Meg Lee Chin

As a kid the rules of war made no sense to me. If countries can get together and agree upon rules of which bullets to use, or how to treat your prisoners why not just agree to ban war altogether?

Imagine how bizarre to be a fly on the wall during the negotiations for the Hague or Geneva Conventions... Someone must have been in favor of war because otherwise banning it altogether would have been a no brainer.

Surely if the parties can get into a room and negotiate calmly in the first place, what's to stop them from deciding "OK we'll agree not to allow war at all". What leverage was used to enforce these rules of war?

Why can't this same leverage be used to ban war altogether? Did anyone even bother to propose banning it outright as an option? If so which party was the one that objected? Under what grounds did they object? Again who was actually in favor of preserving the "right" to wage war?