Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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So apparently the gloves are coming off. Trump has Truthed out, in clear language, that Iran has 48 hours to allow all traffic through Hormuz with no threats of action, or the US will start hitting power plants. Apparently what Trump meant when he said the USA could easily open the strait without any help.
Notably to this point Iranian government sources have only put civilian casualties at 200-400, essentially one big accident and change for a bombing operation this large. From here the intention is to strike civilian targets until Iran cries uncle.
Iran in turn is threatening to strike back at gulf power generation targets. With weapons they may or may not have at this point.
How it started:
How it’s going:
Hehe.
I suspect blowing up power plants is a war crime.
How is this going to win the hearts and minds of the Iranian people? The US is going to seem like a bigger enemy than the clerics now.
I get the impression that people thought I was being hyperbolic when I explained what "winning" looks like from the perspective of the US, Isreali, and Saudi right, rather than plainly stating a position.
How is Trump supposed to accomplish that when he has no real staying power? He's sensitive to what the markets do and what the population thinks. He didn't spend any time actually prepping the American population for a real, prolonged war. All that propaganda about democracy and the free world and good vs evil has useful effects, and that stuff is not present atm. He's not in a strong position and is likely looking for some way out IMO.
You don't need "staying power" to cut off someone's electricity.
Again, I feel like people here aren't grappling with what I'm saying. You seem to think that this is nation building exercise rather than a punitive expedition.
You wrote:
How are you going to do that in quick fashion?
The actual answer is that you're not. Iran is not Afghanistan. Destroying critical infrastructure in Iran isn't going to turn it into a bunch of warring tribes any more doing the same in Britain would. It's just going to lead to a lot of avoidable deaths of Iranian civilians.
I think you have assigned too much weight to the notion of a cosmopolitan UK. If you turn off the electricity, turn off the food, and turn off the water, how long do you think it would take for Anglicans and Muslims, Labour and Tory, Scotts and Britons, Britons and Welsh, Et Al to stop playing nice with each other and start stabbing? I do not think that it would take very long.
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By wiping out the state leadership and then blowing up all the powerplants.
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The USA has shown a marked unconcern for legal niceties throughout, that is not going to change any opinions or make the top 5 list at the end of the war.
Power plants are 50/50 anyway, it should be proportional and Iran will provide proportionality afterwards if it hasn't by now.
How would you characterize the concern for legal niceties exhibited by everyone else in modern history then? Iran, for instance is attacking other nations seemingly at random and targeting infrastructure and hotels and other civilian targets.
The U.S. has shown the most concern for legal niceties out of any major combatant since those legal niceties existed.
That's not to say that the U.S. is particularly great on this front, just to say that nobody else really seems to even bother.
This is the Motte - please leave takes sourced from John Stewart and other talk show hosts where they belong. What they are actually doing is attacking nations which are hosting US forces and military bases, and the hotels they have been attacking were used to host American troops. They've been positively saintlike when compared to the US' blowing up of primary schools and oil depots in Tehran.
Iran attacked a gas field after one of their gas fields was attacked and they explicitly said that was a proportional response. Even Trump chickened out from destroying their powerplants after the Iranians explained what they would blow up if he did.
This is not factually accurate.
I am unaware of any U.S. military bases or U.S. troops in several of the attacked countries, of which there are over ten.
To list, at least: Israel, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Cyprus. By implication also the U.S., U.K., and France, and depending on how you want to count it Diego Garcia. Several of these were explicitly not getting involved.
I am also unaware of any evidence of U.S. military assets being present in a majority of the attacked civilian infrastructure. Some of the targets can be painted as part of an escalation ladder. Random civilian buildings can not.
Come the fuck on. Are you even trying to participate in a good faith discussion? Are you going to seriously sit here and claim that Israel was not party to the attacks on Iran? Do you believe there's no military co-operation between Israel and the US?
Are you for real? Did you forget a sentence or something here? If you aren't aware of any US military bases on Diego Garcia I think you need to go and do some more research before continuing to post on this topic.
I'm sorry - based off of your response I think you may have misread my comment, or at least you are not responding to what I actually said.
Given the specifics of the way you jumped in here it could be as part of some didactic exercise, please clarify if so.
Thank you!
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I think Iran's response is massively scattershot, but Azerbaijan is the only country in that list without US bases and/or troops.
IIRC Cyprus wasn't the U.S. (well I think they might have some classified assets there maybe?), I'm not sure where France got attacked but that probably was non-U.S. Iran seems to have accidentally attacked Palestine and Lebanon.
Iran lacks the targeting ability to actually hit what they are aiming at, which further complicates matters (see accidental attacks in Palestine, Lebanon).
