The Washington Post reports:

The International Criminal Court’s judges on Monday charged Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir with orchestrating a bloody campaign of genocide against Darfur’s three main ethnic groups, the first time the Hague-based court has accused a sitting head of state of committing the most egregious international crime.

The three-judge pretrial chamber issued a formal arrest warrant for Bashir — the second time it has done so — on three counts of genocide. They include the crime of targeted mass killing, the causing of serious bodily or mental harm to members of a target group, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction. “There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. al-Bashir acted with specific intent to destroy in part the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups,” the judges concluded.

But then the Post makes the assertion that this provides a “a degree of vindication to the United States, which has stood largely alone in characterizing the killing in Darfur as genocide.” Well, yes, but it also represents a complete repudiation of this administration’s attempts to engage Sudan, not to mention the work of its much criticized envoy Scott Gration. For sometime now, activists have been hammering the administration precisely because it has failed to treat Bashir as a war criminal and has instead pursued a feckless policy of engagement. The criticism has come from both the left and the right.

In sum, Obama has been dragging his feet rather than leading on this issue. There are plenty of reasons to be wary of giving the ICC too much latitude, but in this case it is filling a void left by the utter absence of leadership from the U.S. This is how America loses standing and forfeits its superpower status to multilateral institutions. It can hardly been seen as a vindication, then, when the ICC grasps the mantle of leadership on human rights from an indifferent U.S. president.