I am going to address your specific points, point by point, within the text...
And how many children's' hospitals were left standing in Hamburg after the firestorm raid?
How many children's' hospitals were left standing in Berlin in May 1945?
How many children's hospitals were left standing after we pulverised Dresden?
There have been occasions in warfare when decimation tactics were employed to stop an unhinged, immoral aggressor, that would not back down otherwise. The general standard practice in war is that when one a side knows that it is losing and there is no hope of victory, they surrender, in order to reduce casualties. When an aggressor refuses to act in that kind of "civilized" manner of war, some military planners feel it is necessary to engage with decimation tactics. And that would include General Sherman's raid on the South during the Civil War. It would certainly include Dresden...to clearly and utterly decimate a lunatic regime that had murdered millions of civilians.
I believe the Dresden firebombing killed about 150,000 people. Horrible to be sure...but not the 10 million or so civilians murdered by the Nazis. I am not saying I agree with it, I really don't know what is right. But retaliation against demonic levels of abuse, is not the same as the instigation of them, without cause.
And it certainly included the atomic bomb attacks on Japan. I think they killed about 250,000 people combined. Estimates of casualty rates for an invasion of the Japanese mainland were put at fully 1,000,000 people. I am not one to simply believe the numbers mean everything, but some military experts do believe the two atomic bombs may have actually saved up to 750,000 lives.
It is only a war crime if the prosecution can prove that the hospital was a briefed target and the attack deliberate and pre planned, not just incompetence on the part of planners or crews.
It is a defence to prove that you had credible intelligence or what you recently believed to be credible intelligence, that combat troops, including partisans, freedom fighters, guerrillos call them what you will, were being treated and returned to the frontline That includes 13 year old Girl Scout messengers having a gash on her arm bandaged up.
To this point, I posted a UN Press Release from 2013, when the UN did, of course, declare actions of Putin in Syria to be war crimes.
Bureaucracy takes time. The UN is definitely going to declare much of the military action in Ukraine to be war crimes. I would assume that will probably take place by June, most likely by the end of the summer. I think the UN general session is in the fall. Maybe they will wait that long.
If you're going to fight a war, fight the damn thing, don't pussyfoot around.
Well, that is true in certain realms of warfare, but not all. Ukraine engaged in exactly ZERO hostilities toward Russia. There was NO WAR going on. Russia instigated it out of nowhere.
And there is a huge difference between civilians dying as a collateral effect of a military engagement, versus actually targeting them to terrorize a population. That is what Russia is doing. And it will shortly be declared a war crime by the UN.
As it should be. Because Putin is a deranged psychotic lunatic, who just directed military fire around a nuclear plant to terrorize the world. This loon needs one of his generals to put a bullet in his head, so that the rest of the world can rest easy. That is what is called not pussyfooting around. Not killing babies. Killing babies is what cowards do.
As I've said before in these columns, innocent civilians, even if they include women and children, became extinct at Guernica.
Guernica was a war crime.
I don't remember world outrage when the IRA executed a 6 month old baby with a single shot to the head at Wildenrath in Germany in 1989.
There was plenty and extensive condemnation of IRA engagements. I am not familiar with the one you cited. But the world community was hardly united behind the IRA.
That being said, the IRA did NOT target civilians, though some did die as a result of their actions. You can't compare Putin to the IRA. No comparison whatsoever.