American Immunity: War Crimes and the Limits of International Law. By Patrick Hagopian. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013. 244 pp. $27.95 paper.

Abstract

American Immunity: War Crimes and the Limits of International Law. By Patrick Hagopian. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013. 244 pp. $27.95 paper.Patrick Hagopian, a Senior Lecturer in history and American studies at Lancaster University, has turned his prodigious talents to an enduring feature of American exceptionalism. American lawmakers after World War II piously demanded that the rest of the world follow universal human rights norms. Yet they carefully exempted American servicemen from these same standards by preventing veterans from prosecution for war crimes committed during their deployment overseas. This created a jurisdictional gap that the United States protected for decades, closing it only in the last years of the twentieth century to avoid the growing reach of universal jurisdiction exercised by foreign courts (e.g., p. 2). Hagopian finds this perplexing.But if you believe, as I do, that law is the handmaiden of ideology-that it serves and legitimizes prevailing belief systems within society-then there is nothing perplexing about the behavior Hagopian has worked so hard to explain.American Immunity: War Crimes and the Limits of International Law is an engaging account of the varied legal arguments by which the United States developed and maintained this double-standard. The net, however, is simply this: In its foreign face, the United States has long insisted on one rule for itself and another for everyone else, and justified the difference by making particular arguments about the law. This of course is a time-honored feature of the interaction between law and ideology in the United States-law blesses what ideology wants-and there is nothing unusual about the behavior Hagopian describes. On the contrary, it is merely another illustration of a drearily familiar principle: power implies the license to make and justify the rules.The most prominent example of this behavior in American history is the creedal attachment to equality set alongside the ideological attachment to white supremacy, which in turn produced elaborate legal justifications, from the slave codes to Jim Crow. Again, law blesses what ideology wants. Given the endurance of this behavior, the oddity is not that it recurs, but that people perennially expect it to be otherwise and express shock when they encounter it anew. Yet their reaction-a mix of astonishment and disappointment-is testament to the capacity of ideology to its incoherence. And in fact, conceal is the wrong verb, as the incoherence is invariably hidden in plain sight. One thinks of Orwell's observations in Notes on Nationalism, which appeared 70 years ago:All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend selfdetermination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. …