His threats are overheated and politically unhelpful, but his domestic opponents are skewing the facts in response.
His threats are overheated and politically unhelpful, but his domestic opponents are skewing the facts in response.
A ndy McCarthy said it best: The president’s “disgraceful rhetoric” around this war is condemnable. His public statements have been anything but reassuring to the majority of Americans who are apprehensive about the course the war has taken. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” the president wrote, by way of example, Tuesday morning. On the domestic front, remarks like these only make the president’s life (as well as that of his fellow Republicans) more difficult.
And yet, at the risk of lapsing into a tendency to which Trump’s biggest fans are prone by grafting logic onto what are little more than wild rhetorical gesticulations, there is instrumental utility in projecting unflinching determination in wartime.
Let’s say you’re confronting an adversary that isn’t responding in ways you regard as rational to objective inputs — like, to reach for a relevant hypothetical, the utter destruction of the adversary’s defense industrial base, power-projection capabilities, internal security apparatus, and much of its dual-use heavy and light industry. In the anarchic international environment — particularly in war, which is a contest of wills and hard power — displaying an unfailing resolve that matches or exceeds the enemy’s is useful as a signaling mechanism.
If, however, the president was to act on his threat to euthanize the ancient Iranian civilization, that would certainly amount to a violation of the conventions that govern just warfare. But the president’s Democratic critics aren’t waiting around for Trump to make good on his threats. To them, the threats alone constitute a crime of war, and they are unanimous in their desire to make him suffer the consequences of his actions even before he takes them.
“This is an extremely sick person,” Senator Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday in response to the president’s latest missive. “Congress must immediately end this reckless war of choice in Iran before Donald Trump plunges us into World War III,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries agreed, echoing Schumer’s demand for Republicans to join Democrats in cutting off funding for the Iran War.
Among Democrats, these sentiments are all but universal.
“Calling for the elimination of a civilization is a war crime,” Representative Jason Crow said of the president’s rhetoric alone. It’s also “a war crime to bomb schools, power plants and bridges,” he added. “Bombing civilian infrastructure is not ‘tough,’” Representative Adelita Grijalva agreed. “It’s illegal.”
“Striking civilian infrastructure that causes disproportionate civilian harm constitutes war crimes,” Representative Ted Lieu informed America’s men and women in uniform. “You will disobey those illegal orders.” Senator Chris Murphy went further, calling the president’s remark not just a violation of “universal moral law” but downright “evil.”
Senator Ed Markey took these contentions to their logical conclusion. “The House must bring up impeachment articles, and the Senate needs to remove a president who wants to commit war crimes,” he wrote. Representative Ilhan Omar concurred. “This unhinged lunatic must be removed from office,” she wrote.
These Democrats seem to have invented a new standard in which the president should be subject to the constitutional remedy reserved for scofflaws in high office only because his rhetorical flourishes make them nervous.
But that’s not the only standard Democrats are seeking to establish. Contrary to Representative Crow, the strikes that the president has spent days foreshadowing — attacks on Iran’s infrastructure, including bridges and power-generation facilities — do not necessarily violate the Laws of Armed Conflict.
As we learned (or should have learned) during Israel’s siege of, for example, the hospitals inside Gaza that Hamas fighters used both for shelter and to execute attacks on Israel Defense Forces soldiers, those protections are not ironclad.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, for example, laid out a set of standards that allow combatants in wartime to target the enemy. After all, it wouldn’t do much good to establish rules of the road for warfare that any belligerent would have no choice but to ignore. But targets that advantage the enemy’s forces as much as the enemy’s civilian population must pass two tests. “First, the object to be attacked must, by its nature, location, purpose, or use contribute effectively to the enemy’s military action,” the ICRC maintains. “Second, its partial or total destruction, capture or neutralization, must offer — in the circumstances ruling at the time — a definite military advantage.”
In executing strikes on Iranian rail lines and bridges on Tuesday morning, the IDF laid out a clear strategic rationale: Those strikes “prevent the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from moving weapon systems” and frustrate efforts by the regime to repress its citizens. And as military historian John Spencer recently wrote, Iran’s civilian power grid fuels the IRGC, too. “Command and control, surveillance, communications, and internal security coordination all depend on it,” he observed. But you wouldn’t need to unleash a biblical rain of destruction to neutralize that IRGC advantage. “Precision strikes on key substations and transmission nodes can create cascading outages without total destruction of infrastructure,” Spencer continued. “The U.S. has demonstrated that capability in past conflicts.”
While it’s true that some of Iran’s infrastructure is dual-use and, therefore, legitimate military targets, that doesn’t mean such a course of action would necessarily be wise. Even among the war’s supporters in the West, there is no consensus on that question. And the degree to which Donald Trump has avoided executing debilitating strikes on the centerpiece of the Iranian economy — its oil and petrochemical infrastructure — suggests this administration is leery of depriving Iran of its capacity to rebuild after the war, hopefully under new leadership. The president’s rhetoric should not obscure a careful analysis of what his Pentagon is actually doing.
The distinctions between a purely civilian and a dual-use facility can be fine, but they at least merit consideration. The president’s Democratic critics seem to have little appetite for that sort of discretion. The escalation the president is envisioning is fraught with risk, and Americans are justified in demanding more circumspection from their representatives in wartime. They’re certainly not getting that from the president. But they’re not getting it from his opponents, either.