people might not like it if it was targeted, but if it got slightly damaged (and currently functional) as collateral damage to a military target, I assume more people would be okay
From what I can tell, international law requires attacks to be distinct and proportional. Distinct meaning they distinguish between civilian and military targets (you cannot intentionally attack civilian targets), and proportional meaning that the collateral damage to civilians is proportional to the military value of the strike.
This probably doesn’t meet that bar. Cutting off water is bad, but 20k people is a fairly small population for this kind of thing and presumably the US won’t stop them from repairing it (that probably would be a clear cut war crime). Presuming Irans government is functioning, this should be extremely hard for those people but probably not lethal. Trucking water around is an option, even if it’s not great.
At this point, every direct hit on a school or a water source or a charity being accidental collateral damage just doesn't ring true.
Either they've been lying about capabilities (and all the precision strikes were undergone with reckless disregard for human life) or they have the capabilities claimed and are doing exactly what they said they would.
[1] One famous example: https://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/02/politics/donald-trump-ter...
Btw: hitting water reservoirs is only a warcrime if the purpose is to kill (or at least replace) a civilian population from a large area. I don't see how this even qualifies that definition.
You need to have higher standards; "no worse than Iran" is not something the US should aspire to.
As for standards: they are useless unless they allow for doing what is required to make the other side comply. Or at least, without that standards won't achieve their goal.
The world has chosen to not enforce war crime legislation under any circumstances, decades ago. Specifically, the agreement is the Rome statute, which essentially says that no government can ever be accused of a warcrime except in one of two circumstances. One, the government one whose soil it happened agrees to enforce war crime legislation AND asks for a conviction (Iran has not, and will not, do this). Either that or the UNSC convicts you.
Other than those 2 situations, war crimes aren't possible. And this is not something the US has chosen but the world has agreed. If any parties are responsible for that, it's Russia and China.
By the way, Iran has managed to commit bad enough warcrimes that China, Russia, US, France and the UK all agreed they were guilty of warcrimes. The US has not.
Someone call Celestia! Magic for all!
Example: Somebody starts, or even threatens, to kill a child, you can empty a clip of bullets into them. You can break their bones. You can hit them with a bat. Hard. That's fine, sometimes even described as "heroic".
And if you empty a clip of bullets into a random person, well, that's against morality.
You can do a lot of things to such a person that would never be acceptable under normal circumstances. In fact, in western countries, violating normal rules to prevent worse outcomes than those rules are meant to achieve to is a duty. This goes from being forced to help if someone's in real trouble to if you are blocked by a red light and refuse to violate the law and prevent an ambulance's passage, that's a serious crime.
You read that right, under those specific circumstances not violating the law is a serious crime.
There is no moral or legal system that has an absolutist view like your statement makes. 12 year olds think like that. And of course, if you actually read this law, you won't find such an unqualified rule.
In other words: shooting someone to prevent a murder is not immoral. Despite the fact that shooting someone is obviously immoral under almost all circumstances.
That's not how ethics works. We give the state the ability to mete out punishment in cases where that punishment or the threat of that punishment helps the citizens' safety. Administering collective punishment does the opposite.