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.
It's fine saying it "needs to be reformed". How do you see this actually being done? The existing UN will resist (with votes and vetoes) any reform movement. The only realistic proposal is for most countries to go off and start their own body and ignore the UN. This happened once before - when the League of Nations was disbanded. And how did that occur? By the Big Guys (US and USSR, basically) deciding at the WW2 Tehran Conference to do it. The rest of the world combined (other than Axis-allied nations) couldn't have done anything to stop them if they wanted to. And they conveniently gave themselves unique veto powers in the new body they established, the UN.
Democratic-esque nations use variations on the separation of powers - passing laws, passing judgments, and enforcing them. The UN would have to have an equivalent. Essentially a world system functioning like the EU. Well, we can dream, but I don't see this happening. A lot of nations will not freely vote to be subject to the UN. Which leaves you with a body forever enforcing laws on nations that don't agree to them and don't want the UN to exist.
The theory of nations includes the idea of self-determination. It's the opposite of universal worldwide law. (The practice of nations, of course, is 'might makes right'.)
My point is that this is an utter coincidence, and unlikely to last indefinitely.
Reforming the UN would definitely require the support of some of the current UNSC veto nations. But the idea is actually quite popular among American foreign policy elites-- I'm talking about advisors to Clinton, Obama and McCain (the last less so). As far as I can recall, Anne Marie Slaughter, current Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, came up with the supermajority idea (though it could be she was just repeating it). It is a relatively mainstream, if liberal notion. It is the kind of thing Obama might have tried if the economy hadn't sh... (read more)