Iran Update: Why Not?
By 
Not respecting the theater of operations…
A U.S. submarine sank an Iranian warship off the southern coast of Sri Lanka, killing dozens of sailors and dramatically widening Washington’s pursuit of the Iranian navy.
Sri Lanka’s deputy foreign minister identified the warship as the frigate IRIS Dena, and said it was heading back to Iran from an eastern Indian port.
The attack happened hundreds of miles across the Indian Ocean from the Gulf, where U.S. and Israeli forces are striking Iran and Tehran is retaliating with missile and drone attacks.
“An American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters,” U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at the Pentagon. “Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death.”
Hospital authorities in the Sri Lankan port city of Galle said 87 bodies were brought in by military rescuers who responded to an early morning distress call.
Another 32 were rescued and were being treated at hospital and about 60 people were likely unaccounted for from an estimated 180 people on board, Sri Lankan authorities said.
A Pentagon video purporting to have captured the attack showed the warship being hit by a huge explosion which blew apart the rear of the vessel, lifting it from the water, and caused it to begin sinking from the stern.
The exact date when the video was filmed and the type of warship could not be verified. However, the deck shape and mast of the vessel in the video matched file imagery of the same type of warship as the IRIS Dena.
The Iranian vessel had taken part in a naval exercise organised by India in the Bay of Bengal from February 18 to 25, according to the drill’s website.
Sri Lanka said it had launched a search-and-rescue operation to locate survivors after receiving a distress call.
Sri Lankan navy spokesman Commander Buddhika Sampath said boats that reached the location observed only an oil slick, adding that although the incident took place outside Sri Lankan waters, Colombo was still committed to providing support.
“We found people floating in the water and rescued them,” Sampath told reporters. “Later on, we found upon inquiring that they belonged to the Iranian ship.”
Rescuers brought bodies, covered in white sheets, in batches in a truck to the Karapitiya hospital in Galle where they were moved to the morgue.
The commander of the warship and some senior officers were among the survivors and they told the Sri Lankan navy that they were hit by a submarine attack, two Sri Lankan sources told Reuters.
Some 18000 American sailors died in the Second Battle of the Atlantic. I doubt any of them would have considered their last moments of life, terrified and choking as water filled their metal coffin, to be a “quiet death.”
Look, war is war. As far as I can tell there was nothing illegal about this attack, apart from the general illegality of the war. The sailors who conducted the attack are not war criminals. The military logic is sound; allowing INS Dena to wander freely would have created its own set of operational problems, and while it might have been sporting to simply demand the ship’s surrender or internment it’s quite unlikely the Iranian captain would have acceded. None of that makes it less horrifying, and people who do not consider it horrifying should not ever be given any kind of responsibility for or over other humans.
Photo Credit: By MojNews, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=126535929
…. because I’m getting this in comments, participation in an illegal war does not constitute a war crime. Full stop, zero questions, zero debatability. It is not the responsibility of an individual soldier to determine whether a war is legal or illegal (this is often difficult and is a lot to ask of individual soldiers). Soldiers in an illegal war may commit war crimes (just as soldiers in a legal war may) but they are not liable simply by virtue of service in the war. Plenty of Wehrmacht soldiers committed war crimes, but a lot didn’t and the ones who didn’t were not war criminals.