times would have it.

The Croatian Serbs had massacred hundreds and expelled thousands of Croats from their homes in the intervening years, and they very rightly feared that their returning neighbors wouldn’t take too kindly to them. Tudjman’s cavalier attitude and his failure and unwillingness to provide security for these people stands as a black mark on the history of the founding of modern state of Croatia. But it doesn’t even begin to measure up to the systematic barbarities and deportations practiced by the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia during the Balkan wars. Equating the two sides, as the Times does above, is either dishonest, or more likely just plain historically ignorant and lazy.