While a ceasefire agreement averted threatened devastation in Iran on Tuesday, President Donald’s Trump’s prior threat that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” cannot and should not be forgotten.
His words promising to inflict such massive violence should not be forgotten because they were, quite literally, criminal in their utterance, in addition to threatening the war crime of indiscriminate attacks: strikes that by their nature would lead to great civilian suffering. His words were criminal on their face even if such attacks didn’t materialize, because the law of war — as espoused by the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual — prohibits threats that terrorize the civilian population.
Such rhetoric continues to inflict moral injury on American service members.
Trump’s words should also not be forgotten, because such rhetoric continues to inflict moral injury on American service members — those whom the nation trusts to wield violence honorably and in accordance with the law of war America helped craft. When the president is seemingly telling them to ignore their training and fight in ways completely antithetical to both that training and their moral compass, surely our men and women in uniform question their oaths and mission — and they should.
They should also question whether the military law provision that all orders are presumed lawful still holds true when the commander-in-chief is himself committing and threatening to commit war crimes. Why should any order to bomb an Iranian power plant be presumed lawful in such context? Service members know there is no statute of limitations for war crimes, and that Trump won’t be in office forever.
Trump’s threats also diminished U.S. legitimacy, eroded American “soft power” on the global stage, furnished our enemies with recruiting material and simultaneously, gave them greater license to fight the same lawless way.
Context matters, and the president’s comments should not be written off as mere bombast or some type of ingenious negotiating tactic. Those words were criminal, harmful to our own fighting forces and dangerous to U.S. national security. Trump’s warning about the death of a civilization if the Iranian regime didn’t capitulate to his demands came on a day the U.S. military conducted more than 800 strikes. And that intensity followed six weeks of massive aerial bombardment. Thus the U.S. appeared capable of carrying out its threat of wholesale destruction.
Hence Trump’s genocidal remark — made after he’d spent more than a week threatening to obliterate Iranian civilian infrastructure — reduced the United States, at least in that instant, to the level of Iran, a rogue state that cares nothing about protecting human life, in particular civilian lives.
Trump’s warning made the U.S. appear to be a weak, renegade nation.
Indeed, Trump’s warning made the U.S. appear to be a weak, renegade nation, one that ignores the law that protects children and other innocent civilians during war (and protects our own service members if captured).
As a former officer with friends and family who still wear the uniform, I want Americans to ask: How must such a statement make our service members feel? Answer: not good.
Indeed, 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. We’re talking about a regime that just this year slaughtered thousands — if not tens of thousands — of its own people after protests. This regime has sponsored global terrorism for decades. It has attacked Israel and vowed to eliminate it as a nation.
Iran is a nefarious rogue state, but Trump’s threat Tuesday cast America — and, by extension, our far more powerful military — as caring even less than Iran does about innocent human life.
The ayatollahs have long told the Iranian people that the U.S. is the “Great Satan” bent on destroying the Iranian people. And then Trump confirmed their propaganda by threatening to eliminate them all by bombing the country “back to the stone ages.”
Some Americans may have become immune to, or altogether tuned out, Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s extreme rhetoric regarding the war in Iran. But their words have inflicted damage to American soft power and the invisible law of war that developed to help avoid a repeat of the massive suffering of World War II.
The U.S. military, despite missteps and breaches in application, has long committed to reducing incidental suffering as much as possible.
Their words also directly harm our men and women in uniform. Moral injury among service members is real, with psychological distress most prevalent among those who participate in operations that violate their, and our nation’s, core values. Threats that disregard the fundamental division of the battlefield between protected civilians and civilian objects on one hand and military targets on the other violate core American military values and the law. Moral injury can’t be avoided when their commander-in-chief’s threats are publicized around the globe.
The essence of war is violence. The U.S. military, despite missteps and breaches in application, has long committed to conducting war in a manner that allows it to successfully apply that violence while reducing incidental suffering as much as possible. This commitment is realized by institutionalized operationalization of the laws of war: the American military’s way of fighting.
This way of fighting has been demonstrated on the current battlefield. While each Iranian civilian casualty in the current conflict should be directly acknowledged and mourned (as well as investigated), to date, the overall total of civilian deaths is low (according to human rights groups: fewer than 1,500 near the end of March) relative to the number of strikes over six weeks of intense bombardment in a nation of more than 90 million people. This indicates that for the most part, the U.S. military continues to fight the way it’s been trained: true to its legal and moral commitments to the nation it serves.
Any departure from that, from America’s way of fighting — in rhetoric or in deeds — is in and of itself a loss.
Rachel E. VanLandingham retired as a lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Air Force. She is the Irwin R. Buchalter professor of law at Southwestern Law School, Los Angeles, and president emerita of the National Institute of Military Justice.