Please keep related news in this thread rather than making separate posts. Remember to include sources and avoid spreading rumours.
Please keep related news in this thread rather than making separate posts. Remember to include sources and avoid spreading rumours.
It’s a form of limited non-nuclear MAD. If you show your opponent that you will respond to their actions in kind, it forces them to consider equal or great retaliation when calculating the benefit of any given action. If they attack air defense, their air defense will be attacked. If they attack civilians, their civilians will be attacked. We’d all be better off if the agressor stopped attacking altogether, but in the absence of that, proportionate response seems a valid strategy, particularly with the West and its proxies.
This implies that Bibi and the rest of the Israeli government cares about that sort of thing, or worse yet would want Iran to start attack schools and hospitals (which would be another reason why they attack schools and hospitals in the first place). Maybe it’d expend resources in recovery and reconstruction, but how many resources compared to military, logistical, and infrastructural targets? If they did something similar to what Russia is doing in the Ukraine where they attack electrical generators then i could see it, but I think direct strikes would probably be wasteful with Iran’s resources at best if not actively detrimental at worst
Exactly. It would be at best militarily pointless or even counter-productive to the military effort by wasting munitions. And moreover it would play right into the hands of the Zionist-imperialist propaganda.
Look at all of the terror shelling and drone attacks against civilians that Ukraine constantly engages in. Has that helped them militarily in any way, or has it only hardened Russian resolve?
Why is it that Russia has been so insistent to not retaliate in kind against civilians - even though they could inflict much more damage than Ukraine can - and instead responded only with strikes on military targets and dual-use infrastructure?
Because that is how you win wars. You remain disciplined and stick to the plan, especially when it is clear that the plan is working and the enemy is desperately lashing out to try to provoke you into making mistakes.
And also, the importance of the “moral high ground” should not be underestimated. Not in a liberal idealist sense but in considering the real geopolitical implications it has when you can credibly portray yourself as engaging in legitimate and legal self-defense.
The West will try to portray you as the “bad guys” no matter what, but there is a big rest of the world outside of the West and they are not stupid, they can see who the hypocrites are. And finally it is also important for your own population and your soldiers to feel like they are on the side that is acting morally.