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Comment by emosenkis | Hacker News Reader

Please explain how attacking a civilian data center in an uninvolved country is a "response".

Bahrain hosts bases that the US uses to attack Iran, and Amazon is part of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program that provides the DoD with cloud services.

Bahrain is host to the headquarters of the US fifth fleet, a notable US airbase, and thousands of US military personnel. These assets are being used to attack Iran.

They’re involved.

The article has actual quotations on Iran's justification: this is in response to a recent US attack on civilian infrastructure (an under-construction Iranian nuclear powerplant with no nuclear material present)

Let’s say you live in the northern US and Canada signs a deal with China to put air bases with Chinese missiles just north of the US border.

Would that be fine? Or would that cause a lot of tension with Canada and make them involved in a US-China conflict?

USA would look very bad if they started bombarding Canada over that, yes. Not even Russia does that. They protest but they haven't started bombarding neutral countries over such things yet. You don't see Ukraine bombarding Belarus either, even though Belarus is full of Russian bases.

US burnt almost entire latin american down last century because "can't have communism in our backyard", even though these countries are quite far geographically than Bahrain is to Iran. Besides, under every international law about neutrality, Bahrain/Kuwait/UAE none of them are neutral.

    > Belarus is full of Russian bases

This is an exaggeration of the truth. Here is what I found:

    > Russia does not officially maintain a traditional independent sovereign military base in Belarus, but it operates two Soviet-era radar and communication facilities and heavily uses Belarusian military infrastructure, airfields, and new joint construction projects.

If only we lived in the reality where this was possible. Americans living in the same fear they inflict on the rest of the world might mellow them out a little.

I'm not defending it, but these countries host US bases.

Why not defend it? You provide logistical support to US war of aggression, you become a legitimate target? What is this whitewashing of military involvement? (Both for Amazon and Bahrain)

What do you mean? It is very clear that Trump declared war on Iran. That's factual.

Civilian damage occurs all the time - often on purpose (infrastructure), sometimes not directly on purpose (drones getting off-target for various reasons, that also happens and not all of this is on purpose). What Iran does here is increase the cost of waging warfare against it, to make continuation of war as unappealing as possible. To claim the nearby countries are "uninvolved" while hosting military bases or providing targeting data to the USA is just propaganda. Why would you insinuate this? It is clearly an incorrect statement. One can debate whether targeting amazon is useful or not, but definitely you don't have an uninvolved country here, so much is clear. Besides, all companies of a given country at war, need to provide data and money anyway.

> Trump declared war on Iran.

No, that is actually a lie, and quite obviously false.

In the United States, nobody can "declare war" except Congress. Our President has authorized military action against Iran and plenty of strikes, this is true. However, Congress has not passed a War Powers Resolution, much less an open declaration of war.

Therefore, nobody in the United States has "declared war on Iran", the current situation notwithstanding. That is why there are many arguments against it.

For the record, the US is a bit weird internationally about how it "declares" war. As a historical fact, the US never formally declared war against Vietnam. Anyone with a middle school education or greater would look at that "conflict" and say, "Obviously, that was a war." Weeks of aerial bombing of military targets in Iran? Again, common sense would say that is a war, regardless of what the US Constitution says.

But anyone who grew up during the conflicts in Korea or Vietnam will distinctly recall how controversial they were as "police actions" and calling it anything-but-a-war, because they were undeclared by Congress.

Obviously, anyone can look into the Wikipedia articles for any of those conflicts and see that they're all properly labeled as "wars", but it is also quite possible for a nation or entity to be a belligerent and participate in an actual war without formally and legally declaring it so.

So to say that "[President] Trump declared war" is definitely false, and it is rather amusing to me, reading the "Iran War" article, how often it says "Trump declared ..." something on X. Perhaps it's a fiction that haters like to hate with, like the way that the executive branch can't pass a law without all of Congress passing that law first, but they still take all the credit for passing those laws?!

I think that the US Congress is reluctant to declare wars because of the many ramifications for our own nation and the entire world. Nobody wants to see WW3 erupt, and WWII was well underway before the US was goaded into wholeheartedly joining the fray.

    > Nobody wants to see WW3 erupt

Slightly off-topic, but I think WW3 is already happening: the Russo-Ukraine war. Over 50 nations are involved in both sides of the conflict.

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