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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   564 thread views

Transnational Thursday for March 26, 2026

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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I’ve seen a lot of people arguing the US is/would be committing war crimes by bombing/threatening to bomb targets like oil depots, refineries, power plants, and desalinization plants.

I understand the argument for desalinization (causing mass water deprivation), although I do think the argument can at times be considered too broad in that besieging an enemy position is a legitimate military tactic, not a war crime and integrating your military position with existing civilian infrastructure is going to make that infrastructure a target. However for oil depots and power plants, I understand it will dampen civilian life. But this is a war! Denying your enemy electricity and especially oil seems like a textbook way to defeat them. How is that a war crime? When I think war crime I think intentionally targeting civilians outside of any military value, or death marches for POWs, or attacks on cultural sites that aren’t militarily valuable. How could removing your enemy’s energy resources be a war crime?

would be committing war crimes

I think the first thing here is to define what we mean by "war crimes". Are those crimes by US law? By Iranian law? By the opinion of some pompous gasbags in UN that have zero legal authority but a lot of ego? By some bilateral or multilateral treaty that US signed and have not currently denounced? Do we mean it in any legal sense or in the sense of "there should be a law against it, dammit!"? I think without finding a mutually agreeable set of definitions the argument has no sense. Of course Iranians think it's a great crime bombing their stuff, who wouldn't? I am sure US military thinks its well within their authority to bomb shit in Iran, especially given Iran is a country which is actively hostile to the US and the US command chain authorized them to bomb the shit out of them. If you want to prefer one of those positions over the other, you need to establish the grounds why.

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