President Donald Trump has once again confounded his many critics by agreeing to a two-week ceasefire in the war against Iran, after threatening to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age and end a civilization.
On the right, former Trump supporter and former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said that Trump had gone “insane.” Andrew Day in The American Conservative suggested that Trump might use nuclear weapons against Iran. Bruce Fein characterized Trump’s attacks on Iran as “unconstitutional” and “criminal.” Steven Simon in Responsible Statecraft accused Trump of threatening genocide in Iran.
On the left, Sen. Chuck Schumer said Trump resembled “an unhinged madman.” Sen. Bernie Sanders called Trump “dangerous and mentally unbalanced.” Representative Ro Khanna accused Trump of “threatening war crimes.” Charlie Savage in the New York Times called Trump’s threats “self-incriminating statements” for a future war crimes trial. Some critics have suggested invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.
Trump’s threat was to bomb Iran’s infrastructure — bridges, desalination plants, power plants. These are the kinds of targets that were routinely bombed during World War II, yet Trump’s critics claim that deliberately striking them would be a war crime. All of those targets affect Iran’s ability to make war. Judged by this standard, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman were war criminals — after all, they oversaw and countenanced the deliberate bombing of civilians in Germany and Japan.
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