Ultimately I think the comment can be reasonably described as uncritical repetition of Iranian propaganda however.
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I don't see where this is relevant to the comment I made or the comment I'm replying to.
I think it's notable, as I've stated upwards in this comment chain, that Iran has only reported a total of 200-400 civilian casualties, showing that the USA has shown a great deal of concern for civilian casualties during this war, and an extraordinary ability to prevent them. For all the talk about the girls' school, it's basically been that and some spare change.
But the DoW leadership has hammered repeatedly on the message that the focus of the military is on "lethality, not legality." They have no concern for legal technicalities.
What legal technicalities are we talking about? If we talking about war with other nation, I am not sure "legal" has any meaning here. We have a legal system in the US. You know, Congress, laws, courts, lawyers, police, 9th Circus, SCOTUS, all that beautiful arrangement. But none of it - beyond trivial cases of military cook stealing supplies and selling them on the side - has any bearing on military actions against a foreign country.
Are you referring to a fictitious notion often called "international law"? If so, I think naming it "law" is one of the biggest swindles ever perpetrated on humanity - it's just a network of voluntary vows taken by various sovereigns, each of them could be at any moment revoked or ignored by any of them. It has very little in common with that we call legal system within the US, and probably as much with any legal system in any existing country. So I don't see any problem in the military not being super-concerned with those. It doesn't mean military should not have any rules or limits - the military is ruled by the civilian leadership, and the civilian leadership can impose on it limitations stemming from our culture and sensitivities. Like, trying to minimize collateral damage, not harming noncombatants if possible, not using munitions that cause excessive harm to noncombatants, not acting in a way that may be repugnant to our culture, etc. But I don't think those can be properly called "legal technicalities", and I think it's not the military's position to define those - it's the outside constraints placed on the military (necessarily and justly), but within these constraints, they should do their thing.
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I'm pointing out that "marked unconcern for legal niceties" isn't really accurate, something like "as usual legal niceties become a bit fuzzier during war time" or "the U.S. usually does a better job than most at maintaining legal niceties, however..." would be more accurate.
Your word choice implies that the U.S.'s approach is worthy of criticism and perhaps is worse than others.
If you feel that way, I think it should be explicit.
This is superficially a small matter of language but given the amount of criticism for certain actions taken by Israel and the U.S. and lack of criticism and even forgiveness for actions taken by the other side that are ten times worse....I think the loaded language needs to be pointed out.
How is it inaccurate to say that the US is unconcerned with legal niceties when the Secretary of War has made a career out of criticizing prior war efforts for their adherence to legal niceties? When the SoW has repeatedly made public statements that they are focused on "maximum lethality, not tepid legality?" When the stated intention has been from the beginning to open up rules of engagement based on legal niceties?
Look bro, you seem to want to be the woke police about people not being rah rah enough for the war, in future consider all my comments about the American war effort to contain the Politically Correct Disclaimer:
Then maybe you won't feel the need to play whataboutism in a discussion of the United States' openly avowed policies. Iran is evil, sure, that doesn't prevent one from examining policy questions in light of the statements made by the United States' Government.
We should be precise in our statements, Iran is winning the propaganda war, you can find a large number of Americans and Europeans saying and believing things like "Iran is about as or more honest in reporting during this conflict" "Iran is about as or more following the rules of war/attacking civilians" "Israel is not checked will attack Europe and the rest of the world" (front page on reddit yesterday!).
This was has created situation where you have a truly unprecedented publishing of military and diplomatic information with near zero credible publishing of military and diplomatic interpretation.
Add in the usual TDS and you have a boiling pot of misinformation that we should be careful to avoid contributing to.
Some people do need to be reminded that Iran's government is evil.
I don't have any problem with criticism of the conflict.
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Power plants are duel use, so my understanding is that attacking them is legitimate if it is connected to a proportionate military effect. Certainly it's been done in the past, by multiple parties.
For the record, I continue to stand by my stated preference that the Trump administration not carry out a wholesale energy disruption campaign.
Possibly, one could argue that literally any action no matter how severe is proportionate to the long term consequence of shutting down the Hormuz strait.
The consequences are likely incredibly bad for the entire world, and apocalyptic for poorer regions.
My understanding is that Iran has not closed the strait to all countries, though.
It seems to me that they practically have and if they haven't then the blockade is meaningless because oil is fungible.
Right, but they can perhaps impose some inconvenience/cost on most hostile states and avoid imposing that on less hostile states.
It's also an easy way to demonstrate capability - a shot across the bow.
There seems to have been no such attempt thus far and i genuinely struggle to understand how it would work.
