1 April 13, 2003 Who Owns the Rules of War? The war in Iraq demands a rethinking of the international rules of conduct. The outcome could mean less power for neutral, well-meaning human rights Groups and more for big-stick-wielding states. That would be a good thing. By Kenneth Anderson The New York Times Magazine (Sunday, April 13, 2003, pp. 38-43) During the euphoria of the opening air campaign against Baghdad, commentary was filled with triumphal rhetoric about hitting ''legitimate military objectives'' while causing little or even no loss of civilian life. A week ago, the air war was pounding more than symbols of the regime, and the ground war had become a real war. Scarcely a speech, briefing or interview was being given that failed to mention the laws of war. The Iraqi regime, for its part, was broadcasting denunciations of American airstrikes replete with images of corpses and wounded civilians in hospitals; the United States responded that Iraq had systematically situated military targets and equipment in the midst of civilian areas. The sheer frequency of these references on all sides belied the ancient maxim inter arma silent leges -- in time of war law is silent. People throughout the world obviously care about what is called jus in bello, law governing conduct during war. This is so even if they differ about jus ad bellum, law governing not the conduct of war but rather the resort to force itself. But even while there is agreement on the need for fundamental rules governing the conduct of war, there is profound disagreement over who has authority to declare, interpret and enforce those rules, as well as who -- and what developments in the so-called art of war -- will shape them now and into the future. In short, who ''owns'' the law of war? Although most of the world's religious and ethical traditions, if they admit the moral possibility of war at all, say something about what conduct is permitted in war, modern law of war descended historically as a tenet of traditional Christian just-war theory. The practical expression of such law, however, began with the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863. The moving force behind the establishment of the Red Cross was Henri Dunant, a Genevan who witnessed and later wrote a widely read account of the Battle of Solferino in the 1859 war between Austria and France. Dunant, together with inhabitants of a village near the battlefield, went about the appalling task of trying to tend to the thousands of wounded who had simply been left to die. Without bandages, stretchers, doctors or medicines, and above all without significant interest in the wounded by their governments, there was little to be done except offer water and prayer. In the aftermath, the Red Cross, organized to do what had not been done at Solferino, became the world's first secular international nongovernmental organization, the ur-N.G.O. One of its goals was self-contradictory and even ludicrous on its face -- to bring humanity to the battlefield -- but its idealism