Notwithstanding the Iran ceasefire, “President Donald Trump’s … threat that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,’ cannot and should not be forgotten.”
The author of those words, Lt. Col. Rachel E. VanLandingham (retired, Air Force), is a professor of law and president emerita of the National Institute of Military Justice.
Doing what Trump threatened would be a war crime. But the bare words “were criminal on their face … because the law of war — as espoused by the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual — prohibits threats that terrorize the civilian population.”
VanLandingham sees moral injury to American military personnel as a likely result, plus damage to U.S. legitimacy and “soft power” worldwide. All of which lowers the bar for current or future enemies.
Ironically, VanLandingham warns, “Trump’s genocidal threat made the Iranian regime look, at least for an instant, like the good guys in this conflict. And it’s incredibly hard to make the repressive, brutal Iranian theocratic regime look sympathetic.”
Given the increasing crudeness of Trump’s vocabulary and obtuseness of his stated goals, are we sure he even understands what’s at stake?
Eugene V. Torisky Jr.
Latrobe