We're all being schooled for moral depravity

Once again, the United States is putting itself in the international war crimes business. If a distinguishing feature of GW Bush's "War on Terror" was institutionalized torture of unfortunate captive brown men, it seems that a central motif of Trump's imperial adventures is using and enlisting the people of the U.S. military in the murder of civilians. 

The ongoing sinking of small boats off Central America without any proof of their involvement any offense is one instance.

Now we get news of an apparently intentional airstrike on a civilian water treatment facility in southern Iran; at least 20,000 Iranians will lose access to clean water.

Strikes early Wednesday destroyed what appears to be a drinking-water facility on Iran’s southern coast, near the Strait of Hormuz, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Around the time of the strikes, the U.S. Central Command said in a post on X that it had conducted attacks near the strait “with precision munitions from U.S. Air Force and Navy fighter jets.” 

Iranian state media reported that the U.S. had hit water storage buildings and a local official said that water was cut off to more than 20,000 people living in a town and villages nearby. Temperatures in the area have reached above 100 degrees Fahrenheit this week.

Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews Phillips P. O'Brien responds to this report without equivocation. 

Is It A War Crime?

Without a doubt. Attacking other infrastructure was probably a war crime as well (think bridges or power plants) but there can at least be arguments made that these are dual use facilities. Militaries use bridges, military production uses generated electricity. If the US destroyed all the bridges in Iran or shut off all the power, as Trump has threatened numerous times, I would definitely consider it a war crime. However, lawyers could try and argue that because of military use, these are allowable targets.

However, a reservoir serving a civilian community is unarguably a crime. The military will get its water somehow, the civilians will suffer. 

And note, this is one of the hottest and driest places on the globe. Academic data for the Sirik region confirms that summer temperatures routinely peak between 45°C and 48.5°C during the warmest months. That is over 115 degrees Fahrenheit. That is comparable to Death Valley in California.

A human being cannot live long in such a climate without water—so either the locals will die of dehydration or, more likely, some will drink contaminated water and die from that.

Either way the US has attacked, seemingly deliberately, a facility vital to the maintenance of human life that has no discernible military utility. So yes, it is a war crime. 

We need to understand that when the military of the United States commits these atrocities against international laws and norms -- as well as against our own legal codes that are supposed to govern our soldiers, sailors and airmen -- something else is happening beyond the immediate rupture of standards.

The Trump/Hegseth regime is corrupting the military, intentionally enlisting serving personnel in crimes. Our rulers want our military to get used to doing these things.

But, like the Bush regime before him, Trump is also corrupting us all. Do we accept that doing wanton murder to prove a point (probably unsuccessfully) is just something this country does? Are we that kind of country? If so, who are we?

We probably don't much care; these crimes are far away and inflicted on people we don't know. And most of the world is certainly not surprised. They live alongside an American colossus that periodically defaults to murderous illegal war-making.

But previous episodes of this national pastime usually evoked some squeamishness from the perpetrators: "No -- it wasn't that bad, it was a mistake, we didn't mean it." 

The Trump regime does mean it: it wants to teach us to thrill to unvarnished, extralegal murder. 

We're living in a magical kingdom with a demented guide

 

The irreplaceable Jonathan V Last at The Bulwark captures the complete lunacy that the madman in the White House and his billionaire buddies have led us into with his Iran debacle

Markets 

The funniest part of this whole thing—the real sorcery—is that the world’s financial markets agree that we’re in a great place and the current status quo is amazing.

America and Israel launched our war against Iran on February 28. Since then,

• America spent in the neighborhood of $30 billion on the war.

• The world experienced the worst oil shock in recorded history.

• Inflation is running very hot.

• There’s been something like $58 billion in damage to infrastructure in the Middle East, which has curtailed industrial outputs independent of the shipping crisis.

• Global companies have lost at least $25 billion in revenue because of the war.

And yet the S&P 500 is . . . up since the war started? Way up?

It gets better! In two days’ time, we will have the biggest IPO in history. SpaceX will shatter records. It will be valued at close to $2 trillion dollars. It will make Elon Musk the world’s first (acknowledged) trillionaire.

It’s going to be the most obscene financial orgy in a century. Like watching John D. Rockefeller and Louis XIV spit roast Caligula.

Iran and the SpaceX IPO are the same thing. Magical thinking. ...

We apparently have an appetite for this sort of thing. Until we don't. Neither Louis XIV (felled by senile gangrene) nor Caligula (killed by associates) ended well. 

Death of Caligula

The American republic, eventually, broke up John D. Rockefeller's oil empire by court order in 1911 and he went on to invent modern foundation philanthropy, for good and ill.

Tylenol is made from crude oil!

Now that Donald Trump has got the USofA into a fossil fuel war. I figured I ought to know more about oil in our lives. Obviously, the big issue is petroleum in several forms -- gas and diesel fuel for cars and trucks. And also in some areas for heating. But it turns out there is so much more that we do with oil, including with the ubiquitous petroleum-based scourge of modern life: plastics. 

The video here explains how Tylenol is made from a component of crude oil with a lot of help from appropriate bacteria-eating plastic. Really. This is a clear explanation and mind bending fun. Even the fund pitch in the middle is smart and bearable. Enjoy.

There are a huge lot of everyday items that use oil in some way. If the current disruption of the global oil economy goes on, the Donald will have succeeded in screwing up everyone's lives. Seems in character.

Click to enlarge.

The economist Paul Krugman observes our moment:

... now we have the worst of both worlds. The world is now highly dependent upon a complex global supply chain and the erstwhile leader of the free world is erratic. Does anyone know what our Iran policy will be a week from now, or even tomorrow? Moreover, the Iran debacle has revealed us to be far weaker than most people realized – so weak that we are afraid to stop Iran from exporting oil even as we threaten to destroy its civilian infrastructure. The truth is, even our allies no longer trust or respect us.

So what we are facing now isn’t simply a matter of consumers losing the ability to purchase imports. Instead we are facing a scenario in which producers lose access to crucial inputs they need to keep producing. The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is raising prices at the pump, which is bad. But it is also threatening to deprive American farmers of fertilizer during planting season, to cut off essential helium supplies to semiconductor producers in Asia, to deprive pharmaceutical producers of crucial materials, and more.

In short, terrifying as the Hormuz crisis is, I worry that it may be only the beginning. For a world economy that is riddled with multiple potential choke points can no longer rely on a strong, reliable and trustworthy America to act as a guarantor of the system. While things are bad now, they may very well get a lot worse.