[enjeyw]

What I find tricky to reason about here is that whether destroying infrastructure comes down to "whether the military advantage outweighs the impact to civilians", and as far as I can tell, there's no robust way to assess this.

Indeed, this seems to be what supporters of Trump are leaning on, as you can make the argument that _any_ bridge, or _any_ powerplant could hypothetically be used by the military, and that this conflict is sufficiently important for the livelihood of people in America/"The West" that doing anything that even slightly helps tips the odds is justifiable.

[iamnothere]

Hell, farms and water sources could be used by the military to sustain soldiers. Women of childbearing age could produce future soldiers. This line of reasoning has no floor.

There’s a reason that past generations tried to draw a line in the sand and say “we will not cross this line.” It was imperfect and often violated, but at least it served to frame actions as just or unjust. Blatant violations could catalyze domestic opposition to unjust war, as in Vietnam and Iraq. Now that the standard has been eroded into nothing, I don’t know if we can stop further escalation.

[graemep]

Interesting requirement. Where does that leave a lot of other wars? Russia has been attacking Ukrainian infrastructure for a while. Ukraine has been attacking Russian oil production and ports, especially recently. I seem to recall a lot of infrastructure destroyed in the US invasion of Iraq. There have been a lot of wars since WW2 and I find it had to believe that those than involved bombing were all restricted to military targets.

A lot of war is about economics and logistics.

Edit: to add, what about Iran's threats to destroy water supplies?

[spwa4]

The problem is also that the world has made it very clear that it doesn't believe in warcrimes. Warcrimes are what's defined as illegal in the convention of Geneve.

The purpose, the idea behind warcrimes is that when warcrimes occur, the world would unite, in the security council, a mandate would be voted in, and the whole world would intervene, preventing warcrimes from occuring, or at least from repeating.

Well, when it comes to Iranian and US warcrimes the UNSC, specifically France, Russia and China have declared there will be no consequence to any warcrime by either side. In France's case it's not that they don't think warcrimes are terrible crimes, it's that they don't want to help anyone.

In Russia and China's case it's that they think this war destabilizes the west and that matters more to them than terrible crimes. Oh and the whole communist stick of "it's not warcrimes, it's internal matters", you know, when they do it to their population. So they have declared they will actively fight to prevent anything being done about warcrimes.

Under those circumstances, of course, warcrimes effectively don't exist, and that's that. Or to put it another way: the world is perfectly happy for you to be discussing the finer points of international law and why this and that is or isn't "a crime".

But the world is totally unwilling to do anything about warcrimes. I mean, let's be realistic. The world is unwilling to do anything about Iranian warcrimes, and perfectly certain the US won't commit any (the US will make mistakes, of course, but not actually commit real warcrimes). Whatever the outcome of your discussion on what is and isn't a heinous crime ... there will be no consequences.

[scotty79]

Hypothetically civilians can be used by the military and provide some military advantage as future soldiers or weapons manufacturers or even army rations providers. So let's bomb them too, right?

[matusp]

One thing to consider is that Trump is publicly stating that the US are destroying the infrastructure as a punishment for non-compliance. That basically makes it clear that the motive is not based on military considerations.

[scotty79]

It's basically what russia is trying to do for years in Ukraine. Beating populatuon into submission. Which is even dumber in case of Iran since it's not a democratic country where population has much of a say.

[enjeyw]

Yeah I did wonder myself if that tweet was an admission of guilt.

If I were a lawyer responsible for defending Trump in the Hague, I'd argue that the tweet was actually an abbreviated way of saying "If Iran does not comply, we will destroy all military assets, including but not limited to their ICBMs, Bridges, and Power Stations, such that we have total military dominance."

Now very obviously (to me at least) this was not the intent of the message, but I don't know whether you could prove that in a hypothetical war crimes trial.

[xtiansimon]

> “…tips the odds is justifiable.”

The slippery slope.

[globalnode]

exactly, they can argue forever that their point of view was justified.