My thoughts, expressed in a sound bite:
If something isn't worth killing civilians over, it's not worth killing soldiers over either.
(Note that this is logically equivalent to its contrapositive: anything worth killing soldiers over is also worth killing civilians over.)
Your basic assumption that war are ever just has very little evidence behind it, making the question meaningless from consequentalist point of view (but maybe not deontological).
The Allies won World War 2 largely by killing about 2 to 4 million civilians in Germany and Japan. Therefore, it isn't clear that the benefits of not killing civilians far outweigh the costs.
This will become more important as technology decreases the difficulty of building WMDs. Eventually, even a small nation like North Korea will be able to make nuclear missiles. By that time, the cost of allowing them to do as they please (and encouraging other nations to also do as they please) may be greater, in expected lives lost, than the cost of brutally killing a million North Korean civilians.
I would go on, but there's no point in going to the next shock level.
On the other hand, the whole point of constructing humanitarian law to be independent of the moral claims surrounding the war itself is that while there is at least one wrong side in every war, there is no real hope of getting the warring parties to agree on which side that is, so the only way for humanitarian law to make them behave any better is by side-stepping the whole issue of who's right and who's wrong.
This is a little too strong for me. In domestic criminal law some means are permissible for resolving personal disputes and others are not. If yo...
There has been a lot of discussion about the merits of humanitarian law, some of it very good. But there has been no discussion of the more LW-ish point of the post, which is that anyone who says that humanitarian law should applied completely independently of the context of the war would seem to be subject to a pretty powerful counter-argument (a moment's thought demonstrates that it can't really be true that what actions in war are or are not OK is completely independent of the context), and yet there's good reason to give this perfectly valid argument very little weight.
Morals are determined to a significant degree by those with the most power. This holds right down to our instinctive moral circuitry. If you want to be 'morally right' in war win. The moral philosophers will then compete to create arguments in favour of whatever actions you happened to choose. Phrases like 'pre-emptive strike' and 'liberation' will be used.
The language of morality is handy to immerse ourselves in while we are signalling and shaming each other to get our way. But if you want to really think about the way things could be consider what I want, what you want and our ability to make it happen.
Humanitarian law, for the most part, serves to help people feel better about horrible tragedies. It does not serve a meaningful deterrent effect. I recall watching a lawyer discuss all the work he had done in investigation and prosecution after the Rwandan genocide. I asked the question, "Do you think this prosecution did anything to deter such actions in the future?" He seemed somewhat surprised, and said, basically, "No, not really."
In other words, humanitarian law has the major caveat that it's only enforced against the losers, or relatively powerless winners. So looking at it from a game-theoretic perspective is not terribly productive.
Humanitarian law, for the most part, serves to help people feel better about horrible tragedies. It does not serve a meaningful deterrent effect. I recall watching a lawyer discuss all the work he had done in investigation and prosecution after the Rwandan genocide. I asked the question, "Do you think this prosecution did anything to deter such actions in the future?" He seemed somewhat surprised, and said, basically, "No, not really."
In other words, humanitarian law has the major caveat that it's only enforced against the losers, or relatively powerless winners. So looking at it from a game-theoretic perspective is not terribly productive.
"Covenants without the sword are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all." - Thomas Hobbes
When someone breaks a law, is it really the proper response to go "OMG you broke a LAW!!"? Can't Yglesias call the police or something? I vote for actually examining the moral issues in each particular war without mentioning "laws" that aren't enforced laws but rather arbitrary goalposts in the debate.
If the circumstances giving rise to the war itself cannot remove the obligations a nation has, can the actions of a participant (such as a guerrilla) revoke protections of the laws of war? The reason George Davis argues in favor of that proposition is that he views the law as being an agreement among states, and for that reason also agrees with the "excellent reason" for the legal standard. "Laws" in that sense are rules which are enforced by somebody (states), distinct from morals which may be merely internalized as good things by acto...
International humanitarian law proscribes certain actions in war, particularly actions that harm non-combatants. On a strict reading of these laws (see what Richard Goldstone said in his debate with Dore Gold at Brandeis University here and see what Matthew Yglesias had to say here), these actions are prohibited regardless of the justice of the war itself: there are certain things that you are just not allowed to do, no matter what. The natural response of any warring party accused of violating humanitarian law and confronted with this argument (aside from simply denying having done the things they are accused of doing) is to insist that their actions in the war cannot be judged outside the context that led to them going to war in the first place. They are the aggrieved party, they are in the right, and they did what they needed to do to defend themselves. Any law or law enforcer who fails to understand this critical distinction between the good guys and the bad guys is at best hopelessly naive and at worst actively evil.
What to make of this response? On the one hand, the position taken by Goldstone and Yglesias can't strictly be morally right. No one really believes that moral obligations in a war are completely independent of whatever caused the war in the first place. For example, it can't but be the case that the set of morally acceptable actions if you are defending yourself against annihilation is different from the set of morally acceptable actions if you (justifiably) take offensive action in response to some relatively minor provocation. (Which situations justify which actions is, of course, a hugely important question, but it is not the point here.) On the other hand, the whole point of constructing humanitarian law to be independent of the moral claims surrounding the war itself is that while there is at least one wrong side in every war, there is no real hope of getting the warring parties to agree on which side that is, so the only way for humanitarian law to make them behave any better is by side-stepping the whole issue of who's right and who's wrong.
So any sensible moral standard demands that the context be considered, but there is an excellent reason why the legal standard requires that it not be. What to do? Since requiring that the context be considered would pretty much be the end of humanitarian law, the question boils down to whether the benefits of a neutrally-administered humanitarian law are worth whatever injustice would be suffered by the occasional country that gets condemned for doing an illegal but morally justified act. I think it's clear that these benefits far outweigh the costs, but in any case that's the tradeoff.
P.S. Though I used Goldstone as the example to motivate the post, I deliberately stayed away from discussing the specific war that he was talking about. I don't think my views on that war can be inferred from what I wrote in the post, but in any case I would ask that folks not argue about them in the comments, not because it's not important, but because this isn't the right forum for it.