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People keep throwing the word "proportionate" around like it's something to be desired.
Was Nuking Japan twice and waging total war against them a "proportionate" response to loosing a few boats and a few thousand people at Pearl Harbor? No of course it wasn't, "proportionality" was never the intent to begin with.
The vast majority of people have a completely wrong conception of what "proportionality" means in international law. The most common belief, which is completely wrong, is that one counts up the amount of damage that Party A did to Party B and say that the amount of damage that Party B then does to Party A must be in some way proportionate.
The part of international law that contains the thing generally referred to as "proportionality" is International Humanitarian Law. You can already get a sense that it has something to do with pain to civilians, who are not, in a sense, "part of the conflict". Indeed, the main treaty provision that is pointed to for this principle is Article 51(5)(b) of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Convention. It prohibits attacks which:
That is, it acknowledges that there will be military objectives, and that pursuing those military objectives may cause damage to civilians. In some sense, military commanders are supposed to weigh those things. This is not a trivial task, and there aren't clear, objective ways to compare those things, either. But the entire consideration is different in character than how it is considered by most people.
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My understanding is that proportionality has a specific meaning in international law as pertains to armed conflict, although I can't claim to always use that correctly.
It's probably worth noting in your example that Japan actually did quite a lot more than just bomb Pearl Harbor!
Anyway, I don't object to moving vertically up the escalation ladder. I do object to using military force against civilians in a way that is not directly connected to military objectives. For instance, if we are at war with Iran, and we intentionally airstrike a public school and hit civilians, the degree to which that airstrike will be justified under the laws of armed conflict will depend on the nexus to a military objective. If we did it for no reason, then it would be disproportionate. If we did it to kill a single low-ranking Iranian soldier, it would likely still be disproportionate. If we did it to strike a surface-to-air system that was colocated with the school, it would be much more defensible (and also the Iranians might be themselves guilty of a war crime).
My objection to a concentrated campaign against the Iranian power grid is not a principled objection to hitting power facilities, but rather that I think that such a campaign would not degrade the Iranian military forces more efficiently than allocating those weapons elsewhere would. To the extent that hitting Iranian power facilities would degrade the operations of their military forces in ways that could not be more easily achieved by other military means, I have no particular objections. But most high-end weapons systems are going to have generators as either a primary (if mobile) or secondary (if fixed) power source. Thus, as a general rule, I think that a concentrated air campaign against weapons systems and military facilities themselves is a more efficient allocation of resources than hitting centralized power sources.
There is a certain logic to striking purely civilian facilities in Iran because Iran has not respected the civilian-military distinction themselves, and according to old custom, the laws of the civilized do not apply to barbarians (defect against defectors). But I do not think the United States needs to do this to accomplish its goals in the region, and it would undermine our pretensions to moral conduct in war and give future opponents precedential cover to make such attacks against us.
What does it have to do with "proportion"? Hitting a public school with no military purpose behind it is wrong. This is because of how our society and our morals work, not because Iranians didn't hit exactly the same school before. Even if they did, it still would be wrong. If Iranians killed 100 random US civilians, would "proportionate" answer be killing random 100 Iranians civilians? I don't think a lot of people in the US would endorse such notion of "proportionality", neither should they.
If you're saying we should not inflict unnecessary civilian casualties, and if there is a collateral damage, there must be a very good justification of why that was unavoidable - I totally agree. But "proportionate" doesn't sound like a very good term to use in such case.
As for hitting power facilities, that depends on the goals of the campaign. If the goal is to degrade Iran's capacity of making trouble, then destroying its energy system is a reasonable step towards this goal. It's hard to manufacture advanced weaponry - or in fact any weaponry beyond light arms - without a functioning power grid. If, however, the goal is to cause the regime change, then it may be less effective, since people would be disorganized and depressed by the lack of basic necessities, and may not be able to resist the regime troops who probably have generators and other provisions to survive independently. Maybe also specific power plants are important for specific weapons factories or communication facilities and knocking them out will disable some important pieces. That's a tactical question.
Yes, that's what I am saying. Feel free to use a different word - I use it because, as I explained earlier, it's a term of art.
Yes, I agree with this. But (if my priors are correct) the decision to hit power plants instead of weapons factories or communications facilities would be a curious one. I would guess that it would likely be easier to hit Iran's weapons factories and military communications nodes than to take out their power network.
I'm not sure that is inherently the case, of course. If Iran decentralized its arms production facilities and situated them in civilian neighborhoods and dwellings, for instance, bombing power plants would likely be both more efficient and more humane. So I agree with you that the facts of the case really matter, there's not some blanket rule saying you can't hit power plants.
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