When in the Rome Treaty get out: and get out now.

Bill Clinton admitted that it had "significant flaws," and knew that the Senate would never approve it. But in the final weeks of his presidency, he went ahead and signed the 1998 Rome Treaty anyway -- and now it's up to President Bush to correct his mistake.

The Rome Treaty seeks to create a permanent International Criminal Court, or ICC. Participation in this new regime would be inconsistent with our national interests, with the Constitution, and with democratic principles. The president should withdraw the Clinton signature and make clear that the United States will neither support the ICC nor permit that court to mistreat our citizens or compromise our interests overseas. A debate is underway inside the administration regarding whether, how, and when to do so; there are abundant policy and legal justifications for taking this action immediately.

The new ICC would be a first: For the first time in history, an independent international institution would be capable of punishing individual Americans for actions it considers to be violations of international law. It would be unlike the United Nations, in that the U.S. would not have veto power over its actions. Its prosecutors and judges would have the legal right to demand the extradition of any American citizen -- from the president himself down to John Q. Public -- they believe may have violated the laws of war, or committed any of the other offenses identified in the court's statute. These include "crimes against humanity," "genocide," and "aggression" -- horrific offenses, to be sure, but defined broadly enough in the ICC treaty to include such ambiguous items as "outrages against personal dignity" and "serious injury to mental health." How these terms are interpreted and applied will be entirely within the discretion of the ICC, whose personnel are unlikely to be sympathetic to the U.S.

Although a number of our allies have signed the treaty, the ICC also has been embraced by states such as Algeria, Cambodia, Haiti, Iran, Nigeria, Sudan, and Syria -- all of which have been implicated in the use of torture, extrajudicial killings, or both. Yet once their instruments of ratification are presented, each would have a full and equal voice in selecting the ICC's judges and prosecutors. Moreover, leaving aside the "outlaw" states, if the U.S. were itself to ratify the Rome Treaty, it would have precisely as much say -- one vote -- in how the court is run as, for example, the tiny states of Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, San Marino, and Nauru (a Pacific atoll). Such arrangements were unacceptable to the U.S. when it joined the United Nations (where it obtained veto power in the Security Council), and they remain equally unacceptable today.

There is little doubt that the European states that have joined the ICC treaty regime -- at least those that maintain more than a police force for national-defense purposes -- assume that they will be in charge at the court. Indeed, since 1997, London, Paris, and Berlin have offered the sweetest of assurances that the U.S., its elected officials, and its armed forces would never be the targets of this institution. Rather, they claim that the ICC would only pursue the worst offenses by the very worst of people: Saddam Hussein is frequently mentioned.

But this is wishful thinking. In fact, the myth of a court for despots was exploded in 1999, when the Canadian prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia -- the ICC's recognized model -- investigated the U.S. and its NATO allies for alleged war crimes during their air campaign against Serbia. No indictments were brought, but this was only because the prosecutor concluded that she would not be able to obtain enough evidence to convict sufficiently high-level officials, such as the president of the United States and the prime minister of Great Britain.

Since then, the fallback position of ICC supporters has been that the principle of "complementarity" will protect the U.S. and its citizens from politically motivated ICC prosecutions. Complementarity, which is indeed written into the Rome Treaty, suggests that national authorities have the primary right to prosecute their own nationals for offenses within the ICC's jurisdiction, and that only if a ...