From Tomgram:

Though the U.S. regularly espouses and pretends to practice the rule of law, successive administrations have chosen to forswear important international agreements,  largely for military reasons. Among those not even signed are the 1969 Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, the 1997 Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty, the 2002 Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, the 2006 International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, and the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Signed but not ratified are the 1977 Protocols I and II to the Geneva Conventions, the 1994 Convention on the Safety of United Nations and Associated Personnel, the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Add to this list the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, ratified in 1972, from which the U.S. withdrew in 2002. Then there are agreements to which the U.S. is a party, but which the US ignores or circumvents. These include the 1928 Kellogg-Briand General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy; the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (Article VI of which states: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control”); and the United Nations Convention against Torture and selected provisions of the Geneva Conventions.

We don’t do prisoners of war; we do “unlawful enemy combatants.” We don’t do torture; we do “enhanced interrogation.” And of course we don’t engage in other illegalities, like “extraordinary rendition” or targeted killing or the use of black sites where hostile parties can be disappeared.  (Gregory D. Foster is a professor at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., a West Point graduate, and a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War.)

I remember travelling in the United States in the early 1060’s and listening to local radio commentaries on world events.  One thing that linked them all (nowadays not often heard) was the vitriol directed at the United Nations, which came only slightly behind the Soviet Union in terms of alledgedly trying to undermine and disarm the freedom- loving United States.  This it was doing by discussing nuclear disarmament, prevention of war and so on.  The paranoia in right-wing districts was quite as great as it is now.  The United States was the “indispensible nation”, even if the term hadn’t yet been invented. The military- industrial complex was stoking up fear and expanding at a accelerating rate into every state in the union.  “Defense research” was already huge as a proportion of gdp.

By the 1980s all this frenetic, wasteful activity was pointless because the US had surpassed the USSR in miitary power (the secret services knew and the Russians knew, but it was too late. The whole machine employed too many people by then, and Congressmem needed their votes).  Rome was an empire whose feet stood four- square on military might.  Eventually the cost, and some handy pillagers and rapers from the North, armed only with shields and bucklers did for a sapped and spent nation. For ancient Huns now read modern islamists.