\n<\/p>\n
Donald Trump\u2019s Tuesday morning comments threatening that \u201ca whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again\u201d in Iran have raised alarms among military observers and retired officers, who called them \u201clikely war crimes\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have to hope that this is bluster, and a negotiating tactic on his part,\u201d said retired admiral Michael Smith, who commanded a carrier strike group in the US navy. \u201cHe must understand that those types of threats themselves are likely war crimes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s post on Truth Social came on the heels of a profane tirade over the weekend, in which he referred to the Iranian regime as \u201ccrazy bastards\u201d while demanding that it cease blocking oil transshipment through the strait of Hormuz. On Monday, Trump threatened to bomb infrastructure in Iran if his demands were not met.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile his comments previously on the bridges and electric power plants might have had military utility that would make it a justifiable target, his current claims have no legal standing,\u201d Smith said. \u201cAnd yet, we have to have faith that the current military leaders will do what is legal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, Trump said he was \u201cnot at all\u201d concerned about committing possible war crimes, and again threatened to destroy Iran\u2019s bridges and power plants if Tehran did not meet his Tuesday deadline to reopen the strait. He also refused to say whether civilian targets were off limits.<\/p>\n
Congress has incrementally surrendered its prerogative to declare war and direct military spending, said Gary Corn, a retired army staff attorney who teaches national security law and the law of armed conflict at the American University Washington College of Law and directs the technology, law and security program for the Center for a New American Security, a bipartisan thinktank in Washington DC.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you have the efforts in Congress failing, one can interpret it as an implicit acquiescence if not endorsement to what\u2019s gone on in the last 30 days,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
By narrow margins, the House and Senate rejected measures in early March to require congressional approval for military operations against Iran. Corn noted that Richard Nixon effectively ignored the repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and continued waging war in Vietnam 55 years ago.<\/p>\n
The threat to kill a \u201ccivilization\u201d in a day implies the use of nuclear weapons, even if the word was not used, said Shawn Harris, a retired army general running for Congress as a Democrat in the Georgia seat formerly held by Marjorie Taylor Greene. The runoff for the election is Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The firing of three generals last week by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, suggests that there may have been internal pushback from senior military leaders against Trump\u2019s war plans. None of the fired officers have made public comments since their forced retirements.<\/p>\n
Separating Trumpian bluster from business has become difficult, Harris said: \u201cI think what he\u2019s basically saying is he\u2019s going to follow through on his plans of things he talked about two or three days ago of blowing up bridges, blowing up power facilities and all those type things … Hopefully we will get to a diplomatic agreement, but you know the Iranians, they\u2019re no pushover.\u201d<\/p>\n
Naveed Shah, political director for the left-leaning veterans group Common Defense, called Trump\u2019s bluster \u201cunhinged\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know we have gotten used to Trump\u2019s locker-room talk, but even the most jaded must recognize that his latest screed today is unhinged,\u201d Shah said. \u201cAs an army veteran who served in Iraq, this type of rhetoric puts our troops in the region in greater danger. If we don\u2019t de-escalate, we will be dragged into another forever war in the Middle East that we can\u2019t afford.\u201d<\/p>\n
Democratic members of Congress expressed their alarm at Trump\u2019s comments.<\/p>\n
\u201cTargeting civilians en masse would be a clear violation of the law of armed conflict as laid out in the Geneva conventions, as well as the Pentagon\u2019s Law of War Manual,\u201d said Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat from Michigan and former defense official whom Trump unsuccessfully targeted for prosecution after circulating a video calling on service members to refuse illegal orders last year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis kind of focus on civilians is exactly what we accuse our adversaries of doing and what our military trains to avoid. It\u2019s built into the rigorous drilling and routines that our military are trained on from their first weeks. If they are today or have been asked to do things that violate the law and their training, it puts them in very real legal jeopardy.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/span>Show more<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Donald Trump\u2019s Tuesday morning comments threatening that \u201ca whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again\u201d in Iran have raised alarms among military observers and retired officers, who called them \u201clikely war crimes\u201d. \u201cI have to hope that this is bluster, and a negotiating tactic on his part,\u201d said retired admiral Michael<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48020,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[634,7411,964,84,744,4490,5618,1755,81,71,261],"class_list":{"0":"post-48019","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-call","9":"tag-crimes","10":"tag-donald","11":"tag-iran","12":"tag-military","13":"tag-officers","14":"tag-retired","15":"tag-threats","16":"tag-trump","17":"tag-trumps","18":"tag-war"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48019\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/48020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}