I’ve always thought that some public things were sacred whether you liked them or not, like traffic lights on red, the flight decks of commercial airliners, and embassies and their satellite consulates.

But I have been disabused of this latter illusion because a few days ago Israel bombed an Iranian consulate in Damascus. That’s right: an official consulate with trimmed hedges and flagpoles and a plaque over the door.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who thought this was an outrage too far, for the New York Times sent a columnist running with the news that this outrage wasn’t as outrageous as it seemed; no, sir, it was legal.

Here is Amanda Taub writing in her column, The Interpreter, to be sure that concerned citizens don’t misinterpret the attack:

“But while those rules of diplomatic relations [regarding embassy grounds] are a bedrock principle of international law, they actually have little force in the case of the Damascus bombing, experts say, because they only refer to the responsibilities of the “receiving State” — in this case, Syria — and say nothing about attacks by a third state on foreign territory.

“Israel is a third state and is not bound by the law of diplomatic relations with regard to Iran’s Embassy in Syria,” said Aurel Sari, a professor of international law at Exeter University in the United Kingdom.

Ain’t that a kick in the head? It turns out that a country is only responsible for the safety of the embassies on its territory, and Taub, careful to make a gesture to common sense, recognizes that “it is not clear what protective steps [Syria] could have taken in this case.”

So if Country A is unhappy with Country B, it can’t bomb B’s embassy or consulate, but it can go after B’s facility in Country C. Yes, that’s fair game. Taub goes on to explain that the sanctity of embassy territory is more myth than law:

“In practice, there is a strong taboo in international relations against attacking embassies, said Marko Milanovic, a professor of public international law at Reading University in the United Kingdom. But that custom is broader than what international law actually prohibits, he said.

“Symbolically, for Iran, destroying its embassy or consulate, it’s just seen as a bigger blow,” he said, than “if you killed the generals in a trench somewhere.” But, he added, “the difference is not legal. The difference is really one of symbolism, of perception.”

Just symbolism and perception — who would have thought? Imagine those dastardly folks in Washington who wanted to murder Julian Assange in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London; they are now staring sheepishly at each other and saying, “Of course: just bomb the place! Wait till midnight when it’s just that s.o.b. and a night watchman on duty, drop a thousand-pounder, then call in some tame NYT scribe to explain it all. Why the hell didn’t we think of that?” You can bet that some heads got rolled after the Times ran Taub’s piece. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t want to be Assange’s next-cell neighbor at Belmarsh Prison.

Taub adds that those creepy Iranians didn’t even deserve protection because they were using the consulate as a military installation, holding “a meeting in which Iranian intelligence officials and Palestinian militants were discussing the war in Gaza. Among them were leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group armed and funded by Iran.”

After backing up the point with quotes from a disinterested Israeli law professor, she assures us that, “An embassy can lose those protections, however, if it is used for a military purpose, as is true of schools, homes, and other civilian buildings during wartime.” Presumably, she is referring not only to Iran’s embassy, but to the schools, homes, and other civilian buildings in Gaza that got connected to Hamas tunnels. Yes, legal protection — in a word, sacrosanctity — seems to be a far more fraught concept than I’d figured.

By contrast, let’s look at another deadly missile attack.

Last week, Russia destroyed a Nato bunker that reached six stories underground, in Chasiv Yar, a Ukrainian communications hub about 35 miles north of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. The attack occurred during “a meeting with the participation of senior generals from NATO countries, including representatives of the United States and Poland.” Russia used a hypersonic Iskander missile for the attack.

Since it was a Russian military success, Western media ignored this story, though Polish media reported that one of its generals had recently died of “natural causes.” The story appears nowhere except on small websites and the Russian Pravda. But it represents an important development in the war because the target was Nato officials. Like Israel, Russia is going after foreigners that are conniving against it. The difference is that they refrain from bombing the consulates of NATO countries in Kiev where most of the conniving is done amidst comfortable swivel chairs, good coffee, swift assistants and crowds of computer screens.

But seriously, maybe we’re missing an important point here. Israel’s targeting of a foreign-country’s consulate is an example of the rules-based order, where once a new rule is introduced, loyal scribes the likes of Amanda Taub will justify it to the public. And there are plenty of examples, like America’s assassination of General Souleimani, like Ukrainian missile attacks on Russian cities near Ukraine that have no military value and go unreported.

ORDER IT NOW

On the other hand, an underground bunker in a war zone, even if it was the site of a meeting of those helping one of the belligerents, is a properly law-based target. If that same meeting had taken place in one of the countries consulate in Kiev, Russia would not have attacked, just as they have not attacked in the NATO countries where Ukraine-bound missiles are produced, Ukrainian troops are trained, and NATO tanks loaded on flatbed trains rumble across Europe towards the front.

But I wonder: for how long will the law-based order last?

Therein lies the real significance of Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate: the West’s moral decline is now infecting its relationship to international law, not to mention common sense: if Israel can destroy an Iranian consulate in Syria, why can’t Iran do the same to an Israeli consulate in, say, Egypt? Another example: what if Ukraine, seeing its last defenses crumble, unleashes a chemical or biological attack on Russia? Surely Amanda Taub will rush to ramparts and assure everyone that, really, technically, according to experts, it was legally justified or at least part of a legal gray area (as long as it’s Ukraine doing it to Russia).

How long will the offended parties — Russia, Iran, and soon China — observe legalities? How long before legal practices turn into legal niceties and then into obsolete customs with no bearing on a battlefield of AI-run drone swarms, e-spies as small as fleas, slippery computer viruses and satellites hunting other satellites?

Amanda Taub’s parsed “interpretation” notwithstanding, Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate is a serious step downward into the maelstrom.