Instead, Russian and Syrian government forces may have used that information to find them. Some of the hospitals had shared their coordinates with the UN to avoid being hit. These attacks were unquestionably war crimes, and those who chose the targets knew they were war crimes. Although a sovereign state and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia first began deliberately hitting civilian targets in Syria in 2015, including power stations, water plants, and above all hospitals and medical facilities, 25 of which were hit in a single month in 2019. Although terrorist tactics are usually associated with small revolutionary movements or clandestine groups, terrorism is now simply part of the way Russia fights wars. Instead, they deliberately create fear and chaos among civilian populations. Terrorists, by definition, are not fighting conventional wars and do not obey the laws of war. Both aggressors have deployed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli civilians are both blatant rejections of that rules-based world order, and they herald something new. The British still agonize over the past behavior of their soldiers in Northern Ireland, and the French over theirs in Algeria. Americans who mistreated Iraqi prisoners of war were court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to time in military prisons. Even when fighting brutal or colonial wars, countries that had signed treaties on the laws of war either tried to abide by them-avoiding civilian casualties, for example-or at least felt remorseful when they failed to do so. Soviet dissidents used to embarrass their government by pointing to human-rights language in treaties the Kremlin had signed and did not respect. Nevertheless, these documents have influenced real behavior in the real world. The UN Commission on Human Rights deteriorated into parody long ago. Signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights include known violators of human rights, among them China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. The Geneva Conventions did not stop the Vietnamese from torturing American prisoners of war, did not prevent Americans at Abu Ghraib from torturing Iraqi prisoners of war, and do not prevent Russians from torturing Ukrainian prisoners of war today. The UN Genocide Convention did not prevent genocide in Rwanda. In the more than seven decades since they were written, these documents have frequently been ignored. This aspirational order is rooted in the idealistic aftermath of the Second World War, when it was transcribed into a series of documents: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war, among others. The “rules-based world order” is a system of norms and values that describe how the world ought to work, not how it actually works.
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