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The Biden administration announced that they had conducted "necessary and proportionate" airstrikes against weapons and ammunition storage areas used by Iranian-backed militias with two F-16s. They are still assessing damage. The storage areas were unoccupied at the time they were struck. If they really destroyed something, we would be seeing the videos of bombs going down ventilation shafts. Maybe we destroyed something, but maybe we just hit some sand.
Iran conducted 19 attacks against two of our bases in Syria from 17-26 October. Twenty-one of our soldiers suffered traumatic brain injuries, and one contractor died.
I want disproportionate retaliation so that Iran will never do it again. I want the Ministry of Defense in Tehran burning. It saves the most lives on both sides if the US responds forcefully to evil. Biden is encouraging evil to metastasize.
Discussion (33)
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When does the principle of “proportional response” apply and when does it not, according to generally accepted international standards?
Obviously, it applies to one end of the spectrum: police actions to control a civil disturbance, such a demonstration by civilians that turns violent. (Even if someone throws a rock, you are expected not to mow down the crowd with machine guns.)
If we were in a declared war, isn’t there the conventional expectation that we would reasonably aim to destroy by force of arms the will and capacity of the enemy to continue resistance to our political will, without regard to any consideration of proportional response?
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[I welcome all replies, responsive or not, and will respond to all that are responsive to either of the two question statements: clarification requests or answers compliant with the CoC.]
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If they said "necessary" without specifying, "necessary to what end," that means they don't know what they're trying to do.
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The principle of proportionality in the law of armed conflict is often misunderstood. It says that the expected harm to non-combatants should not be disproportionate to the expected military gains from an operation. In other words, the proportionality ratio is not between harm we do to our enemies vs. harm they did to us. It's between expected harm to civilians vs. our expected military gain.
If they kill one of our soldiers, we would be justified in wiping out an entire division of theirs. But if there is a sniper in a building occupied by a thousand civilians, we would not be justified in wiping out the entire building.
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Actually, that's not quite right. It could also mean they are dissembling about what they're trying to do.
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True, but in prosecuting an open-ended lie, you focus on blowing the cover story, not on proving the hidden truth.
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