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Where in his tweet dies he call for mass murder with intent to eliminate Iranian as an ethnic group? He is clearly using "civilization" as a synonym for the Islamic Republic regime. A clear stretch of the term, but less of a stretch than calling a total regime change, a genocide, as you are, and many in the mass media are implying.
A blockade of Iranian ports, if taken to the extreme, will likely result in famines in Iran, which causes people to starve to death in large numbers.
They import a lot of their calories and don't have the road/road logistics capacity to replace their ports.
The bulk of the Iranian population lives away from the Gulf in roughly the northwestern third of the country. Their second-largest city, Mashhad, is next to the border with Turkmenistan. They definitely have enough logistics capacity to move stuff around.
I was repeating/summarizing a handful of comments I read on /r/credibledefense, which is usually quite pro-USA (mixed on this conflict)
We could rightly question their epistemic status, although in the same vein I'd question yours as well. I suspect everyone is talking out of their asses.
That being said, I genuinely hope that you are right. I have no sympathy for IRGC members being turned into pink mist, but I strongly dislike rampant punishment of civilians.
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They have a northern coast along the caspian sea and several long land boarders. The sanctions will not be as solid as people expect. Russia is still flying Boeing jets four years into the war. Sanctions don't work in a globalized world along long boarders.
I was repeating/summarizing a handful of comments I read on /r/credibledefense, which is usually quite pro-USA (mixed on this conflict)
We could rightly question their epistemic status, although in the same vein I'd question yours as well. I suspect everyone is talking out of their asses.
That being said, I genuinely hope that you are right. I have no sympathy for IRGC members being turned into pink mist, but I strongly dislike rampant punishment of civilians.
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It appears that food and other humanitarian cargoes will be inspected and then permitted to pass.
I have my doubts they can accomplish this while also stopping Chinese drone parts or whatever getting in.
But I hope this works! At this point whatever ends the war fastest while minimizing civilian harm (remember when we were freeing them from their fucked up government?) receives my full support
I don't think stopping Chinese drone parts from getting in (via sea) will be very hard, I don't think Chinese ships are likely to try running the blockade, although I could be wrong. China can provide stuff like MANPADS via aircraft easily enough if they really want to.
I suppose they could declare a destination in e.g. Bahrain and then attempt to swerve at the last minute, but then presumably they would be stuck in Iran indefinitely (I assume the US would interdict them if they successfully pulled this stunt and then tried to leave, although I might be wrong).
Keep in mind that sea control is an ideal task for aircraft and thus it's not very hard for the US to keep an eye on ~all ships transiting the strait, and they can do it without deploying, say, destroyers in the Persian Gulf. And I don't think it would be very difficult for ships with humanitarian aid to stop in Dubai or wherever for inspection and then finish the rest of the journey.
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Although blocking oil exports while continuing to freeze Iran's foreign assets will mean that food and essential humanitarian imports will cease reasonably quickly because Iranians can't pay for them.
This happened to Iraq between the two Gulf Wars - food and medicine imports were excluded from sanctions, but the exports to pay for them were not. There was an oil-for-food programme at one point, but it never worked because Saddam didn't care about disfavoured ethnic groups starving and accordingly didn't actually want food imports, he wanted to embarrass the countries imposing sanctions.
I agree that this might be a problem - and sincerely hope and pray that it is not.
However from a humanitarian perspective it seems to me the blockade is almost infinitely preferable to a concentrated power generation destruction campaign. When a blockade is lifted, it takes days or weeks for trade to resume; when power generation capacity is wholesale destroyed, it takes months or years to rebuild, and the economic damage from a blockade would be overshadowed by the economic damage from destroying Iran's power generation capacity.
(The US does have specialized munitions to temporarily degrade power supply but given that their effects are, I believe, relatively easily reversible I am not sure we would use them for "Bridge and Power Day.")
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This is the biggest asymmetry you can have vs the west. As long as your local faction has all the guns and you don't give a shit about the civilians, you can ensure your boys with guns are always fed, and any civilians who die along the way are a bonus because you/people in the west can point to them and scream "genocide"
Is it underhanded and fucked up? Yes. Is it an effective tool on the strategic layer? Unfortunately, also yes.
Sadly it works because local opposition parties in the west are incentivized to leverage the accusations for local gain rather than take the necessary stance to discourage the practice.
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Words have meanings, and I'm not a fan of constantly excusing the use in official communications of words that mean something completely different.
I agree with this take (it's poor form from someone not winning as much as they planned), but I assumed it was (intended as) a mirror to the longstanding motte-and-bailey of what the "America" in "death to America" means. Sometimes Tehran's supporters claim it only means the current government. On the other, they say the same thing about Israel and seem to have no qualms launching cluster munitions at civilian population centers there. Or supporting proxies happy enough to target Americans.
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The word “civilization” is never used to refer to just the political faction currently in power. If you google “Chinese civilization”, you will not find anyone using this term as a stand-in for Xi’s current regime. So this would be a brand new use of the term. The content of the tweet also goes against your interpretation as Trump claims there already has been total regime change:
So he can’t just be referring to the regime, as there has been “complete and total regime change”.
Thanks for digging up the actual tweet, I think it speaks for itself. Also, if he meant the Ayatollah regime with civilization, he would not express regret but glee at their removal.
@Poug: I am not claiming that he threatened to murder every last ethnic Iranian. (Doing that with Iran would surpass all historical genocides in scale, I think.) However, the crime of genocide does not require that you kill everyone.
The act of genocide is the intentional destruction of an ethnic group as a distinct culture -- which is damn close in concept space to 'destruction of a civilization'. Outright murder is a typical strategy, but not the only one. Mass sterilization or the forcible transfer of children to other ethnic groups are likewise ways to destroy a group.
However, context matters, and the context does not do Trump any favors here. The 'softer' variants like cultural genocide generally do not work overnight. Nobody could mistake Trump's threat as "we will occupy Iran, outlaw Shia Islam and the speaking of Farsi, force everyone to speak English and eat at McDonald's to destroy any distinction of the Iranian people and turn them into generic Americans" -- not that that would have been acceptable.
The only way Trump could possibly destroy the Iranian civilization overnight would have been to nuke their cities, killing most of their urban population and industrial base, so that the survivors would find themselves in a mixture of Fallout and rural Afghanistan, neither of which qualify as civilization. This would still dwarf the Shoa and the Holodomor in total deaths, even if the Nazis were more meticulous about murdering every last one of their victims.
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