STAY THE HAND OF VENGEANCE: The Politics of War Crime Tribunals.

• Author: Marks, John
• Position: Review

STAY THE HAND OF VENGEANCE: The Politics of War Crime Tribunals by Gary Jonathan Bass Princeton University Press, $29.95

FEW SIGHTS IN PARIS ARE BETTER than standing on the Champs Elysees at night and looking at the Arc de Triomphe. Commissioned by Napoleon in 1806 after his great triumph at Austerlitz, the Arc is a monument to all his victories.

Like most visitors to France, I have been struck by the aesthetics of the monument, not by the record of the man. Yet recently, on reading Gary Jonathan Bass' informative new book, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crime Tribunals, I realized that during the early 19th century most of Europe--outside of France--regarded Napoleon as the Slobodan Milosevic of his day.

Napoleon's armies, after all, pillaged much of the continent, overthrew legal governments, and set up puppet regimes. As with Milosevic, there was fierce debate over how best to punish Napoleon. The Prussians, furious that his troops had executed their prisoners--a war crime then and now--were most extreme. Prussian field marshal yon Blucher declared that Napoleon should be summarily shot. "But Britain would have none of this," writes Bass, "because of an idiosyncratic intrusion of its domestic traditions into its foreign policy--in this case, the gallant or priggish refusal of Wellington to have anything to do with so sordid a deed"

The British position prevailed. After Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, British marines arrested him, and he was banished without trial to spend the rest of his life on the island of St. Helena in the frigid South Atlantic.

In the 185 years that have passed since Napoleon's banishment, the international community has developed an array of legal mechanisms to deal with people who wage war in ways that violate international law. While great progress has been made, the world is far from the point where justice is applied uniformly. Dealing with Milosevic, as with Napoleon, the administration justice largely depends on the political needs of the victors.

In today's world, there is a full spectrum of responses to war crimes. At one end is the punishment the Prussians wanted for Napoleon--summary execution. At the other end of the spectrum, war criminals escape scot-free--Saddam Hussein is a prime example. In between, there are many shades of gray.

Bass, a journalist and professor of international politics at Princeton, focuses his book on the factors that determine whether war criminals are held...