Hi All,
After sending out two pieces yesterday, the last thing I was expecting to do today was clog up your inboxes further. However, something happened on the evening of June 9 that needs to be understood and, hopefully, deplored by all Americans. The USA seems to have deliberately and with foresight, committed a war crime as an act of policy. If this is right, and all evidence seems to say it is, committing acts of terror is now an acceptable method of war in the judgement of the US government and, by extension, the American people.
I think it might be best to break down what happened here through a series of questions.
On the evening of June 9, the USA, with what seems to be intent, attacked two reservoirs and a water treatment facility in southern Iran. Almost immediately afterwards, water was cut off to about 20,000 Iranian civilians who live around the southern Iranian town of Sirik.
Why was this most likely a deliberate attack? Well, there seems to have been nothing nearby of military value and the destruction was precise. The New York Times has already run an investigation on it.
Here is how the story begins.
Strikes early Wednesday destroyed what appears to be a drinking-water facility on Iran’s southern coast, near the Strait of Hormuz, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Around the time of the strikes, the U.S. Central Command said in a post on X that it had conducted attacks near the strait “with precision munitions from U.S. Air Force and Navy fighter jets.”
Iranian state media reported that the U.S. had hit water storage buildings and a local official said that water was cut off to more than 20,000 people living in a town and villages nearby. Temperatures in the area have reached above 100 degrees Fahrenheit this week.
Earlier attacks that hit civilians might have been mistakes, such as the attack on the girls’ school which started the campaign, but it is hard to see this as a mistake. The target was too specialized, too localized and the effect seems calibrated (see the section on why it might have been committed below).
Without a doubt. Attacking other infrastructure was probably a war crime as well (think bridges or power plants) but there can at least be arguments made that these are dual use facilities. Militaries use bridges, military production uses generated electricity. If the US destroyed all the bridges in Iran or shut off all the power, as Trump has threatened numerous times, I would definitely consider it a war crime. However, lawyers could try and argue that because of military use, these are allowable targets.
However, a reservoir serving a civilian community is unarguably a crime. The military will get its water somehow, the civilians will suffer. And note, this is one of the hottest and driest places on the globe. Academic data for the Sirik region confirms that summer temperatures routinely peak between 45°C and 48.5°C during the warmest months. That is over 115 degrees Fahrenheit. That is comparable to Death Valley in California.
A human being cannot live long in such a climate without water—so either the locals will die of dehydration or, more likely, some will drink contaminated water and die from that.
Either way the US has attacked, seemingly deliberately, a facility vital to the maintenance of human life that has no discernible military utility. So yes, it is a war crime.
What makes this even more perverse is that this war crime was deliberately committed because Donald Trump is getting frustrated that the Iranian government is not doing what he wants them to do and that the Iranian military attacked a legitimate military target, a US Apache helicopter that was enforcing a blockade (an act of war remember) against Iran.
These reasons are not being hidden, indeed the White House basically laid them out to Axios in a detailed story. Here was how that story started:
The trigger for President Trump's strikes on Iran was the downing of a U.S. helicopter, but behind the scenes Trump had been growing more and more frustrated over nearly two weeks of waiting for an Iranian response to his latest offer that still has not arrived.
This is typical, Trump,/organized crime style behavior. He attacks a small civilian facility as a threat and warning to Iran that he might go on and commit even greater war crimes if they do not do what he wants. As if on cue, a few hours after these attacks, while speaking to Fox News reporters, Trump went ahead and said he might start mass attacks on Iran’s bridges and electricity power generation. He also tweeted out that if Iran did not do what he wants it to do, that it would have to “pay the price” of their defiance.
So it is a historic war crime committed because the President of the USA can think of nothing better to do.
It will almost certainly not get Iran to bend the knee. Trump can boast all he wants, as he did above, about the Iranian military being destroyed, but the reality is that he is still very worried about Iranian capacity. How do we know that? Well many of the US strikes against Iran were done on June 9 and then again last night with (fast depleting) stocks of Tomahawk missiles or by aircraft that can fire at safe distances. CNN is stating that preliminary reports from last night were that at least 49 Tomahawks were fired.
In other words, Trump is rapidly running down US stocks in these attacks—they are not sustainable.
So unless Trump actually goes for massive escalation, this is just more of what went on before, with a shorter window for action and more degradation of US strength. It is unlikely to force Iran to back down, more than likely it leads to a hardening of their position.
And, btw, it further leaves China in strategic control of the Western Pacific as it weakens the USA. Pure strategic brilliance.
As for the Iranian people, I am no expert. However the few sources I know of who do have information within Iran are in despair at this kind of war crime. What one wrote was that attacks like this are “pushing Iranians predisposed to the west towards the (IRGC) regime”.
So these are not just strategically stupid and immoral war crimes, they are probably counterproductive.
What Iranian will now say that I really want to side with the USA after they cut off water to 20,000 civilians?
So this very much looks like a deliberate war crime that was made as a threat to commit even more horrible war crimes. It will almost certainly not work, though it might lead to thousands of Iranian civilian deaths.
It is an attack that I fear the USA will regret for a long time. It is no different than an Al-Qaeda style attack, a deliberate targeting of civilians to create terror to get political results. If the USA gets attacked in return, it will only be served what seems to be official American policy on a cold plate.
This is no small matter. The lack of reporting or push back against this operation shows how much the country has been damaged by the present administration and how difficult it will be to recover. War crimes are now an open and deliberate tool of US policy.
Where this is going is pretty bleak.