“We are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously,” he said in prepared remarks that were amplified by the state department’s social media accounts.
There is little debate among legal experts that such an attack on the life-supporting infrastructure for 93 million Iranians would constitute a war crime.
That definition of war crimes seems to have expanded out a little too far, no?
It’s the “International Law” equivalent od “Racist!”…
As far as these cunts are concerned, the US & Israel winning is a war crime.
I think it’s just their existence that’s the war crime!!!
You might want to clarify your statement a little there, Bb.
To me, it seems that the left deem that anything done by the whites or the Jews is criminal.
Thus the mere existence of Israel and the US is a crime. No doubt if I asked them, they’d say it’s the same with Oz.
There *are* certain left-wing thinkers who maintain that the creation of the state of Israel and/or the permission for Jewish refugees to settle there was a crime. A crime under what laws is unclear.
Yes, I got that you were talking about the left, Boganboy; but if you were on a trip to the US and the gentlemen with the blue gloves “checked your socials” and found your simple statement (as written and exclaimed) saying you think just the existence of the US is a war crime, you might be the one getting explored.
Hopefully there is plenty of context now.
Thus is the important word in what Bb wrote. It establishes that what follows is attributable, not to Bb, but “certain left-wing thinkers” who are the ones to be explored by the blue-gloved employees.
That would be selectively edited out from any quotation though, as we know.
That did not appear in the original comment from which I was trying to rescue him. He simply wrote, referring to Israel and the US:
“I think it’s just their existence that’s the war crime!!!”
The “thus” appeared in his clarification comment, which I suggested he might want to make.
The question is, at what point is something civilian or military. If a woman is giving an SS officer blowjobs and keeping him happy, is it OK to kill her, as she is improving morale? What about the bar that the SS men go to drink in? Is the bloke that sells barbed wire in town a legitimate target, as it’s used at Auschwitz?
When it was dukes with professional armies fighting each other, there was a clear distinction between military and civilians. You worked on the duke’s land, and if he was killed by another duke, you worked for him now. Like a corporate takeover, where the employees carry on. There wasn’t the sense of belonging to a nation in the same way. Once you get that, that this is Germany vs France rather than Henry vs William, there is no line.
I said as this kicked off, that a lot of people in industrialised west don’t understand the tribal nature of the Middle East, that yeah, Iran tortures and kills people, but they’re people that the Shia population would actually quite like to be tortured and killed, as they’re a threat to their way of life. Yeah, you can find some people who want the Shah back, and you might get the odd protest, but 1% of the population on the streets doesn’t mean there’s 60% of the population agreeing with them. it might mean it’s more like 2-3%.If the Iranians wanted the Ayatollahs gone, they’d have done it. They did it to the Shah.
So if these people back the Ayatollahs, who are committing acts of proxy war throughout the middle east, and will be the beneficiaries of any Iranian influence, are they not also war criminals?
“They did it to the Shah.”
With lots of help from outside of course.
The Dam busters would have been in trouble, then.
And not just for what they named their pets!
And RAF zobbits were still naming their black labradors in honour of Guy Gibson well into the 70s. I once had to deliver one such canine from Detmold to Rheindahlen in 1976 as a favour for a two-ringer.
So the Labs were called Guys, or Gibsons, or …?
A word starting with “N” and rhyming with trigger.
OT, I was at Detmold 1974-77
I only visited a few times, serving the anemometer on top of the ATC building.
I notice they’ve arrested Ben Roberts-Smith again here in Oz.
Pauline Hanson has said she definitely supports him. So I’ll have to make sure she gets my vote in the next election!!
No, it was Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Convention that gave “Works and installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations” protected status (which can be foregone). So 617 Squadron weren’t breaking any particular law by hitting the Ruhr dams…
Ah, that’s interesting, so you can bomb the hell out of electrical generators and their prime movers, as long as it’s not a nuclear reactor. A precision raid on the generator at a nuclear power station wouldn’t count, as long as the reactor infrastructure or its safety systems weren’t damaged.
If the situation arises again, we’ll wipe our arse with Protocol I and bomb the bastards. Do you want to be sitting there smugly saying that it was all done properly as your family are raped, killed and enslaved?
The Geneva Convention is for sad nerds.
As one of the sad nerds who looks at some of this stuff (part-time…) “necessity” is one of the key principles of the Law of Armed Combat.
Just because the collateral limit was set at “zero” for Iraq and Afghanistan, doesn’t mean that’s where it would be if we were fighting a more existential conflict – a point I’ve had to gently educate folk about.
