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I don't think I'm the one to attempt that one. There are limits to my ability to prognosticate.

I prefer to remain within the realm of opinion, where mine is as good as anyone's.

Its a mistake in general terms to try to criminalize war, or to try to adjudicate it. I am in favor of war-trials in the immediate aftermath of a war, as these have a specific military purpose. At the end of hostilities, there are inevitably some war prisoners, usually the ones in a leadership role, who must never walk free. With those you hold a brief hearing to document the reasons you are going to hang them, and then you hang them.

Saddam and his inner circle are a good example. You can't have these guys walking around free, sipping tea and planning revolutions. So you drop them at the end of a rope.

These are not "trials" in the civilian sense of the word. There is no possibility of an acquittal. You aren't trying to decide "if" your enemy is guilty, probably by his own law he is not guilty of anything. But for military and political reasons he will always be a threat, so you document it and execute him.

But the idea of arresting war leaders years after a war, and then trying them in a civilian court with civilian rules of evidence strikes me as futile and even dangerous. War is by its very nature extra-legal. War is the circumstance that exists when normal legal institutions are insufficient to resolve a conflict. When a conflict is such that cops, judges, subpoenas, and men with briefcases are incapable of saving you, you call out the men with guns, who go and settle it directly.

Peace comes when the facts of the ground have been re-arranged such that a return to rule of law is possible. To try to apply normal peacetime law to the period in which law was inadequate to the conflict is to misunderstand both law and war.

To try to use law to force a return to status quo ante, to the status that existed prior to the war is also a mistake, as that is the circumstance that led to war in the first place. Peace comes by changing the status quo, not by returning to it.

I think its a mistake to encourage the conceit on the part of Dutch and Belgian lawyers that they have any jurisdiction over wars in which they themselves did not serve. The idea that a Dutch lawyer is going to impose justice on two warring parties is silly. Where are the Dutch regiments that are going to enforce this law? So they are forced to resort to bribery to get jurisdiction. The government of Serbia is alternately bribed and blackmailed to hand over its offending commanders. That might work with a small country that wants badly to enter the EU, but its hardly a legal standard. If the Dutch start seizing American commanders or Secretaries of Defense, I would consider it an act of war, although probably the Democratic Party would agree at least where Rumsfeld is concerned.

I don't know what is going to happen to Mladic. But my general belief is that wars should be settled on the battlefield, and that they can not be resolved in Dutch courts. If you capture a Mladic and hang him right at the end of the war, fine. But to go through a circus of a trial the way they did with Milosevic, and in the end basically acquit him posthumously, just shows the basic silliness of the whole thing.