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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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!
Could you please clarify what your list actually meant then? When you said "I am unaware of any U.S. military bases or U.S. troops in several of the attacked countries" you then followed up with "To list, at least: Israel,". What, exactly, were you listing? I interpreted your post as listing countries that were attacked which lacked US military bases or US Troops, because simply listing all countries that had been attacked and implying that some of them lacked US Military bases or Troops would be ambiguous and useless in a good faith discussion. I'm not aware of any nations that Iran has attacked which didn't contribute to the attacks on them, with the exception of Lebanon (which is a difficult situation anyway, because to the best of my knowledge Iran has been attacking Israeli forces inside Lebanese territory).
I think this implies you understood what I meant and decided not to interpret it correctly?
From my perspective, the two interpretations were you that you were wrong and/or didn't know the details of the situation, or that you were creating unnecessary ambiguity to obscure the actual argument you were making - what's the point of listing countries which were attacked and asking me to guess which of them your criteria actually apply to? I believed that the first interpretation was the more charitable.
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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.
It's true that Iran can't target very well over long distance, but accidentally hitting Azerbaijan is probably too far fetched. Like, when they want to hit "something" in Israel and end up hitting Arab village, that's likely random. But if they hit Azerbaijan or Cyprus, that's likely on purpose, whatever that purpose might be.
If you define random as "missiles unable to target adequately and therefore landing at random locations" they certainly to do lots of that.
If you define random as "flailing around targeting nearly every country in the area (every country but Syria?) intentionally and unintentionally for unclear reasons*" then that sounds random and that's happening.
Both are running at the same time.
*likely to sow terror and expense, which has been a frequent part of their strategic posture.
I admit I don't really understand what their strategy of "make everybody hate you" aims to achieve, but I think there's clearly a strategy. Maybe a crazy one, but there's a method in this craziness.
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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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