Exactly so – if you’re targeting a nuclear power station or a hydroelectric power plant, you need to avoid unleashing “destructive forces” but taking out generation and/or distribution’s in scope.
Remember we shut down a lot of Iraq’s electrical grid in 1991, by hitting the substations with TLAM-Ds modified to dispense carbon-fibre spools instead of BLU-87 submunitions – shorted everything out and took a couple of months to clean up and reset.
Hitting power stations is entirely legitimate if there’s military advantage to be gained by that, but “what happens postwar?” is an issue: do you want to be able to get the lights back on in a few months, or do you want the power to be out until someone builds new stations from scratch?
I suppose that’d depend on who you thought’d rule the place postwar.
On that basis the Nazis and Japs didn’t comity war crimes, because “War Crimes” was an invention after the war so that Nazis and Japs could be prosecuted.
Not quite. For instance, Kapitan-Leutnant Eck, commanding U-852, was tried and convicted of war crimes where after torpedoing the freighter Peleus, he surfaced and spent some time machine-gunning survivors in the water (he missed a couple, who were able to testify at his trial).
They (617 Squadron & the rest of Op Chastise) are one of the reasons the Law of Armed Conflict was broadened in 1949.
Sir Arthur Harris pleads guilty in absentia and asks for 387,000 other offences to be taken into consideration.
To be fair there is little actual debate among actual legal experts. There is also however little actual debate by those asserting the opposite on twitter who confidently claim to be experts.
Here’s a good debate from a scholar:
look up @spencerguard on X for the rest
Can anyone name a war that didn’t include “war crimes”?
Anything Iran or its proxies do appear to be “not war crimes” by definition.
The Cod Wars, in the early 70s.
07 October 2023 in South Israel – part of the ongoing war against the Jews.
But these weren’t war crimes, they were merely atrocities of the most inhuman extreme – so doesn’t count.
“War crimes” are perhaps like “hate crimes”; the qualifying word sucks much of the meaning out of the substantive one.
Jackie Fisher: “The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility”.
I assume that Britain does define some actions as crime: raping women, murdering disarmed prisoners, torturing people, … I don’t see what is gained by sticking the qualifier “war” onto the noun “crime”.
There’s a difference between prosecuting war to its fullest, and being sadistic and cruel.
Can you reasonably justify it as a step to achieving victory, is it a good use of resources to do it? Then do it. Blowing up the factory that makes soldiers uniforms is fine, even if little old grandmas work there. Ideally, you blow it up at night, when most of the grandmas have gone home. You want to stop production, not kill grandmas.
Bomber Command, after the eye-opener of the Butt Report, based a lot of its equipment and tactics on what the Luftwaffe had achieved against Hull (where its location on the Humber made it easier to find and hit at night, and repeated raids had serious effect)
Hence the mixed payload of large blast bombs to strip roofs off buildings and blow out windows, lots of small incendiaries to start fires, and delay-fuzed MC bombs to crater roads and cut utilities – with refinements like using thermite, rather than magnesium and oil, in the 4lb incendiary bomb so it would have more effect on vehicles and machinery.
The aim was to damage the factories, but also to disrupt the area around them so the workforce were homeless, the water and power was cut off, the roads were cratered or blocked by rubble… civilian casualties were not the main goal but certainly weren’t being avoided.
It worked much better than many post-war revisionists liked to admit…
I’ve thought betimes that in 1945 there was a thought process that “the Soviet Union did no strategic bombing. If strategic bombing was effective, then the USSR should have been pounding German factories alongside the UK and US. But they weren’t. And since Comrade Stalin is infallible and cannot possibly have made a mistake, strategic bombing must therefore have been pointless and useless.”
There are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war. Well, my answer to that is that it has never been tried yet, and we shall see.
When the High Wycombe base commander was sufficiently relaxed about security issues, it was possible to tour the office from which ‘Bomber’ Harris made this speech, with the Bakelite phones still on the desk.
the Soviet Union did no strategic bombing
The Soviets had no heavy bombers, though I suppose they could have built some if they saw the need.
Trump, Mossad and Hegseth miscalculated. Badly. They believed that after the decapitation strike on February 28, Iranians would rise up against the Iranian regime, and the situation would resolve itself with limited outside intervention.
The Iranians have not risen up against the regime. They are very naughty. They must be punished.
