The value of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the additional `Protocols' of 1977 is impossible to overestimate. In simple human terms, millions of people are alive today because these norms enabled the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Together, the conventions and protocols form what is misleadingly called international humanitarian law (IHL), but which in fact regulate war--seeking to limit its effects, regardless of the rights and wrongs involved, and to restrict its methods, even in battles undertaken in a just cause.

For example, many states now believe that the prohibition on intentionally targeting civilians is binding, and they act on that basis by actually limiting their battlefield tactics. Consider the transformation of American military behavior from the Vietnam era, when commanders spoke of destroying villages "in order to save them," to its operations in Kosovo and Afghanistan, where military lawyers and even ICRC officials were consulted on what targets could be bombed.

This progress, which gained a further institutional foothold with the establishment of the International Criminal Court last July, led many to believe that the triumph of international law is no longer a utopian hope but a practical prospect. The vision remains attractive, but in its moral seductiveness lies profound moral and intellectual danger.

It is worth recalling Walter Benjamin's observation that "every document of civilization is simultaneously a document of barbarism." Florence Nightingale understood this when she declined to join the ICRC's founder, Henri Dunant, in the 1860s. She argued that to set limits on war, as the ICRC devotes itself to doing, is also to make war more morally palatable to those who wage them and those who fight them.

Indeed, the fetishization of any document has a religious cast that should make any thinking person skeptical. The law should be no more immune to critical examination than any other creed. When Jakob Kellenberger, the ICRC's current president, asserts that it is "the principle of humanity" that underlies all of IHL, we enter the realm of legal idolatry.

But IHL is confronted not only by the ethical challenge of coping with its own moral hubris. War began to mutate in the last part of the 20 ^th century. Notwithstanding the horrors of the recent conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea and the likelihood of catastrophe accompanying any Anglo-American attack on Iraq, most wars nowadays are civil wars. As such, they are, almost by definition, less rule-bound than interstate wars.

The reasons are simple and brutal. In civil wars, each side tends to deny the legitimacy, if not the humanity, of the other. The goal is less often victory on the battlefield than ethnic cleansing, subjugation, even genocide. If, as in Bosnia, a commander's goal is to replace the Muslim population of a given area with Serbs, then war has, by definition, been made indistinguishable from a war crime.

Were such a Serb commander to fight by the rules outlined in IHL--that is, afford civilians a basic measure of protection--there would be no purpose in initiating hostilities in the first place. For the Bosnian Serbs in 1992, the Rwandan Hutus in 1994, or the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, the real adversaries were not enemy combatants but the civilian population of a rival ethnic or cultural group.

In such circumstances, law is useless. The commission of war crimes may trigger international intervention à la Kosovo or East Timor. But the idea that such interventions can become customary, that great powers (and only great powers have the resources to act effectively) will commit their troops to kill and die in endless wars of altruism is utopian in the worst sense of the term--it is utterly unrealizable.

So, far from having triumphed, international humanitarian law has never been more imperiled. The law assumes a moral consensus among states and warlords that exists only in rhetoric. Yes, the Rwandan government signed the Genocide Convention. But a signature does not mean sincerity. Obviously, some norms do eventually enlist the consent and support of those toward whom they are directed. The problem is that no law of nature guarantees this.

Meanwhile, the actual conduct of intrastate war is growing more, not less, barbarous. In most conflicts, prisoners' rights are routinely debased, torture is commonplace, and the inviolability of cultural and religious edifices is ignored. When Kellenberger cheers on the rise of a civil society supposedly determined to "bring about greater respect for human rights and humanitarian law," he is mistaking his dreams for reality.

In fact, the assault on IHL comes not simply from warlords from Ivory Coast to Chechnya to Aceh. It increasingly comes from states that, in their conduct of conventional military operations, tend to respect the laws of war. The so-called "war on terrorism" saw to this.

The US, in particular, now believes that most of its adversaries are not soldiers in the conventional sense, but "unlawful combatants"--people to whom the protections of the Geneva Conventions do not apply. If anything, the erosion of IHL now stems as much from decisions made in Washington as from the cruelties of militia commanders in West African jungles.