No Policy Changes Who We Are

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it in July, in a recorded message to the American people, as he launched a campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court. He said it again in October while sanctioning the court itself: the American people, he said, are not subject to the jurisdiction of “this fake ICC.” This week, at the Federalist Society, he made the case once more—Americans never voted to put their country under a foreign tribunal.

He keeps saying “the American people” as if we all agree with him. As if the question has already been settled for us.

It hasn’t.

I didn’t watch the speech. I heard the clips on social media—enough to hear that phrase, over and over, doing the work of a mandate. And I kept thinking: either he doesn’t understand what we owe each other as one species, or he doesn’t care. I don’t know which. Either way, he doesn’t speak for me.

So here is the question this whole post is about:

Ali Kinani was nine years old when he died.

It was around noon in Baghdad on September 16, 2007. Traffic was moving through Nisour Square the way traffic moves through any city square at lunchtime. People were heading home and heading to work. A taxi driver was looking for his next fare. A man was out delivering mail. A father had his son with him.

Then a convoy of American private security contractors working for Blackwater—hired to protect U.S. diplomats—opened fire into the square with machine guns and grenades. By the time it stopped, Iraqi authorities counted 17 civilians dead and more than 20 wounded. FBI investigators later found no justification for at least 14 of those killings. The youngest of the dead was Ali Kinani. He was nine years old.

Ali’s father, Mohammed Kinani, is an American citizen.

Hold onto that, because we’re coming back to it.

Nobody is born believing that some children matter less than others.

Watch a group of five-year-olds on a playground. When one falls, the others run to help. They don’t check what neighborhood the hurt child lives in. They don’t ask whose side the child’s parents are on. Pain is pain. At the start, we teach children that much.

Then, slowly, we teach them something else.

We usually don’t say it out loud. We teach it through what we show them and what we leave out. We teach it through which deaths make the evening news and which ones never do. We teach it through which victims get names, photographs, and families on camera—and which ones get counted as a number in the last paragraph. We teach it through whose testimony gets believed and whose gets called propaganda.

We teach it through words.

“Collateral damage.” “Neutralized.” “Military-age male.” “Regrettable incident.” Each of those phrases was built to do one job: put distance between you and a dead human being. It turns a person into a category. And categories don’t have mothers.

The family digs through rubble with their bare hands. They’ll set one less plate at the table. They’ll walk past the spot. They’ll wake up at three in the morning and remember. The official at the podium goes home for dinner.

The family lives with the loss. The officials choose the words the rest of us hear.

That distance is what makes it possible for human beings to accept the destruction of other human beings. Weapons do the killing. The distance is what lets the rest of us accept it.

Go back to the founding. A majority of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence owned human beings. So did nearly half the delegates to the Constitutional Convention.

Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal.” Over his lifetime he enslaved more than 600 people, sold more than 110 of them, and freed only ten. He wrote that an enslaved woman who bore a child every two years was more profitable than his best field hand, because “what she produces is an addition to the capital.”

They didn’t just hold beliefs about rank. They built rank into law. The Constitution counted three-fifths of the enslaved population toward representation, which gave slaveholding states more power in Congress. It required people who escaped to be returned. It barred Congress from ending the slave trade until 1808. When slavery was finally abolished, the Thirteenth Amendment kept an exception for punishment for crime, and the same extraction found a new legal container.

The words were universal. The design was ranked. And a ranked design has to be taught, generation after generation, or it falls apart. People have to learn who sits where. They have to learn whose work counts, whose land can be taken, whose testimony gets believed, and whose death is a tragedy and whose is a statistic.

That’s the mechanism. It isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a curriculum. It’s the water we swim in.

And here’s why that matters: if stratification had to be taught on purpose, then its opposite can be taught on purpose too. What one generation built, another can take apart.

Before we go back nineteen years, look at what this year has already shown us.

On February 28, 2026, the first day of the war with Iran, at least one U.S. missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab. Iranian state media reported 168 people killed, most of them children. There is still no final count. The same day, U.S. missiles scattered tungsten pellets over a sports complex and neighborhood in Lamerd, and 22 civilians were killed. A UN fact-finding mission found reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes in both strikes. Our government still hasn’t released its own investigation.

That same mission found that Iran’s government committed crimes against humanity against its own people, killing protesters on a massive scale before the war even started.

In Sudan, more than 6,000 people were killed when the RSF militia seized El Fasher. ICC prosecutors say war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed there, including mass executions and mass graves dug to hide them. UN investigators say the killings bear the markers of genocide. They had warned it was coming, and nobody listened.

