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.