How the international community responds to human rights in times of conflict has always been an issue when judgments are made about differential levels of culpability for war crimes. In Iraq — a conflict I covered between 2003 and 2007, when the Shia death squads first began their campaign of murder — there was a resistance among U.S. and U.K. officials to acknowledge that a problem existed. When they would acknowledge it, some — shamefully — chose to depict it as a natural consequence of the brutality of the Saddam era.