In Iran, Washington is no longer destroying military arsenals. It is draining villages to starve and thirst in order to provoke a Maidan-style color revolution.
Mohamed Lamine KABA
Perpetual escalation, the carefully maintained mutual threat, the enemy always designated just before it becomes useless: this is the very grammar of American foreign policy since Hiroshima
The material damage is staggering: nine bridges, two airports, a railway junction, a road tunnel, and more than a hundred telecommunications towers silenced in just a few days. The human toll is no less devastating, with dozens dead and several hundred wounded among civilians, including women and children. A spokesperson for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs sees this as the collapse, beneath the rubble, of American moral authority and the very architecture of international law. A former senior official at Human Rights Watch goes even further: targeting civilian drinking water infrastructure constitutes a clear and simple war crime.
The shockwave extends beyond Iran’s borders: retaliatory strikes against American bases in Jordan, attacks on installations in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Syria (which had previously been spared), and Tehran’s appeal to the United Nations. A Cambridge researcher interprets this as a calculated show of force, a message sent to all countries hosting American troops in the region.
One question remains at the heart of this article: when drinking water becomes a military objective, where is the line between strategy and war crime?
Water, the weapon of a defeated America
Since June, American aircraft have no longer been targeting only Natanz or Fordow. They are now targeting dams, reservoirs, desalination plants, and electrical infrastructure. After the incident involving the helicopter shot down over the Strait of Hormuz, Trump promised “proportionate strikes.” In reality, the scale of the issue has shifted: from a war against centrifuges, it has become a war against thirst.
An admission of failure
Neither Fordow, nor Natanz, nor Isfahan delivered the promised victory. Iran’s military capability survived the bunker busters. So Washington changed its target. Drinking water reservoirs in southern Iran were cut off, leaving tens of thousands of residents without water. Bridges were destroyed in Bandar Khamir. The South Pars gas plant was attacked, a coordinated effort by the Americans, then half-heartedly disavowed by a president caught red-handed in strategic improvisation. A country that attacks water rather than missiles doesn’t win the war. It changes wars, because it’s losing the first one.
On the ground, the death toll is rising as the strikes multiply. Ahmad Moradi, representative of Hormozgan province, reported that “around seven to eight people” had been killed in the recent strikes targeting bridges and residential areas in the province. At the UN, Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s permanent representative, denounced in a letter to the Secretary-General the attacks, which had “targeted and caused significant damage to ports, transport networks, communication facilities, logistics centers, radar installations, coastal defense systems, and other infrastructure essential to the civilian population and the functioning of the national economy,” warning that “the continuation of these unlawful armed attacks constitutes a grave threat to international peace and security, freedom of navigation, regional stability, and the security of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.”
The diplomatic shockwave followed almost immediately. Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister, announced that the United States has violated and suspended all its commitments under the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, adding, “We have also suspended all our commitments accordingly; we are no longer implementing these commitments.” Tehran, he clarified, now says it is “occupied with defending the country.”
An 80-year-old doctrine
This shift is not an accident. It is the continuation of a doctrine forged since 1945: keeping the rest of the world on a lifeline of fear. Bretton Woods weaponized the dollar. Containment made every ally a strategic hostage. Military bases scattered across five continents made dependence a state religion. Perpetual escalation, the carefully maintained mutual threat, the enemy always designated just before it becomes useless: this is the very grammar of American foreign policy since Hiroshima. Today’s Iran is just another chapter in this novel of permanent coercion.
What Washington is hiding
The official narrative speaks of “self-defense” and a “proportionate response.” The reality is a country that, unable to achieve a military victory, chooses to starve and dehydrate. Tehran is experiencing its fifth consecutive year of drought. By November 2025, the Amir Kabir Dam held only eight percent of its capacity; nineteen major dams were dry. Striking at water under these conditions is not a military tactic. It is a gamble on civilian collapse, cloaked in the sanitized vocabulary of deterrence.
Yet, international humanitarian law is clear: drinking water facilities are civilian property, never legitimate targets according to the Berlin Rules on water resources. Isa Bozorgzadeh, spokesperson for the Iranian water industry, called the strikes a “war crime.” Kaveh Madani, winner of the 2026 Stockholm Water Prize, speaks of a “normalization” of targeting vital infrastructure. Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, for his part, judged that the targeted facility “was not a legitimate military target,” emphasizing, “Targeting it is a war crime.”
The Iranian accusation targeting a desalination plant in Qeshm remains contested. Washington and Tel Aviv have denied it, but independent evidence is still lacking. However, doubt itself serves the strategy: sowing uncertainty while confirmed facts accumulate. Disinformation consists precisely of burying the undeniable under the debatable, of invoking “collateral damage” where the intention becomes harder to conceal each week. Donald Trump, through his posturing, fits perfectly into Charles Pasqua’s theorem of creating a “case within a case” to muddy the waters of the main issue.
A prediction that is already being written?
Roxane Farmanfarmaian, professor of Middle Eastern politics at the University of Cambridge, observes that the belligerents “are using Kuwait, in particular, as an example of what they can do in retaliation.” According to her, “The United States is clearly striking the south in Iran and targeting airports, desalination plants, and bridges, and so the same kinds of things are currently being struck in Kuwait to demonstrate the effect Iran can actually have on countries that host American bases.”
Esmaeil Baqaei, spokesman for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, succinctly summarized this moral shift: “For a state that once presented itself as the world champion of order, liberalism, and the war on terror, proudly displaying images of destroyed bridges and civilian infrastructure has become its only remaining ‘victory.’” He added, “Yet, with the collapse of every bridge, every tower, and every civilian facility, it is not merely steel and concrete that are reduced to rubble. It is America’s moral standing – along with the entire architecture of international law and the civilizational claims of the West – that is crumbling before the eyes of the world.”
Clearly, an America that strikes at the water is, first and foremost, a sign of its own moral defeat before its strategic one. Every village left dry harbors a resentment that no surgical strike will erase. The entire Gulf is already reeling and gradually turning away from America: Kuwait has seen its own desalination plant damaged by Iranian retaliation, and Bahrain is accusing Tehran in return. Escalation feeds on escalation, exactly according to the logic inherited from 1945. But this time, the weapon is backfiring. By trying in vain to humiliate Iran without defeating it, by targeting civilians because it cannot target combatants, Washington is no longer exporting power. It is exporting living proof of its own decline.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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