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.
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?
> “…tips the odds is justifiable.”
The slippery slope.
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?
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.
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.
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.
exactly, they can argue forever that their point of view was justified.
[dead]