Donald Trump has raised, then dropped, multiple different strategic objectives for his war against Iran. But he has been consistent about America’s tactics. He has repeatedly announced a contempt for international law and a fascination with indiscriminate destruction that crosses the line to war crimes.
The New York Times reports on his latest threats:
Power plants, desalination stations, oil wells, roads, bridges and other infrastructure.
They are the foundations of civilian life in Iran, and their destruction by American and Israeli forces would cause widespread suffering among the country’s 93 million people—and in most cases would be considered a war crime under international law.
Yet President Trump has repeatedly threatened to do exactly that, with the aim of sending Iran “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong,” as he put it in a speech on Wednesday. …
International laws aimed at preventing the horrors of total war are codified in a series of agreements, including the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles and the United Nations Charter. Deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure violate those. So does pillaging a country, which Mr. Trump has suggested he might do by taking Iran’s oil. …
During a standoff with Iran in his first administration, Mr. Trump threatened to destroy 52 cultural sites in the country. Mark T. Esper, then the defense secretary, acknowledged that hitting such sites would be a war crime and said the Pentagon would not do it.
The second Trump administration has taken a different approach.
Then he went further, posting: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” basically a warning that he is prepared to use nukes to commit genocide on a mass scale to try to win an illegal war with no clear purpose.
Basically, what this suggests is that unless something stops him, there is no limit to the cruelty he will unleash to get his way.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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