I'm surprised you don't take issue with what seems to me to be the main point, and one both more interesting and (perhaps) more wrong, from a moral point of view. Why is it "reasonable to expect" that aggressors will be more likely to violate in bello conventions? What's the argument there? It seems an obvious logical leap, and I rather doubt it would be borne out empirically, too.
I don't take issue with it because the narrative concerning legality is largely wrong. As it happens, I re-read the UN Charter the other day, and came across 1(1), which reminds us that 'the suppression of acts of aggression' is one of the formative principles of the UN. It also so happens that members states of the UN can, under Article 35, bring any dispute to the Security Council. That being the case, it's surprising that Iraq does not make a big deal out of US bellicosity, obvious to anyone following current events at that time.
The reason Iraq does not do so is Resolution 1441 (pdf), where (at the end of page 2), the Security Council explicitly invokes its Chapter VII powers against Iraq. That is to say, there's a very important definitional slide in the argument. Returning to Larison:
There are aggressors in war, and in the case of Iraq I hope we could agree that our government was that aggressor. Since aggressive war is itself a crime and a violation of international law, it is reasonable to expect that governments that wage aggressive war will be more likely to ignore legal conventions against other kinds of crimes committed during war.
Along the lines of that Anthony Coates essay quoted below, one might notice that Larison slips between a sense of 'aggression' meaning 'country whose forces enter the sovereign territory of another state,' and another sense meaning 'crime under international law.' I think it's a genuinely unclear point how far, if at all, the US was outside the mandate of the UN (/what it means if the UN makes threats it doesn't enforce, with absolutely no prejudice to the discussion of whether invading was a good idea for political, moral, or military reasons--staying only on the question of whether it violated international law); that is to say, the mere crossing of a border doesn't tell us much without a more substantial interpretive apparatus.
But to the larger point: is it reasonable to expect states that wage aggressive war will be more likely to ignore other legal conventions? I can posit a model on which that's entirely reasonable to expect. Is it reasonable to expect the opposite? Well, it probably depends on which conventions you have in mind (and whether the state in question is a signatory, what reservations and understandings it might have attached to its signature, and the status of CIL in the legal area). From a social scientific perspective, the number of cross-border 'aggressive' wars in the time period with a relevant level of international law is so small, one can derive almost any conclusion one wants.
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