Churro
4d ago
I don't disagree. Blockades are a longstanding and recognized act of legitimate warfare, if always controversial (re: Turnip Winter). A nation is not obligated to permit the flow of goods into its enemy, although it should keep in mind what cutting off resources like, say, food will actually achieve when compared to the long term consequences of starving a population to death. Most people tend to not appreciate mass civilian death and suffering for little real strategic gain.
But what was being suggested was something entirely different in kind. The complete destruction of all power generation is total war logic against an enemy that has posed an until now unrealized economic threat that was clearly foreseeable and avoidable by not picking this fight in this way, with so little preparation, and managed to saturate US and Israeli air defenses with enough drones and missiles to cause, so far, a few dozen deaths and a bit over 8000 injuries, of varying degrees of severity. Oh, and a nuclear weapons program weeks away from a workable bomb for decades now. An existential threat deserving of existential tactics this is not.
Churro
4d ago
The pre-electrification comparison doesn't really work. Iran before widespread electricity had somewhere around 20-30 million people, mostly rural and agrarian, and it was a society built around that reality. Modern Iran has 90 million people in a heavily urbanized country whose infrastructure, agriculture, water systems, and supply chains are all built on the assumption of a functioning power grid. The question isn't whether humans can live without electricity in the abstract. It's whether you can remove it suddenly from a modern nation of 90 million without mass death, and the answer is pretty clearly no.
The backup generator argument also assumes an intact fuel supply chain, which in turn requires functional refineries, distribution networks, and so on. If you're actually destroying all power generation infrastructure in a country, those downstream dependencies don't survive either.
Also, why are you advocating for punishing a people who recently were killed in the tens of thousands for protesting their own regime for the actions of that regime? Is getting killed in the streets by the Basij for saying "I don't want this government" a secret signal for preferring a medieval theocracy?
Churro
4d ago
I don't know, 60% disapproval of Israel's actions would seem to indicate a majority actually do care about dead Gazans, or at least the scale of civilian deaths. But I'm more curious why you think the deaths of other humans are comparable to insects. Is it just proximity? Or is it something about who they are?
To stop an active ethnic cleansing? Can you point to me the population that Iran is depopulating en masse?
This argument is "we should do war crimes because we did war crimes before".
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