Originally Posted by
DogTailRed2
All this talk of war crimes. How would you enforce it?
The U.S. withdrew from the
Rome Statute (correction thanks to Chronic Snoozer) on 6 May 2002. UCMJ applies however, and that then hangs on a tenuous distinction on what constitutes legitimate targets, which the rhetoric from Sec Def and POTUS are making fairly clearly to be untenable defences. That then places every single service person in the unfortunate position of being given a potentially unlawful command to carry out.
Only a problem outside of the U.S., but it may have the same sort of long term trauma as prior wars have when the moral justification is ambiguous, which is one of the factors in the level of suicide that is prevalent in vets.
Sad thing is, not much of this is surprising, yet POTUS was considered the best choice; Faust would have smiled at this as it plays out.