Hang the Kaiser

By comparison with the kind of games Britain likes to play, Russia's invasion of Ukraine is uncontroversially a model of humane restraint. Three weeks into the campaign, civilian fatalities are estimated at something under eight hundred: the sort of bag which the forces of Iraqi liberation typically averaged in two or three days. It's only natural, therefore, that the war crimes in Ukraine should have provoked two of the British Neoliberal Party's least effective has-beens into demanding that the fiend Putin be subjected to the glories of Allied justice after the fashion of the Nuremberg trials. Gordon Brown, the self-pity machine who bankrolled the Iraq catastrophe, has joined his voice to that of the whiny interregnum which presided over seven years of corruption and drift in the immediate aftermath of Thatcher's removal, to decree that somebody or other must create an international tribunal and ensure a "day of reckoning for Putin," so that the free, fair and cantankerous Russian media can start informing their customers of the truth. The moral component of the demand may presumably be gauged from Brown's declaration that, in return for an outcome which his conscience could approve, the reckoning might be commuted.