In Gaza, a UN commission of inquiry found in October that Israel kept committing genocide even after the 2025 ceasefire. Earlier this year it found that about 30 percent of the people killed by Israeli forces were children. Gaza’s health ministry counts more than 74,200 dead. Israel rejects the findings. The same commission also accused Hamas of murdering 108 Gazan civilians.

In Ukraine, UN investigators found in October that Russia committed war crimes and crimes against humanity by attacking the power and heat that keep civilians alive through winter. Civilian casualties this year are at record levels. Russia says it doesn’t recognize the commission.

The flags are different and so are the languages, but it’s the same thing every time. Human beings who should have been protected were killed by other human beings, and someone with power is working to make sure no one answers for it.

These are findings by investigators, not verdicts. That’s exactly why courts matter. A finding is where justice begins. Without a court that can hear the case, it is also where justice ends.

Try this. Picture it as clearly as you can.

A foreign security contractor, hired by a foreign government, opens fire into a crowded intersection in an American city. Seventeen Americans are killed. One of them is a nine-year-old boy. That foreign country tries the contractors and convicts them. Years later, their president pardons them, and they go home free.

Would we tell those families that justice had been served?

Would we accept a lecture about that country’s sovereignty? Would we nod along while that country’s officials sanctioned the only court willing to hear our case?

We wouldn’t. Not one of us. We’d be in the streets. We’d demand the extradition of the people responsible. We’d say the dead had names, and we’d say them out loud.

I would stand beside those families and demand a fair hearing.

I owe the people of Baghdad that same commitment. So do you. So does every one of us who claims to believe that a human life has value.

That’s the test, and it isn’t complicated. Whatever we would demand for our own children, we owe to everyone else’s children.

Here is what doing nothing looks like.

The sanctions stay. The court is starved—its judges cut off from the financial system, its prosecutors unable to travel, its witnesses afraid to talk. The cases pile up and go nowhere. The warrants gather dust. The people who gave the orders die in bed.

The next convoy fires into the next crowded square. The next missile hits the next school. The next mass grave is dug and filled and covered over. And there is no court left with the reach and the will to hear the case.

That is not a hypothetical. It is the direction of travel. It is what the sanctions are for.

And it doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. Watch what happens at home.

Another president will take this country to war. Maybe on a Tuesday. Maybe on a holiday weekend, when the news cycle is slow and nobody’s paying attention. There will be a vote—or there won’t be. The Constitution says Congress declares war. Lately Congress has been content to watch. It hands over its power a little at a time and then stands in the chamber and calls that leadership.

We have seen this time after time. Korea. Vietnam. Iraq. Libya. Now Iran. The names change. The pattern doesn’t. One person decides. Millions of people find out afterward. And the people we elected—the ones who swore an oath to check that power—they stand by and watch. Some of them vote to authorize it after the fact. Some of them say they were briefed. Some of them say nothing at all and hope we’ve forgotten by November.

And when the war goes wrong—when the school is hit, when the wedding party is struck, when the wrong family is wiped out—nobody answers for it. The president finishes his term. The generals retire. The contractors go home. The members of Congress get reelected.

That is what doing nothing protects. Not the country. The arrangement.

The Trained Country

And here is the part that should trouble us most.

If we do nothing, we don’t just stay the same country. We stay the same trained country.

We stay trained to see rank before we see a person. Trained to sort human beings into tiers the moment we look at them—by passport, by skin, by class, by which flag flies over the rubble. Trained to measure a life by where it stands in the order rather than by the fact that it is alive at all. We were taught to see stratification, and we learned it so well that most of us don’t even notice we’re doing it. It feels like eyesight. It feels like common sense. It is neither.

We stay trained to ignore the one thing that was true before any border was drawn and will be true after the last one is erased: that we are the same species. The same blood. The same fear at three in the morning. The same love for a child. The same grief when that child is taken. Every wall we have ever built—every constitution, every treaty, every sanction, every rank—was built on top of that truth and then built to make us forget it.

And here is the hardest part. We already know.

That’s what makes it a choice and not a mistake. We know, because we were children once, and children know. We knew before anyone taught us otherwise. We knew on the playground. We knew the first time we saw someone hurt and felt the pull to help without asking who they were. That knowledge never left us. It is still there, under everything.

We realize it—and then we ignore it. Every day. We realize it when a school is hit and something in us flinches, and then we ignore it when the next headline moves the flinch along. We realize it when we hear “collateral damage” and feel the wrongness of the phrase, and then we ignore it because the alternative is to admit that we have been accepting the unacceptable for a very long time. Realization is uncomfortable. Ignoring it is easier. So we ignore it, and we call that being realistic, and we teach our children to do the same.

