Comment by 10111001

> I fully agree, and think the international community is making a big mistake by not (re)formalizing international law and the rules of war, we should force all nations (including those not in conflict -yet-) to store school locations etc. as machine readable maps... we will never be able to roll back the clock and find out if Iran would have properly declared the presence of the school or not, ... but we can PREVENT SIMILAR SITUATIONS in the future, or at the very least have a mechanism which makes it crystal clear when one or more parties are playing very dirty games.

The problem with that idea isn't that a country like Iran would fail to properly declare all of its schools, it's that it would improperly declare military targets as being schools. No one could trust the maps.

If you really wanted to do something like that, the maps would have to be compiled by some neutral 3rd party with on-the-ground verification.