It's sad how quickly this comment thread went from someone talking about their experience at SERE to... this.

Spokane is Eastern Washington, the college in Cheney is literally called Eastern, its just not a desert.

Why do it, then? I'm not trying to be inflammatory or ask loaded questions here, I'm genuinely curious (as someone who, as you note, has almost no connection to the Americans who fight in wars; I have friends who are vets, but have been out of the military for years), and I just don't understand.

I absolutely believe you when you say that none of y'all want to commit war crimes, fire on civilian infra, bomb schools, etc. And yet that's happening right now, in Iran, and the soldiers continue to follow orders and carry out this travesty. I get that refusing an order is not something any soldier will do lightly, but when a school gets hit in Iran, do the soldiers conducting that strike not know what they're attacking beforehand?

Even if they don't, do they never find out? Do they not see that some large N% of targets that have been hit have ended up being civilian targets? When they're ordered to fire on a new target, do they not question whether or not it's a civilian target, given past history?

I ask these questions from near-complete ignorance; I really do not know how this works, or what kind of information any officer or soldier has when they're about to follow the orders they've been given. But it just seems insane to me that people continue to follow these orders, assuming they know how many civilians have been killed through previous actions. I just cannot imagine being in their position, and actually trusting that my superior officers were ordering me to do things that will later turn out to be morally defensible. (If any of this war is morally defensible, which I don't think it is.)

It's My Lai, not Mai Lai FYI.

Thank you for expressing your humanistic thoughts, but do consider the history of the institution and the government.

What's different this time is that they haven't bothered with the PR.

[dead]

"No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically-correct wars. We fight to win,” Hegseth said."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

> they have been getting letters from the DOJ office of legal counsel that say it's legal. This effectively immunizes them (the DOJ can't turn around and charge you with a crime, if they advised you beforehand it was not a crime).

This is not true.

OLC opinions are just that: opinions. They are non-binding and non-promissory. They are an important factor in any assessments as a norm, but definitely not dispositive and not legally binding.

The only real barrier is the pardon power, but I'm personally fine at this point with totally breaking the seal, trying and jailing every criminal in the administration(++), and consider the pardon power gone for good. Small price to pay.

> This effectively immunizes them (the DOJ can't turn around and charge you with a crime, if they advised you beforehand it was not a crime).

Where is the check or balance on this? The executive branch can apparently just launder itself wholesale of any crimes committed by its members.

Alas, the USA isn't signed up to the ICC.

How am I reading this? Wasn't the regime mowing down tens of thousands of its own citizens prior to this war? I mean, not a "war" crime, I guess, but it seems ludicrous to give them any "moral victories".

Iran has for nearly fifty years pursued unilateral hostilities against the US and Israel, including funding numerous terrorist groups and militias to wage war on them. It can’t negotiate its way out of this quagmire because the IRGC’s core ideology and mission is hatred (and hostage-taking).

In addition to waging continuous offensive militia operations, it’s been cultivating a conventional and nuclear offensive option which it most definitely would use if it had it, because again, the IRGC’s reason for existence is to “resist” Israel and the US, by which they mean obliterate those nations. What Trump recently has been saying about Iran is exactly what Iran has been saying for decades about the US and Israel.

One of those militias went all Leroy Jenkins in 2023 and prematurely initiated the current hot war, which Iran is losing. In frustration, Iran has embarked on a terror campaign of bombing neutral neighbors to punish them for … friendly diplomacy with the US I guess, and bombing civilians in Israel. And annexing an international waterway.

What Trump and folks on this board don’t seem to realize is that war with Iran is more like fighting a bunch of lawyers. You hurt them kinetically and they make you feel like you hurt yourself, get all confused. They slaughter 35k of their own people and shut off the Internet; the US mixes up the boundaries of an IRGC naval base in a much more constrained horror and the UN starts strutting around.

Narratives do matter for winning wars and between Trump derangement syndrome and the IRGC’s natural cleverness at permanent victimhood, it’s the narrative that’s at risk in a war between great nations that, unfortunately, sadly has been perfectly inevitable for decades.

They already targetted civilian infrastructure, so they already commited war crime. They also threatened to attack universities wh8ch is war crime on itself (after attack on their universities).

So how is bombing schools, dessalination plants and hospitals helping Iranians exactly? If that's what the US is really looking for?

Right. Go watch CNN. “Back to the Stone Age” will surely save so many of the lives spared.

Come on US media tell us the truth, you want to save people by killing them or to just kill them?

None of those numbers are verifiable. The opposition has every incentive to lie. And let's not forget there was a lot of armed agitators amongst those protesters. Mike Huckabee let the cat out of the bag with a tweet boasting of how a mossad agent walks beside every protester.