If the US goes after water infrastructure, that would be an obvious war crime. People need water to live. Electricity is a greyish area. Without it, Iranian civilians will still die, but not in the same numbers. True, it will reduce Iran’s battle capability very substantially. But after the hoped-for surrender, electricity generation will have to be rebuilt, very rapidly and at great expense to the victors. It’s a dumbass kind of strategy. The clean, surgical war is turning into a hopeless morass.
Along with truth, the ability to think clearly is one of the first casualties.
It’s this problem people have, like if you destroy Sauron, or Emperor Palpatine, it all becomes kumbayah. But the truth is, these people always have supporters. If you don’t have supporters, you won’t last long. If you killed Palpatine, it wouldn’t be all yub nub around a campfire. The admirals that were left would take over the fleet. Do you think Admiral Piett wants to be unemployed? He’s probably got a mortgage, wife and some little Pietts to take care of. Maybe a mistress somewhere.
Below every middle east dictator is a load of blokes defending him who get nice jobs running the military, and all his supporters get a share of the oil money. If he gets booted out by another dictator, all those supporters are going to stop getting a share of the money. It’ll go to the New Dictator’s supporters and pals.
So if you’re a Shia muslim in Iran, you like the Ayatollahs because the alternative is a load of Sunnis come in, and you’re fucked.
A lot of German people liked Adolf Hitler in 1933. A larger percentage than Keir Starmer in 2024. Lots of Germans thought that being mean to the Jews, and taking some bits of Eastern Europe were a great idea. If you’d murdered the senior Nazis, destroyed the party, they’d have voted for someone else promising prosperity by being Judenfrei and taking some Lebensraum.
It’s possible they thought there was a reasonable chance of that happening, but I don’t have your amazing mind reading skillz so wouldn’t like to say for sure.
Is a hopeless morass wider than a quagmire? Gotta get these military terms nailed down.
Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit and all that.
You don’t have to have mind-reading skills if you have eyes to see and ears to hear.
You might be right about the Yanks, but I’d be surprised if the Israelis cared. I would guess taking out Iran’s nuclear capability and giving them a good slapping was enough for them.
You know fuck all about it.
You don’t know what they calculated would happen, and you don’t actually know what has happened, and is happening, nor obviously what will happen.
Most of all, you don’t know why they did it: if they did it just for shits and giggles that’s one thing, but if they had intelligence to suggest that Iran really was close to developing a nuclear warhead, then they calculated perfectly, there not being much else they could do.
Of course, the Iranians say they didn’t, but the lying cunts did have an awful lot of enriched uranium, and they also had missiles with a 4000km reach, double the maximum 2000km they claimed they were limiting themselves to.
Tsk, language.
It appears that I know infinitely more than you do about it, through the simple process of listening to what people actually said they were thinking.
It’s far too early to say (war’s only been on since Feb 28th). We’re still within the original publicly projected Trump timeline of “about 4-6 weeks” even if you take that with a pinch of market-soothing salt.
Iranians could rise up tonight, or tomorrow, or never. We don’t know. But there is no scenario where the post bellum situation is more favourable to Iran than the ante. “Winning” for the Iranian regime means “surviving” as a broken, impoverished parish state that united all its important Arab neighbours against it and saw its regional terrorist networks and pretenses of being leader of the Muslim world vapourised with the Ayatollah. Their supposed big boy allies, Russia and China, were unable to stop them from taking a terrible kicking in front of everyone. The US and Israel have already vigorously executed on the tangible material victories of decapitating the regime and grinding its warmaking capabilities (considerable, on Feb 27th) into fine dust.
So it’s surprising to me that the Western MSM is able to keep up the narrative that the US and Israel are in some danger of losing here. The biggest losers are likely to be the EU aligned governments who have picked precisely the wrong time to defy Uncle Sam, and the collateral damage Asian nations suffering from immediate shortages.
“Clean, surgical war”, well, who promised you that? Wars are always a sprawling knife fight on a dirty pavement but to be fair, the current generation of US and Israeli weapons are stunningly precise. I’ve seen footage of individual Basji guards getting smoked on IR. Poor buggers. The US now operating (large, unstealthy) F-15’s and A-10’s over Iran is a sign of their confidence and power, not t’other way. After some 15,000 airstrikes, Iran managing to score a lucky MANPAD hit on an F-15 and fail to prevent the US building an airstrip on their territory (!) to successfully rescue the downed airmen is not the stuff of winning on Iran’s part.
This is as clean as war gets.
