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Proponents of the court wager that the long-term benefits (they would say necessity) of taking this first step far outweigh the meager practical results that can be expected from the court as it is now constituted. But, after Bosnia and Rwanda, it may well be that more idealistic initiatives are exactly what we don't need?that, in fact, initiatives should be judged by the actions they are likely to engender in the here and now, not by the better world they may, in some indeterminate future, help to usher in. In the absence of a world government, or of a United Nations army, such strong action, of course, can be undertaken only by states. Utopianism can be a fine thing, but not if it is based on a misperception of the world as it actually exists. And that misperception seems to have bedazzled the decent people who have campaigned for the court.

The deeper argument that didn't quite take place before the Rome treaty was signed would have revolved around the relation of law and politics. Advocates of the court never really ask what law can honestly be expected to accomplish in what is still very much a lawless world, no matter how many nations have signed up for how many international covenants and conventions. People today rightly mock the 1928 Kellogg-Briand pact, which, among its other provisions, 'outlawed' war. If the idea that the likes of Ratko Mladic will really be dissuaded by the existence of a court in The Hague is not equally preposterous, then surely the advocates of the court must meet the burden of proving that the world has changed in fundamental ways since 1928. The experience of the past 60 years should be enough to demonstrate that they can do no such thing. What was needed in the 1930s was not pacifism but a war against fascism. What will be needed to stop the next Bosnia or the next Rwanda will be force, not the prospect that, somewhere down the line, the criminals may find themselves indicted for war crimes. Imagining otherwise is like supposing that street thugs will decide not to commit a mugging or a rape because of the distant possibility they may go to jail.

There is something hubristic about the effort to graft a system of international law onto the tragedies of faraway peoples. I say faraway because, of course, none of the main nations backing the International CourtóU.S. anxieties to the contrary notwithstandingóreally imagines that its own citizens will ever stand in the dock. Would an international legal system have been the right response to the American Civil War, to use an obvious example? And, if the answer is that Sherman's war crimes in Georgia were of secondary importance to the need to break the will of the Confederacy, then why should the same defense not be available to the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which committed war crimes in a just war against its genocidal enemies?

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