How can Obama & AG Holder stick to the ludicrous "look forward not back" on WAR CRIMES today?

[True Blue Door]

33. Unfortunately, the world doesn't care.

Opinion polls are one thing, but actions are another. No government did anything to stop Bush - not one. France prevented UN approval, but never did anything that would have impacted their bottom line. When you really care that someone is a murdering, marauding rogue state, you do a little more than just refuse to actively encourage it. Everyone else was either equally hypocritical, accomplice to the crime, or itself a brutal state that could at most laugh at US hypocrisy rather than take any kind of credible moral stance.

And the same webs of global interest make war crimes prosecutions on any level unlikely. Have you noticed how no one was ever prosecuted for the vast, unimaginably horrific crimes of the Soviet Union even after its total collapse? No one cared enough to pay the geopolitical price for such a thing, either internally or externally; far easier and more profitable to simply exploit its successor states. The US GOP is far stronger than the wreckage of the Soviet state was after its collapse, and likely to exact considerable economic and diplomatic revenge on any state that appeared serious about prosecuting Bush's war crimes - and that's if any of them actually internally cared enough to try, which they don't.

The fact is, we don't either. We right here on DU and the broader activist left in America don't care enough to try. We're a bunch of cause-heads and intellectuals who enjoy taking positions more than doing anything with them. Are we going to stop the civil rights protests prompted by Ferguson and Garner in order to take up this subject? Or just write two different slogans on opposite sides of the protest signs (until a third issue comes up, and then we just go home?). Circulate petitions, just like all the others on the issue?

That's why it won't happen. But there is a small keyhole through which justice may occur - one that sometimes happens in history, to the bafflement of cynics: A discerning political animal somewhere may find it advantageous to seriously advance the issue. The reaction from the US GOP may be overwrought and cause blowback that paradoxically creates enemies of people who would otherwise not care. A spiral of similar events could develop. This is basically how Nixon was brought down, by a Congress that otherwise would have been content to look the other way on Watergate.

But it's not worth expecting such a thing. Never expect evil to be stupid at convenient times.