As much as I loathe the US and their imperialism, attacks like these make sense in a purely tactical fashion. If you know your enemy is getting their fuel from that port, the port goes. I live close to the port of Antwerp. If any conflict between EU-US-Russia ever goes hot, it’ll be one of the first places to be nuked.
According to just war theory civilians in the military supply chain are valid military targets.
Even Ukrainian civilians?
The author does not appear to understand the definition of the term “military target”. According to the Geneva Convention:
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Civilian objects shall not be the object of attack or of reprisals. Civilian objects are all objects which are not military objectives as defined in paragraph 2.
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Attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives. In so far as objects are concerned, military objectives are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.
CENTCOM is in fact explicitly claiming that the attack is against a military target.
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Not sure how the rest of you feel, but I consider the “double tap” style of attack to be a war crime. Whoever pressed the button the second time needs to be court martialed, every person who passed the order along needs to be court martialed harder, and the person who gave the order in the first place, along with whoever came up with the idea, needs to be hung by the neck until dead.
this seems like iranian propaganda, how did they know those were civilians?
If civilian trade vessels are valid military targets, oil and gas depots are too.
The target itself is not really defendible as a non military target, but the double strike should be considered war crime behavior because it specifically targets medical and recovery personnel by intentionally waiting between each strike.
Of course, not of that actually matters because the US doesn’t care if they commit war crimes since they’re very content with helping to run a genocide.
Yeah I love the 21st century of globalized conflict /s
But the Yemeni navy isn’t targeting civilian trade vessels, it is merely enforcing a blockade on Israeli vessels and vessels heading to Israel as a response to the genocide and blockade on Gaza. Yemen even stopped the blockade during the ceasefire and only resumed it after Israel broke the ceasefire and blocked aid into Gaza.
Which are still civilian vessels. They are attacking the trade supply line, which has been a very effective tactic, especially since it also affected the states that back Israel, including the US.
My point is these are both very common warfare tactics. Yes the US is an arse, but they haven’t done anything out of the ordinary aside from the double strike method, which even that originated from the first Gulf War when the US was figuring out how to destroy heavily reinforced bunkers deep in the ground.
The attack on medics and civilians who showed up afterwards is something that should be the key issue here, not the fact that the targets are oil depots.
The tactics aren’t comparable neither in intention and purpose, nor harm. No one died from the Yemeni blockade, they did hold crews captives who were later released. Targeting the fuel supply for millions of Yemenis is an attack on civilian infrastructure let alone the innocent people purposefully killed.
I’d say the US’ attitude towards the ICC is even more direct proof of that.
