As a well-known adage holds: "To the victor go the spoils." But it might well add: "Meanwhile, the losers go to the gallows."

This is the logic of victor's justice. It is the logic of the Treaty of Versailles, which demanded unpayable reparations from the vanquished German nation. It is the logic of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, where perpetrators of war crimes pronounced judgment on the war crimes of the defeated. It is the logic of Abu Ghraib, where the US military tortured and killed its enemy captives.

Throughout human history, victorious nations have gone too far in exacting revenge from their defeated foes. The entire notion of "international law"—from the Geneva Conventions to the International Law Commission to the International Criminal Court—has been sold to the public as a check against this unfortunate tendency to impose victor's justice on the fallen. But just as history is written by the winners, so, too, is justice decided by the victors, and the International Criminal Court is the prime example of that.