Germany considering charges against Rumsfeld

And pretty much everybody else in the Bush Administration (see Time Magazine article here).

Why is it again that the Europeans seem surprised we didn't agree to sign on to the International Criminal Court?

(In fact, if I recall, when the United States originally objected to the ICC, citing exactly this kind of thing, European governments and some legal scholars in the US assured everyone that these concerns were overblown. Oops.)

Of course, this is probably just another case of a frivolous lawsuit -- or a serious lawsuit brought under a very problematic German law that the Germans will continue to find embarrassing. But if the German prosecutor accepts the charges, it turns into another case of a local prosecutor/politician/judge trying to meddle in a country's foreign policy (in this case, Germany's foreign policy). Whether it's local judges bringing charges against Chilean dictators, or local attorneys general trying to create national financial regulations, this type of meddling should stop. There is a reason countries have national governments -- it's so there is a single voice setting national-level policy. If you don't like that policy, in a democracy you have a perfectly good venue for redress (called an election).