US president Donald Trump boasts that if there is no deal the US intends to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age, where they belong,” and to hit oil facilities and “each and every one of their electric-generating plants very hard”.
His statement, rightly criticised internationally, including by Taoiseach Micheál Martin, represents an outrageous threat to violate the international rules of war, specifically the Geneva Conventions.
Those rules, particularly the failure to distinguish between military and civilian targets, have been breached many times in Gaza, Ukraine and now Iran. Those responsible have sought, however unconvincingly, to excuse themselves by insisting civilian casualties are accidental by-products of strikes on legitimate military targets. Trump has no such scruples.
Speaking in a national televised broadcast on Wednesday evening, he claimed he would achieve US goals for the war “very shortly” but signalled further escalation, rather than a quick peace deal. He urged increasingly alarmed Americans, not least in his Maga base to whom he had promised to avoid international embroilments, to “keep this conflict in perspective”, calling it a “little journey to Iran”, insisting it was not nearly as long as other US wars.
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“We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly,” he claimed. The US has certainly degraded the Iranian military, navy, and missile capabilities, although Iran still has the ability both to strike hard at Gulf neighbours and deny shipping the use of the Strait of Hormuz, dangerously damaging the world economy.
And what of America’s political objectives? There was no mention of the downtrodden Iranian people, whose rights Trump promised to champion and whom he now proposes to plunge into the Stone Age. He claims, preposterously, to have already effected regime change although power continues, after numerous assassinations, to rest with the brutal Revolutionary Guards.
Other unfinished business, specifically the guaranteeing of safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, is now a matter for everyone else, he says. And Trump is implausibly attempting to pretend to voters that “short-term” increases in domestic petrol prices are nothing to do with him.
“This is not our war” western allies are responding rightly – any role in escorting ships and demining in the strait, they insist, will have to await an end to hostilities. n response, Trump has taken his bullying of allies to new levels, again threatening to pull out of Nato because they have refused to back his war. His recklessness will further convince these countries that the US is an unreliable – and dangerous – partner under Trump and that they must set their future strategies accordingly.
