Yet Bob Kerrey and his team, who invaded a village and slaughtered twenty-one civilian women, children and elderly, need have no fear of a sudden unplanned trip to the Hague. Nor does any other Vietnam veteran. The Serbian war criminals who performed similar acts recklessly neglected to obtain their U.S. passports first in order to avoid unpleasant legal complications. The double standard that the U.S. employs in its foreign policy morality plays is rarely so obvious as when it refuses to countenance international jurisdiction over U.S. military personnel while advocating war crimes trials for others. Or when U.S. politicians line up en masse to condemn the U.N. Human Rights Commission election for democratically jettisoning U.S. as a member.
Righteousness loves double standards.
After a flurry of media attention, Bob Kerrey has returned now to his job as president of the New School University. Although that university has been associated with progressive social thought from its founding until today, there is little publicly discernable upset within its community over the revelations. Those words do not constitute either a legal defense or sufficient reason for a reputable university should refuse to ask reasonable questions of its academic leadership. At New School University, war crime confessions apparently are not a tenure problem. When a university nominally dedicated to social research refuses to examine public issues of criminal responsibility, it is indicative of the depth of social denial.