That is the real thing we would be protecting by doing nothing. Not a border. Not a budget. Not a court. A habit of looking away from what we already know.

A country can survive a bad policy. It can survive a bad president. It cannot survive generation after generation of people who know we are one species and choose, every day, to act as if we are not.

Doing nothing is not neutral. Doing nothing is a choice—the choice that says: this is fine. The powerful keep their shield. The victims keep their silence. The next family that loses a child to a contractor, a missile, or a militia learns the same lesson we have been teaching for generations: your dead don’t count, because no one with power will ever have to answer for them.

And the message we send to the next generation is even worse. We tell them that accountability is something done to the weak. We tell them that a title is a hiding place. We tell them that if you hold enough power, you can pardon yourself, sanction the court, and call it sovereignty. We tell them that when a president takes them to war, the people who were supposed to stop him will stand by and watch.

If we do nothing, we are not just failing the people already dead. We are teaching the people not yet born how to live with it.

Back to Nisour Square.

The four Blackwater contractors were convicted by a federal jury in 2014, after years of investigation. Federal prosecutors fought for that case through setbacks and appeals. Iraqi witnesses traveled to an American courtroom to testify. The system did what it is supposed to do. It heard the evidence and reached a verdict.

In December 2020, President Trump pardoned all four.

A presidential pardon can end the remaining punishment for a federal offense. It doesn’t erase the conviction. The convictions remain part of the record.

1. 2007

   Nisour Square

   17 civilians killed in Baghdad.

2. 2014

   Verdict

   Four Blackwater contractors convicted by a federal jury.

3. 2020

   Pardon

   President Trump pardons all four in December.

4. Today

   The record

   The convictions remain. The punishment is gone.

Think about what that meant for the families. They waited years. They watched appeals and retrials. They finally heard a court say what they had always known: this was wrong, and these men were responsible. Then one person in Washington signed his name, and the punishment was gone.

Mohammed Kinani said the pardon “broke my life again.”

Remember, he is an American citizen. His son was killed by Americans, and the American justice system convicted them. Then an American president set them free. Even an American family didn’t get to keep the justice it had won, because the victims were in the wrong place, had the wrong names, and were on the wrong side of the distance.

The question for all of us is simple. If an American father can’t hold onto justice for his son because the boy died in Baghdad, what does justice mean for families who have no American passport at all?

Rubio says he is defending American sovereignty. I want to take that seriously, because sovereignty is worth taking seriously.

So what is sovereignty for?

Sovereignty means the people govern themselves. It means that power comes from us and answers to us. It was never supposed to mean the people in power answer to nobody. A sovereign people holds its own officials accountable. A sovereign people doesn’t need an exemption from justice, because a sovereign people is the source of justice.

I wonder how much of this fight is really about keeping the final decision in a few American hands. An independent court can ask questions our government would rather leave closed. It can look at evidence our officials would rather not discuss. It can’t be pardoned away, and it can’t be voted out by the people it investigates. That may be exactly why it is being attacked.

When our own government shields someone accused of a war crime, where are the victims supposed to turn?

That question has no answer in the current system. If the government that hired the shooters is also the only government allowed to judge them, and that government can cancel the judgment with a signature, then the victims’ only real protection is the goodwill of whoever holds power that year.

That isn’t sovereignty. That’s impunity with a flag on it.

There are children alive right now who will inherit whatever we decide.

They’re watching what we do the same way we watched the generation before us. They’re learning, right now, whose suffering counts.

If we teach them that some lives can be pardoned away, they’ll learn it. If we teach them that justice ends at the border, they’ll learn that too. If we teach them that the powerful can sanction a court for asking questions, they’ll grow up believing accountability is something done to the weak.

Or we can teach them something different.

We can teach them that the blood spilled in Nisour Square is the same red as the blood of any American child. We can teach them to ask “who was hurt?” before they ask “whose side were they on?” We can teach them that a soldier, a contractor, or an official who refuses an unlawful order is a hero, not a traitor. We can teach them that no uniform, contract, or pardon makes a killing acceptable when it wasn’t.

We can teach them what we taught them on the playground and then made them forget: when someone gets hurt, you go help. You don’t check where they’re from first.

I don’t know for certain what would happen if one generation grew up truly believing that. But I know we’ve never really tried. I know we’ve spent generations teaching distance, and we’ve gotten exactly what distance produces.