Actually, i decided to check, and we're arguing on the wrong premise. I checked, at the USA didn't in fact sign the landmine treaty at all. So, nobody in USA decided that "landmines kill civilians and that's bad" in any case. At least, not bad enough to sign up to the treaty. You guys are also the lone holdout on "
Convention on the Rights of the Child" which even Iran, North Korea, Myanmar are signatories to. So, @Madman198237 this discussion is not making the USA look "evil", just amoral and self-interested. This isn't even a blip on the radar of things that could be said that make the USA seem "evil as possible". It's unarguably
more evil to not have signed onto the landmine treaty than to sign it, along with refusing to sign a pile of human rights treaties.
EDIT
Yeah I forgot that the USA doesn't like signing treaties at all, no matter what good they would do. But still, the core point about things the USA did, not being war-crimes stands, even leaving aside the land-mine thing.
For example, Admiral Donitz wasn't a war criminal because of the
specific act of ordering the sinking of neutral shipping vis submarines, because the USA and UK ordered that too (though Donitz was convicted for other unrelated charges). The point being it
would have been a convictable war-crime if not for the pesky fact that the allies did it, too.
Similarly, bombing civilian targets isn't a war-crime, because that was a tactic used by the allies too, so Werner Von Braun who created the V1/V2 rockets that bombed England wasn't classed as a war criminal - but he
would have been if the allies hadn't bombed cities, too.
In additional the USA is one of the nations in the world who hasn't fully ratified the
International Criminal Court, which is the body for handling war crimes. The only reason not to sign it, is to prevent the possibility of any living US person being indicted for a war crime. The people this is protecting range from Henry Kissinger through to American operatives in various Latin American dirty wars in the 1980s, through to modern Bush-era people.