NYT: America is abandoning Morality

As many Americans prepared to start the workweek, President Trump announced his intentions to destroy Iran’s electricity-generating stations and water-purifying plants should the regime fail to lift its blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.

The president’s ultimatum is a contemptible departure from the restraint that most wartime presidents have strived for. The bombing campaign Mr. Trump described holds the potential to affect millions of Iranian civilians, inflicting long-term consequences on their access to water, electricity and other necessities. Such an attack order should never be given — in public or private, ‘The New York Times’ stresses.

His proposal, if acted upon, would almost certainly amount to a war crime. One of the central tenets of the laws that govern modern conflict is that the targeting of civilians is off limits in military campaigns. Customary law of war principles would prohibit infrastructure providing essential services to civilians from targeted obliteration.

Should the U.S. military act on an order from Mr. Trump to indiscriminately destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure, it will be a flagrant violation of the laws of armed conflict and international humanitarian law, said Robert Goldman, a law professor and the faculty director of the War Crimes Research Office at American University. “It’s wanton destruction that would bring about clear and foreseeable catastrophic effects on the civilian population,” Mr. Goldman said.

These acts would also be antithetical to how the American military sees itself — maintaining a moral standing that dates back to the Revolutionary War. The foreword of the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual says, “The law of war is a part of our military heritage, and obeying it is the right thing to do.” It continues, “But we also know that the law of war poses no obstacle to fighting well and prevailing.”

The language of war

Mr. Trump’s threats to indiscriminately launch airstrikes on Iran’s infrastructure amount to holding a civilian population hostage as a means of coercing the government in Tehran.

Praising gratuitous death and destruction has been a running theme in Mr. Trump’s second term. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has publicly dismissed the “stupid rules of engagement,” which are drawn up by senior officers and U.S. military lawyers to protect both troops and civilians, and instead has called for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

This glorification of carnage has been echoed in the White House’s social media channels, which in recent weeks have published a series of stomach-churning propaganda clips that feature real footage of airstrikes in Iran cut with cartoons and scenes from video games and movies — all edited to guitar lick-laden soundtracks. War may appear super cool to Trump administration staffers who watch it from 6,000 miles away through a pop-culture viewfinder, but the rest of us should examine the human reality — and cost — of combat.

Confirmed Gulf war casualties

In Iran, no fewer than 1,443 civilians, at least 217 of them children, have been killed since Mr. Trump launched the war alongside Israel on Feb. 28, a consortium of human rights groups estimated in a recent report. The United Nations reports up to 3.2 million Iranians have been displaced from their homes. More than 1,110 people have been killed in Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon, more than 50 people have been killed in Persian Gulf countries and at least 16 people have died in Iran’s attacks on Israel.

Across the region, 13 American military service members have been killed and more than 300 U.S. troops have been injured.

Photo: Reuters

If the U.S. military follows through with the president’s proposed attacks, it will surely open an even bloodier new chapter as the war continues in its fifth week. It would be a major escalation that risks even greater Iranian retaliation against allies’ energy sites across the Gulf, causing a domino effect of suffering for civilians across the Middle East.

It would also be self-defeating. More likely, it would propagate a new generation of enemies for Americans to fight.

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