By All Means, Let the War Crimes Trials Begin!

By All Means, Let the War Crimes Trials Begin!


Trump’s critics cry “war crimes” while ignoring decades of U.S. precedent—revealing less a legal argument than a reflexive, and deeply selective, political outrage.

By Victor Davis Hanson
The Left and some on the Right went crazy over a recent Trump tweet.

He warned that if the Iranian regime did not cease blocking the international Strait of Hormuz, he would hit its dual military-civilian infrastructure. He promised that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

His wording may have been sloppy, but Trump obviously meant that the murderous civilization/culture of radical Iranian theocratic Islam would cease to exist and wouldn’t come back once power plants and transportation systems crucial to the regime’s survival were cut off.

Why do we know that?

Because, unlike in most prior American wars, Trump has never targeted dual-use infrastructure—not in bombing ISIS, not in removing the Venezuelan thug Nicolás Maduro, not in the 2025 bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, and not in the present war—with the exception of a key bridge central to the regime’s efforts to reposition missile assets to avoid air strikes.

Ever since Trump announced that “help is on the way” to the Iranian people, the entire aim of the five-week war has been to selectively target the regime’s command and control and military assets.

The goal was to diminish its threats abroad, while weakening and humiliating the mullahcracy at home—so that soon the Iranian people might at last be able to overthrow the odious theocracy.

Trump’s critics knew all that.

But they see political advantage in tagging Trump as a Strangelovian madman, no different from the Nazi criminals in the docket at Nuremberg.

A few less unhinged people argue that his rhetoric nevertheless comes across as unpresidential.

Perhaps.

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