re: Why Don't, Or Why Can't, We Strike Power Plants?

Because we don’t want them to strike alliance infrastructure that would result in thousands or millions of civilian deaths in an area incapable of sustaining urban life without desalinization and power?

Oh and the fact that they could also take oil facilities offline for 3-5 years resulting in a global energy crisis unseen in modern human history.

So I’m gonna guess the short answer is reciprocity.

Trump is trying to gain peace by offering a future of economic prosperity….

Power facilities are critical infrastructure for economic growth.

If we state bombing critical infrastructure, it will be a dark future for Iran

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JFK's policy of having groups like the Green Berets to "win minds and souls" in Vietnam eventually became GWB's "winning hearts and minds" in the Middle East and has continued to be the prevailing policy for conducting warfare to this day even though it hasn't worked nearly as well as the policy of "beat the frick out of them until they beg to surrender" we had with the Axis powers in WW2.

Until we are willing to get out of that mindset and wage war with the goal of forcing the enemy into giving an unconditional surrender because we've brutally beaten them into submission, we are going to see prolonged engagements.

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I mostly agree, but that cuts both ways.

If America chooses war, it needs to wage it with a real plan for decisive victory, not some open-ended “manage the problem forever” half-war where we kill people, spend trillions, rotate administrations, and pretend the next “troop surge” is finally when it all turns around.

The problem is that America does not get an unlimited imperial timeline. We are not uniquely weak or uniquely allergic to long wars. The average medieval peasant disliked war too. We just have elections. That means any war has a short political window before support starts collapsing, especially if the objective is vague and the end goal keeps moving.

There’s a reason the wars we hold up as our greatest military efforts, like the Civil War and World War II, were conducted almost entirely under single administrations. Lincoln had the Civil War. FDR had almost all of World War II, and Truman finished it. Those wars were not passed from administration to administration for twenty years while each new president inherited the last guy’s mess and pretended a revised strategy would finally make it coherent.

So if we are going to war, it needs to be decisive. But that also means we better be extremely careful about choosing war in the first place. “Total war” cannot become the answer every 10 or 15 years because some think-tank dipshit or politically ambitious general thinks this one will be quick, cheap, and morally satisfying.

If the only way to win is to brutally break a country’s capacity to resist within a short timeline, then the bar for starting that war has to be incredibly high.

Slow your roll Kemosabe.
I’m on your side (I think)?
Times have changed. WW2 it appears all Americans were on the same side.
Walter Cronkite had the “we report, you decide” we’re independent thought was OK.
Today, politicians are out to get rich, Democrats are unified and Republicans will eat their own and argue amongst themselves.
Media is against Republicans, lie and make up their own narrative. They have an agenda that is to the detriment of America.
The remaining years of my life will be very different from the first 66.

From what I remember hearing sometime back, the Iranians threatened to strike the water facilities of the Arab nations if their power plants were damaged.

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The problem is destroying them usually has an outsized impact on civilians in the area. That’s why Trump ultimately decided not to, despite his threats to “end civilization” in Iran.

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Anything can legally be considered a military target.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both full of civilians but they served as crucial factories for making munitions for the Japanese imperial army.

Because people like the leaders of Iran don’t give two shits about the common people who would be harmed most.

Have you ever heard Let Them Eat Cake.