THERE was a horrified reaction around the world when US President Donald Trump tweeted, at in the US’s ongoing dispute with Iran, threatening Iran’s unparalleled cultural heritage.

He wrote that the US had identified 52 sites, including important historical buildings and artefacts, that would be targeted if Iran retaliated against the killing of its top military commander Qasem Soleimani on January 3.

After Trump’s advisers, including the Pentagon, told him this would be illegal, he pulled back from that position.

But why the fuss? Historic buildings and places are damaged and destroyed during conflict through collateral or accidental impact, and historic artefacts get looted. That’s war.

For hundreds, if not thousands, of years, armies were paid by being allowed to loot and run riot after winning a battle.

The military mind cared little about anything other than winning the war and going home richer.

There are many cultural and academic reasons for trying to protect heritage during armed conflict, most of them irrelevant to those doing the fighting.

We need to realise that cultural property protection will only be effective if militaries and their political masters take it seriously.

Ironically, given Trump’s tweet, the US is accepted as the first country to make cultural property protection part of its military policy through the 1863 Lieber Code, written for Federal forces during the American civil war.

Today, the intentional targeting of cultural and religious sites that are not military objectives, have no military function, and make no contribution to military action, is prohibited specifically in international humanitarian law, most notably in the Hague and Geneva conventions on the protection of cultural property during wars.

Whether any specific country has ratified one or all of the above, cultural property protection is increasingly regarded as “customary international law” and applies to all sides in any conflict. And it works. The commanders of military and extremist groups have been found guilty and imprisoned for deliberately attacking cultural heritage in the former Yugoslavia and Mali.

Since Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War in China in the 6th century BC, military writers have argued that to destroy the cultural heritage of your enemy is bad military practice. It gives the first reason for the next war and often makes a defeated population harder to govern.

On the other hand, protecting the cultural heritage of a population you have conquered shows them respect and they are easier to govern. This is what modern soldiers often refer to as a “force multiplier,” something that makes their main job of winning a conflict that much easier.

Britain established a cultural property protection unit in 2018 but the military cannot be expected to deliver good cultural property protection on its own.

If we want to protect cultural property, it’s important that those in the heritage sector develop a close partnership with armed forces over the protection of cultural property.

This does not mean heritage experts need to support any particular side in a given conflict but they must be ready to work with all sides.

Often, after actual fighting is over, the military is frequently the only organisation with the resources to protect cultural heritage.

This can range from engineering support to stabilise a building, to providing troops to protect sites or museums from looting, to liaison with local heritage professionals and the evacuation of collections to safer and more stable locations.

These are all different and may require different expertise. As more countries develop a military capability regarding cultural property protection, such units may begin to take the lead on protecting heritage during and after conflict, although they will still require significant support from the heritage community.

It is also clear that cultural heritage is not only threatened by collateral or accidental damage but by a range of other accidental or deliberate actions.

They include lack of planning, lack of military awareness, accidental damage, deliberate targeting, looting, deliberate reuse of sites, enforced neglect and development.

Cultural heritage is what makes us human. It gives us a sense of place and identity. On occasion, it is used as a weapon to show difference, as in the targeting of minority religious groups and their buildings, such as the Yazidi in Iraq by Isis.

But it can and should be used to explain and explore a common human past — what makes us the same. We can’t do that if cultural heritage is destroyed, or worse deliberately targeted, during war.

Peter Stone is Unesco chair in cultural property protection and peace at Newcastle University. This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in The Conversation (theconversation.com).