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During Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israeli jets bombed the Jiyeh power station north of the coastal city of Sidon. The blaze could be seen for miles, a towering column of black smoke. Sand was turned to glass.
The plant’s damaged storage tanks leaked an estimated 15,000 tonnes of oil into the eastern Mediterranean, the largest spill in that sea.
Israel bombed the country’s motorway bridges as well, destroying spans and cratering roads.
The result?
In the short term, a ceasefire agreement to end the war was signed, as half-baked as it was over-optimistic.
Israel, as it does after each of its conflicts, declared a victory. Hezbollah survived, rearmed quickly, and lived to fight another day.
As the deadline approaches on Donald Trump’s threat to bomb Iran back to the “stone ages” – the question arises not only of the morality and legality of such a campaign – but also of its utility.
On Easter Sunday, Trump threatened in an expletive-laden post that Iran will face “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one,” while adding that “you’ll be living in Hell” unless the strait of Hormuz reopens.
On Monday Trump doubled down on his threats.
“A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump posted on Truth Social.
Even if Trump pushes back his deadline once again, recent history does not suggest that strikes on infrastructure – widely seen as war crime – are likely to force Iran on to a new path.
More recent than Lebanon, is the experience of Ukraine under four years of sustained Russian bombardment, after Moscow’s own illegal war of aggression. That culminated this year in Kyiv’s worst winter of blackouts as Russia hammered the country’s heating and power plants, but failed to force Ukraine to concede.
Indeed the history of such bombing campaigns – going back to world war two – is highly contested, including the British decision in 1942 to move to a policy of “area bombing” aimed at undermining the morale of the “enemy civil population”.
Despite the promise by the head of British bomber command Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris in late 1943 that he could bring about the collapse of Germany within four months, it was the allied destruction of the Luftwaffe – not the targeting of industrial and residential targets – that would prove more significant.
The US Rolling Thunder air campaign against North Vietnam from 1965-1968 – though far more constrained in the scope of its targets – was not much more successful in persuading Hanoi to withdraw its intervention in the south.
By 1967 US defense secretary Robert McNamara told a closed session before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Preparedness that there was “no basis to believe that any bombing campaign … would by itself force Ho Chi Minh’s regime into submission, short, that is, of the virtual annihilation of North Vietnam and its people”.
Writing in the Interpreter this week, former Australian general and theorist of modern war Mick Ryan unpacked some of the issues with Trump’s current threat.
“The Islamic republic of Iran, whose political identity is built around resistance to American coercion, is unlikely to respond differently. “Bridge and Power Plant Day” is unlikely to change the Iranian regime’s strategic calculus and would not reopen the strait of Hormuz.
“It would, however, give the Iranian government its most powerful propaganda tool of the war.”
Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher in the Iran and the Shi’ite Axis Program at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies was also sceptical over whether such pressure from Trump could be successful.
“The United States lacks a credible military option that can force Iran into submission,” Citrinowicz posted on X.
“The assumption that pressure alone can break Tehran is not strategy, it is wishful thinking.”
