Writing in 1992, just after the First Gulf War, military historian Martin van Creveld suggested that important changes in the rules of war were in the offing. For the first time in many years, previously banned practices of war – assassination, hostage taking, and poison gas – were gaining a toehold of support among belligerents, and van Creveld predicted that support for these practices would grow. More than a decade later, we see that he was only partially right. Support has grown, but in a direction he did not predict. Assassination (plots to kill a head of state in the First Gulf War) has emerged as the targeted killing or extrajudicial execution of suspected terrorists. Hostage taking (attempts by Saddam Hussein to protect vital facilities by placing civilians in their midst) is now augmented with blackmail as governments fighting terrorism threaten citizens and their property with catastrophic destruction unless their government reins in terrorists. Poison gas (then used by Iraq to attack Kurdistan and Iran) is now part of a growing arsenal of nonlethal weapons (NLW) developed by the United States and its allies. Van Creveld missed torture. Although torture was a key component of established counterinsurgency warfare in many European colonies following World War II, it did not rise again to prominence until the Iraq War.

Van Creveld's predictions went astray because he focused his attention on a short-lived conventional war against a despot who was willing to sacrifice large numbers of his own civilian population to serve his megalomania.