How the Bombing of Schoolchildren Fits Into Trump’s War |
Last Saturday, a journalist asked President Donald Trump about the reported U.S. bombing of a water desalination plant in Iran. The president said he did not know about the attack. But, either way, it did not matter to him. “They are among the most evil people ever on Earth,” Trump said to excuse a military action that could cut off water to residents of a country already experiencing severe drought. “They cut babies’ heads off. They chop women in half.”
Trump appeared to be referring to unverified claims about Hamas’s attack on October 7 and Iran’s role in funding the group. But his retort, however specious, also reflected an old Washington logic used many times over the past few decades to justify war: that U.S. atrocities are negligible when the broader incursion is justifiable. “Take a look at what they’ve done over the last 47 years,” Trump said of Iran. Because “they” are “evil,” by edict of the U.S. president, the usual legal standards of warfare do not apply.
What’s very different this time is the Trump administration’s almost total lack of interest in justifying the broader incursion at all.
From the beginning of this war, the administration’s rationale for attacking the Islamic Republic has been all over the map. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said it was not intended to be a “regime-change war” — but then again, it isn’t not one, either. (“The regime sure did change and the world is better off for it,” he said at the Pentagon last week.) Secretary of State Marco Rubio has offered increasingly convoluted explanations ranging from, essentially, “Israel pulled us into it” to “No, Israel didn’t,” because that would look bad. Trump, for his part, has........