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Disclaimer: what I'm about to say is not in support of any action, it's just philosophical musing.
Isn't the whole concept of a war crime sort of hypocritical? War is inherently barbaric and uncivilized. Yet we seem to think we can make it something other than that by placing restrictions on parts of it. The goal is to defeat your enemy but society says it's not gentlemanly to do it in a particular way, as if treating it like a sporting event with ineffectual referees will fundamentally change what's happening. At the end of the day we're still giving the green light to kill a bunch of people. I get why we do it, it just seems insincere to stop short of saying any amount of killing is immoral. We'll only allow you to kill these people in these places under these circumstances.
I don't know how this helps anybody it's just something I was thinking about.
War parties usually don't want to completely eradicate the opponent's population, just break their fighting power and force them to surrender. The "tolerated" form of war is a power struggle between those who want power (incl. keeping it, so defending yourself), and it should leave out those who don't as much as possible. So the idea is that you only fight the people on the other side who actually signed up for fighting, and spare those who would rather flee or accept defeat. Ofc in reality it's never that clear cut, soldiers can be forced to fight against their will for example.
If war is unavoidable, wouldn't it be a good idea to have an international council capable of condemning tactics that lead to total destruction?
The concept of war crimes and international courts aren't there to concede that war is acceptable. They are there to grapple with the fact that war is inevitable and try to mitigate the worst, most horrific and lasting consequences.
If the international courts had the power to stop war crimes they would, but they don't have that power. All they do is condemn. Why is it hypocritical that they condemn war crimes when they don't have the power to stop wars either?
Condemning something you believe to be inevitable is a rather pointless exercise in my opinion. It may not be wrong but it's not exactly useful either unless you believe it can be avoided, in which case it is no longer inevitable.
I'm any case, you're speaking from a UN perspective and I'm speaking from the perspective of individuals. The way we speak of war as if it's something that can be noble so long as the enemy "deserves" it. Nevermind the fact that your enemy thinks the same of you. We're fine with dehumanizing and killing large groups of men but women and children is a step too far. It's perfectly acceptable to bomb a factory full of workers but not a hospital. The concept of innocence in war presupposes that those who participate in it are not worthy of the same consideration as those who do not, despite the fact that in many cases a small group of people directed the actions of everyone else equally. Maybe that's a valid point but it does seem to clash with Western ideals of equality and judicial review.
Woah dude, you're putting a lot of words in my mouth.
There's no metric saying that war crimes weren't avoided by condemning them.
Also, we don't use mustard gas anymore. We don't use zyclon d. Or agent orange. There are plenty of tools of war we don't utilize anymore because we condemn them as war crimes, even if there's no actual, tangible punishment for utilizing them.
There's plenty of evidence for the effectiveness of just calling those things war crimes and condemning them.
Are you going to say that you prefer a world where we didn't condemn and phase out more brutalistic forms of warfare in the name of alleviating hypocrisy? Because grandstanding about how not all war crimes, or war, can be averted, is advocating for a world that's much worse off for the lack of restraint.
Edit: I'm not deaf to your point that the individual participants of war are no more deserving of death than anyone else. But is preventing some death in the name of sparing women and children morally the same as just letting everyone be killed for a concept of equality and justice?
"War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means." - Clausewitz