Trump, Iran, and the "War Crime" Double Standard | Victor Davis Hanson

So everybody got very angry, and it's true that Trump could have used a better noun for civilization. The critics who say that he's genocidal, he should be charged with war crime, they know what he meant. And they know what he meant for two reasons. Before we even went in, he said to the Iranian people, help is on the way. And unlike prior American wars, Donald Trump, for over five weeks, has not targeted civilian infrastructure. He has not targeted the civilization of Iran. What does he, he hit one bridge. He was threatening to hit dual use, dual use. These are assets that can be used militarily and for civilian. And he said, they're going to end tonight. But he said, your civilization, and he was talking directly to the theocracy, because he should have said, if he was a linguist or explicit, or his advisors could have said, your fascistic Islamic culture that runs the country will cease, and there would have been no problem. But he gave his enemies an opening by being a little bit vaguer. But here's the flip side. By saying civilization, and by having his critics say that he was crazy, that he was unhinged, that he was Hitlerian, it may have strengthened the credibility to the Iranians. They may have thought, wow, he's gone way over, he's jumped the shark, he's talking about the existential destruction of the physical space of Iran. Oh, my gosh. And they came to negotiations, at least temporarily. So that brinkmanship, reminiscent of Curtis LeMay, and we should bomb him back to the Stone Age in Vietnam, it worked. Is it a good thing to do? No. But they know he didn't mean it. They can't decide, because on Monday after that tweet, they were comparing him to Adolf Hitler. By Wednesday, excuse me, yesterday, we're speaking on Wednesday, by Tuesday, they were calling him a taco. Trump always chickens out. That was Bill Kristol and the new coalition of the Democratic Borg. That's what they are. They are mindless mimics that are controlled by an overarching war room that feeds them their rhetoric. And then the vestigial elements of the never Trumpers, the Bill Kristols and all those people at the Bulwark and partly in the dispatch. And then I would call them the remnant MAGA social media influencers. They can't decide whether he's Hitler on Monday or whether he's Neville Chamberlain on Tuesday, the appeaser. I would just like to remind everybody, I can't think of a war off hand where we didn't hit dual use. So here's my question. Will all you people on the left and the right go back to World War II and say, we want to strip FDR's name off buildings and monuments because we obliterated why he was still president on March 11th, 1945, Tokyo and 11 cities that followed. And the argument was that they were assembling war materials in their suburban workshops and we dropped leaflets and said, you should get out. We went in the next day after Dresden and hit all of the rail yards, locomotives. Yes, they were being used to supply the Eastern front. They were being used to ship Jews and I have no problem with it, but they were also dual use. In Korea, Harry Truman ordered all of the hydroelectric plants of North Korea to be wiped out. There was a movie, a great movie, I thought, with Bill Holden, Mickey Rooney, and an array of movie stars and it was called The Bridges at Tokyo Ray about bombing the North Korean bridges. We knocked out all the hydroelectric civilian use in North Korea. During Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson, Rolling Thunder, Richard Nixon, Operation Linebacker, both of them went into North Korea and they destroyed bridges and roads and train yards and electric plants. So what I've just talked about is a democratic Roosevelt, a democratic Truman, a democratic LBJ. But that's not all. If I could continue with your permission. Please, go ahead. Okay. So then they said, after Vietnam, they said, we're going to go into the first Gulf War. And that was the decision of George H.W. Bush, but his close advisor was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, who incidentally said, when we spot the Iraqi Republican Guard, Iraqi soldiers, we're going to cut it off and kill it, kill it, annihilate it. Did anybody say at the time, well, General Powell, what if they surrender or when you kill some of them, you're going to kill it, you're going to destroy it and kill everybody? They wouldn't say that. But here's the thing, Mark Kelly, Senator from Arizona, has been caught charging that Trump is a war criminal. He was a Navy pilot in the first Gulf War. I don't know the exact missions that he flew. I think he flew over 30 missions quite heroically. I have no problem. I think he did a service, but those missions that Naval pilots flew included hitting telecommunications, hitting TV stations, hitting power plants, hitting bridges. I don't know what he did in each one, but it's likely that he hit dual use as he was ordered. We said, Senator Kelly, we're going to investigate you post-factual because you hit things that robbed civilians of their civilization. And then we go to the Locus Classicus, and that is the 1999 bombing of Serbia to stop its war in Kosovo. That was the Bill Clinton adventure. He was asked by our NATO allies, and again, the NATO allies always go on their misadventures first, Libya, and then they go into the Falklands, which was successful, they go into Chad, and then they ask us for help. And then they say, now that you're going on misadventures and we can't help you, it's yours. And they're going to find out it's a two-way street very soon. But we go into Serbia and we bomb a European country, and we took out every bridge on the Danube and paralyzed the entire city of over 1.3 million at the time. And we took out all of the electrical grid for days, hours, every day. Did anybody say to the NATO pilots, and by the way, they wanted to start this, and we ended up flying 80% of the missions, but did anybody go back and say, well, we're going to call the International Criminal Court, pilot, pilot, pilot, you hit a bridge, and you hit the power grid in Belgrade, and people were being operated on, they died. If that's not enough, we can then go to the 2011 bombing of Libya. That was cooked up by the French and the English with the coalition of NATO powers. Gaddafi was on his last legs, the Arab Spring was a mess, it wasn't the democratic renaissance they told us. I had visited the country, he was liberalizing it, he was turning over power insidiously to the next generation that were westernized, but we decided to go bomb him because the French and the British said it was a humanitarian gesture, and we had the triad, the three sirens, the three graces, if you could say it. We had Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, speaking for Obama. And they said, we've got to go in and bomb these people. We bombed them for seven months. And by the way, after 60 to 90 days, the War Powers Authorization Act ends. In other words, you can negotiate from 60 to 90 days about whether you need Congress's approval to make war. After that, it's illegal. Supposedly, courts have challenged this, but Obama just said, no, I'm Barack Obama, I'm a left wing. You're not going to do anything because you control Congress. And they didn't. So he bombed for seven months.