The Scariest Thing About This War? He’s Sitting in the Oval Office. |
The Scariest Thing About This War? He’s Sitting in the Oval Office.
The president’s plan for Iran’s civilian power plants might be a war crime. But it’s definitely an escalation. And with Donald Trump, nothing can be ruled out.
Iran, according to reports, has around 500 power plants. The vast majority run on natural gas, though a fairly impressive number are solar. Only one is nuclear. The country’s largest plant, called Damavand, is gas powered and sits about 30 miles southeast of Tehran. If Donald Trump decides to start bombing civilian power plants, as he threatened to do over the weekend if Iran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz tonight, it would seem likely that Damavand, which produces an output of around 2,900 megawatts (point of comparison: the largest gas-fired plant in the United States, the West County plant in Florida, has an output capacity of 3,750 MW), would be among the top targets.
Bombing it to the point of taking it offline would be a pretty large undertaking (go check it out on Google Maps—nothing is obscured, hidden, or pixilated). It would leave millions of Iranian people without power. It might also be a war crime.
Wait a minute, a real war crime? Well, as the United States Law of War Manual defines it, probably not. But under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Law of Armed Conflict therein, probably yes. Article 147 prohibits acts by a military—and the United States, of course, is a signatory to those conventions, as is Iran—that cause “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.”
International law experts debated the question robustly in the earlier stages of Russia’s war on Ukraine, when the Red Army was trying to knock out Ukraine’s electrical grid. So,........