The invasion of Iraq, as Brown said of Putin’s attack on Ukraine, amounted to “the supreme international crime”, as identified by the Nuremberg tribunal: of aggressive war. Like Israel is said to have done in Gaza, but with much more deadly effect, US troops during the second Iraq war
used white phosphorus as a weapon, bombing the city of Falluja, in which 30,000-50,000 people were sheltering, with this and other weapons, during an attack that treated the entire city as a combat zone, causing the mass death of civilians.
No one has been tried or convicted for these crimes. The laws of war, it seems, are for the little people.
So why bother? Why even mention war crimes, knowing that the charge is unlikely to be enforced against powerful perpetrators? Why not accept that war and atrocity are inextricable?
Because it is upon these laws that aspects of our humanity hang.
If we succumb to cynicism, if we are dissuaded by the hypocrisy of the dominant powers, if we cannot demand and hope for a better world, we accept the premise that might is right, and the powerful may treat the powerless however they wish. We accept that atrocities by one side will be used to justify atrocities by another, in a never-ending cycle of revenge and carnage. In doing so, we create a world in which none of us would choose to live.