I’ve made it perfectly clear already that I think Trump is a bad president, so I’ll skip the whole buildup of that.
Two weeks ago, he threatened major military attacks on Iran if they didn’t reopen the straight of Hormuz. He specifically said the attacks would target power plants and other civilian infrastructure. And when it became quite obvious Iran wasn’t going to fold, Trump extended the deadline to two weeks.
(The postponement is a really sad move that makes him look weak. All the cash in my wallet says the military came to him and said “If you give us a couple weeks, we can wear down their supplies, so that any response to our attack will be muted”. But of course Iran isn’t stupid, and adjusted their tactics to conserve their supplies.)
And on Easter, Trump again threatened Irans infrastructure in an astoundingly offensive social media post. This morning’s post from the president threatened to destroy “an entire civilization” if today’s deadline wasn’t met.
Off the top of my head, I have concerns about this. The most obvious being that these are international war crimes, as they well should be. Just the threat of many of these things is a war crime. It is astoundingly inhumane to threaten the vital basic needs of millions of non-combatant people. Just a few months ago, we were encouraging these people to overthrow their government, and now we’re threatening to kill them for something they have no control over. As if large portions of the region didn’t already hate us, an act like this will certainly stop them from ever trusting us again.
And it’s not just a question of wether we should be “better people”. (Because some willfully ignorant keyboard hero will always be ready to tell us how — like a 14year old boy — he doesn’t care what other people think of us). But when it becomes apparent that the US will no longer follow any internationally-recognized standards of behavior in conflict, then it frees those people we’re fighting against to do the same or worse. When they start capturing and torturing our soldiers and civilians; when they start bombing public transportation in other nations; when they launch a dozen 9/11 style attacks at once; when they poison water supplies in dry regions, we will have no right to an indignant response. We’ll have no standing to receive sympathy from other nations for violations against us. There will be no reasonable response, because they’re just behaving as we do.
So we can call off or again postpone the attacks, but not without looking weak and fearful. Or we can continue to attack a country that was no immediate threat to us, and continue to look like an international bully. We can fulfill the president’s threat, and try to wipe out a whole people, but not without becoming an international pariah on par with some of the most hated people and countries of the last century.
We don’t come out of this well no matter what. Can we please come out of this not as monsters, at least?