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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One of America's war aims is to leave the Iranian people in a better position after the war than before. Likewise modern Western armies have an incredibly strong taboo against civilian damage, to the point where we made a missile that acts as a fucking blender so it can kill literally one guy.
This level of restraint is basically a new invention, and most non-American armies don't bother (see: Russia). It's the equivalent of besieging a city and allowing food in "so that the civilians don't starve."
It's incredibly stupid but has been at times sustainable because the U.S. is that powerful and because most of our adversaries understand that the primary move is to use propaganda pieces to perpetuate fighting warfare in this way.
Loosen restrictions and things open up immediately.
The Iranians can't do much if 16 million people in the Tehran metro area are starving to death. Now that's pretty abhorrent but this is how wars were fought throughout history and America has the ability to make it so.
Without drifting that far into awful behavior you can still force evacuation of cities, destroy critical infrastructure and all kinds of other stuff we are very very voluntarily not doing and a good chunk of which is totally valid even with this restrictive mode of warfare.
I ask for the third time: How do you do this nasty stuff to win the war without millions of US ally citizens suffering the same fate? How do you stop the countless hidden/hardened Iranian missile/drone sites from being used against Gulf desalination plants, power plants, etc etc?
How is that relevant?
First you have to suppose that the disruptive threats are still possible in an actual war. Iran will not be able to manage the resupply required to keep things going very long if the country falls apart. An army requires logistics which is why attacking logistics is the first job of any military. We aren't really doing that now. If the Iranians have to choose between feeding and watering their population or warfare then the war won't last long, you'd get some insurgency afterwards but the organized military response would be over very quickly.
That also presupposes we care. Most of the negative impact seems to be on the gulf states, who are enemies if you'd ask the average American for most of the last 50 years. Suddenly lots of people think Saudi Arabia is an ally and while that's true to some extent it's certainly a wild swing for both the left and the right.
Outside of the gulf states it's the Europeans who are refusing to help with the problem, that's pretty easy not to care about, and again you can shut down the gulf disruption pretty fast by just tanking the country.
Of course nobody wants to leave millions of Iranian starving and homeless, and nobody wants to turn the entire country into a misery factory or something that requires an occupation for another couple of decades.
That doesn't mean we can't.
It's relevant because American power projection and global export economy relies on other countries preferring to have you as patron vs. the alternatives. If the choice for Iran is genocide and America running their country vs. letting China come in and run some chunks of their country, which do you think they're going to pick? And what are you going to do when making Iran play nice involves bombing Chinese citizens and tripwire forces?
Likewise the Gulf States. They don't like each other much and America has been pretty good at keeping things stable and paying for oil - far from perfect, but good. When it's a case of "any American President may genocide us because half the electorate considers us enemies", guess how fast they will seek a new Patron? And guess how fast they will seek nuclear weapons?
America has up until now made the calculation that one uppity little regional power that is fairly isolated is much better than big groups of regional powers who agree on little else except the need to have tripwire alliances and patrons to guard against the US, and are happy to pay for it with resources that America's global adversaries want.
TLDR: America's foreign policy has always been founded on putting together lots of NATOs that allow it to project influence, and to avoid becoming the target of NATOs owned by other superpowers. That means being careful how you escalate.
All that is an argument for "should" I jumped into this to make a point about "can."
I've seen a lot of people misunderstanding the situation about "can" (in part because making this unclear is in all likelihood an organized part of our adversaries propaganda efforts).
The Iranians are smart and clever and have a good plan and are winning or losing the political war depending on who you talk to. They lost the war war so bad it's not even funny.
This isn't a bad trade for them if they get what they wanted/out unscathed, but it's still happening.
And it's important that people understand it's happening because if you don't you'll miss how the ethics of conflict are being defined and the role of propaganda in shaping policy and mood.
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