The EU-aligned chump governments, including ours, fell for Trump’s rope a dope. It shouldn’t matter if the current, soon to be term limited out of office, US president is rude. Life is not Love Actually and Sir Keir is no Hugh Grant. Supporting the Americans in keeping the sea lanes free and open was a no-brainer. After Operation Prosperity Guardian against Iran’s client, the Houthis it makes no sense to claim freedom of navigation between Europe and Asia is none of our business. Even a token contribution from the diminished RN and other NATO allies would have been appreciated. Ukraine read the room and supported the US, because they understand how transactional relationships work. Peter Mandelson, now unpersonned I think (?) understood relationships with power, and how to make them work in our favour. But he was a brilliant ambassador to the United States, and our relationship with them has deteriorated since poor Peter got Epsteined
As for a hopeless morass, seems unlikely. Air war with limited ground action involving elite troops overwatched by the mightiest technological fighting systems on the planet. The EU bloc of losers hoped, by withholding their trivial military capabilities, they could help inflict a Blackhawk Down on the US and hopefully get rid of Trump. But we’re not in that movie, we’re in Team America: World Police, and the goodies are in full blown AMERICA FUCK YEAH mode.
If I was Trump (Mossad and Hegseth), and I wanted to bomb or attack something big in Iran, I might go on and on about bombing something else and sound a bit convincingly mentalist for emphasis. So I won’t be surprised to see something else unadvertised happen.
It seems to me that Bandar Abbas could be taken with the expeditionary forces available (gone quiet on those). There are airfields each side and multiple port facilities. Once sufficiently secure, Gulf Arab militaries are bussed in to take over and fan out along the coasts (maybe as far as Bandar-e-Mogham one way and the Pakistan border t’other). Inland as far as necessary to secure the Strait. A bit like the historical Omani occupation/lease.
Or an extraction operation for the Nuke material.
Or, having gained a lot of new intelligence about missile activities and locations, a new massive campaign against those.
Meanwhile, loads of civilians are out of the way human-shielding the bridges and power plants.
Obviously, dunno. But it would be classic Trump to use all the TWAT facilities onhand to misdirect the enemy.
Or another “couple of weeks”.
Another couple of weeks it is.
The ceasefire seems to be imaginary, with Iran launching major attacks on Israel and Gulf states. Israel responding. Media ignoring.
“Supporting the Americans in keeping the sea lanes free and open was a no-brainer.”
But the Strait of Hormuz was free and open until the Americans attacked.
Partially, i.e. not. Iran has been attacking and seizing shipping nearly every year. They were close to having nukes for their long range missiles.
If we get an open Strait and an Iran with no nukes and fewer missiles, it’ll have been worth it. If things return to how they were, not so much.
“Partially, i.e. not” Then explain the rise in oil prices. Christ, people say the stupidest things.
“They were close to having nukes for their long range missiles.” Yeah, and Iraq had WMDs.
Oil prices rose because there was a fucking big war in the region with Iran steadily destroying the Gulf states’ capacity to extract, refine, store and export fossil fuels. Plus Iran had fully blocked the Strait apart from their friends and clients (such as China and France).
Why you say stupid things is between you and Jesus.
“There is little debate among legal experts that such an attack on the life-supporting infrastructure for 93 million Iranians would constitute a war crime.”
Aha. So that’s the entire political establish of Europe who have attacked the life-supporting infrastructure – blown up coal fired power stations, closed down nuclear power stations, forced farmers to abandon food producing land, forcing the reduction of cattle herds, used coercion to medicate the population with an experimental vaccine for which there was no safety data and which killed and injured million, increased energy costs so many cannot afford to heat their homes.
When do the trials and subsequent hangings start?
Please let me know. Alongside the paint-stirring sticks I’ve collected in my garage, I have a good rope that I didn’t know what to do with.
Do the executions extend to Oz????
This is all covered in the Department of
Defense’sWar’s Law of War Manual.Revised Section 5.6.8.5 (revised under Obama and still in effect) says:
Generally and usually.
Yes, but the idea is to liberate Iranians from the theocracy, not to exterminate them. The operation was a success, but the patient died.
The idea was to remove Iran as a nuclear armed threat to Israel and the west.
You are listening to and believing the media, which is never wise.
I wonder why the Guardian isn’t allowing comments on this story? Might it be that some readers might alert others to the existence of Department Of Defense legal guidelines (last updated under Obama) which say it’s perfectly okay to target electrical infrastructure?
Clinton did it in Kosovo, Bush did it in Iraq, Obama did it in Libya.