Pay Attention When Your President Promises To Commit War Crimes

AP/Vahid Salemi

As families were putting on their Sunday best for Easter services and children across America were unearthing goodies in their Easter baskets and anticipating egg hunts, the American president - a figure those same children are taught to respect and revere - unleashed perhaps the most dangerous, unhinged social media rant of his entire five-plus year presidential odyssey.

Trump promised to destroy all of Iran’s bridges and power plants unless the regime reopened the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has closed to commercial traffic since Trump began his totally pointless and illegal war against Iran. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH,” the president greeted Easter revelers, before signing off, on the day of Christ’s resurrection, with “Praise be to Allah.”

As soon as Trump published the post, he began speed dialing political reporters to reaffirm his basic promise: to start committing mass war crimes on Tuesday. And then Monday afternoon, Trump doubled down, saying during a press conference, “the entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.” Of the many presidential firsts America has witnessed under Trump, this was perhaps the most jarring and diabolical.

Am I sure that what he is planning to do if Iran won’t open the Strait are war crimes, you ask? Yes. And it’s not really a close call. The Geneva Conventions clearly limit bombing to military targets and some dual-use targets (sites used for civilian and military use). But Trump’s promise isn’t to target power or bridge infrastructure used by the military; he is calling reporters and telling them he is going to destroy EVERY power plant and bridge. That campaign will kill tens of thousands of innocent Iranians who work in the plants and travel on the roads. That’s a war crime.

A Wall Street Journal report over the weekend added some flavor to Trump’s decision. It detailed how Trump’s advisors told him the entire point of the new bombing campaign would be to terrorize civilians. Why? Because targeting civilian infrastructure would create political turmoil and maybe regime change. If this regime won’t reopen the Strait, then maybe after killing thousands of innocent people, a civil war might break out that would lead to this regime’s downfall. If this plan seems macabre and insane, it’s because…well, IT IS.

The International Committee for the Red Cross, the organization charged with interpreting the Geneva Conventions, is also clear that attacks designed for this purpose - to create civilian unrest just for the purpose of civilian unrest - are also war crimes.

Now, if you’re a student of international war crime conventions, you will know that many of the restrictions on bombing are included in the 1979 amendment to the Geneva Conventions - an amendment that was never ratified by the United States. True, but the U.S. has nonetheless honored and abided by these additional protocols even without formal agreement. A war crime is still a war crime.

But of course, Trump isn’t pretending that he cares. His entire threat is to purposely terrorize innocent Iranians and hope the regime responds by meeting Trump’s demand.

It won’t. Iran believes it is winning this war. And their immediate reaction to Trump’s early morning threat was to step up attacks on its neighbors. In my briefings from Administration intelligence officials, there is no evidence the regime is at risk of falling, and the U.S. attacks instead seem to be hardening Iranian antagonism toward the U.S., just as our strikes in Afghanistan pushed citizens back toward the Taliban.

But even if Trump’s war crimes were successful in forcing Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, how on earth is that a victory? The Strait was open before Trump’s disastrous war of choice that has spiked gas prices to over four dollars a gallon in the U.S. Did we really spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, throw the entire Middle East into chaos, hemorrhage the global energy market, and lose over a dozen American lives, just so we could commit a bunch of heinous war crimes to simply open a waterway that was open before we broke hell loose?

I raise the question of Trump’s promised war crimes because I worry deeply about our tendency to repeatedly look the other way at his norm-breaking. We do it all the time, and it’s never excusable. But on Sunday, he seemed to gain energy the more he bragged about committing war crimes. There was something unusually sinister about how off the rails his threats were, and we have to understand what the consequences are if this week our president proudly starts bombing civilians in Iran, like Putin bombs civilians in Ukraine.

I’ll spare the “our international credibility will be greatly damaged” monologue. Few Americans, too often living paycheck to paycheck and quickly losing touch with purpose, meaning and connection in their lives, care much for lectures about America’s international reputation. I will simply ask you to query: do you want your nation to be one of a handful in the world that brazenly tries to hurt innocent people and use their pain as ransom to get foreign governments to bend to our will? Would you do that in your personal life - threaten to hurt a neighbor’s infant child to influence their behavior toward you? I think Americans take pride in our exceptionalism - our decision to hold ourselves to higher standards than other nations. We fought and prevailed in the Cold War to not become like Russia - why model their war crimes now?

I wasn’t kidding when I responded to Trump’s Easter morning tweet that his Cabinet should start researching the 25th Amendment. It is possible he has come unglued in the face of a war he cannot win - a war that could be the world’s economic undoing and his political unraveling. The people around him - those that enable him - should stop him from committing these war crimes. And we should speak up loudly to make sure they do.