As the third week of the war with Iran came to an end, Donald Trump published a different kind of threat to his social media platform: If Iran failed to fully open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, he wrote, the United States would start destroying civilian power plants in the country.

Trump ended up backing off, but the significance of the threat lingered. It suggested the administration was prepared to target civilian energy supply, which many observers recognized as a potential war crime.

As the sixth week of the war gets underway, the Republican isn’t just toying with the possibility of war crimes, he’s starting to lean into the idea with increased enthusiasm.

Trump’s Easter morning madness generated headlines for various reasons, but among the more notable was that his online missive included explicit vows to target Iranian power plants and bridges. As the day progressed, the president did brief, one-on-one interviews with several media outlets to echo that point. The Wall Street Journal reported:

President Trump threatened to destroy all of Iran’s power plants if the country’s leaders don’t agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday evening, ratcheting up pressure on Tehran.

‘If they don’t come through, if they want to keep it closed, they’re going to lose every power plant and every other plant they have in the whole country,’ Trump said in an eight-minute interview with The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.

Other news organizations heard similar comments. Trump told ABC News, for example, that he’s prepared to “blow up the whole country.” He also told Fox News, “I’m considering blowing everything up and taking over the oil.”

Pressed last week on whether the administration was prepared to commit war crimes, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a briefing, “Of course, this administration and the United States armed forces will always act within the confines of the law, but with respect to achieving the objectives of Operation Epic Fury, President Trump is going to move forward unabated.”

There was obvious tension, however, between the first half of the sentence and the second.

The New York Times reported on the degree to which the president has steered the nation in radical directions:

No other recent American president has talked so openly about committing potential war crimes, legal experts, historians and former U.S. officials say. Wartime American presidents and their aides have usually insisted they were trying to follow international and U.S. military law, even if they violated it in some cases.

International laws aimed at preventing the horrors of total war are codified in a series of agreements, including the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles and the United Nations Charter. Deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure violate those. So does pillaging a country, which Mr. Trump has suggested he might do by taking Iran’s oil.

I’m not in a position to say with confidence what the administration might do next or whether the president might be bluffing.

But as his threats continue and the world confronts the very real possibility of watching the U.S. transition from writing war crimes statutes to violating them, among the institutions I’ll be watching closely is the U.S. armed forces.

If Trump orders the military to commit war crimes, will military leaders resign? If individual troops are directed to execute illegal orders, will they comply?

Nearly six months ago, six Democratic military and intelligence veterans appeared in a video to urge service members to reject illegal orders. This sparked apoplexy within the administration, as if it were outrageous to remind service members to follow the law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (Trump’s Justice Department ultimately tried to indict the lawmakers on charges of seditious conspiracy — charges that, if they resulted in a conviction, would have sent the lawmakers to prison for many years. Regular citizens on the grand jury rebuffed the ridiculous gambit in late February.)

The White House’s hysterics about that video and its emphasis on service members following the law is newly relevant as Trump weighs the possibility of war crimes.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Trump abandons all subtlety with talk of possible war crimes in Iran appeared first on MS NOW.

Author: Source Author

From MS Now.