If Trump commits war crimes in Iran, he can be prosecuted |
Donald Trump is openly threatening war crimes in Iran because he apparently thinks he can get away with them. Sadly, the US supreme court has given him reason to believe in his impunity within the United States. But there are international options for prosecution that lie beyond the court’s lawless license. They are not easy to exercise, but the terrible precedent of the world’s most powerful president openly flouting international humanitarian law should compel action.
There is no doubt that Trump is contemplating war crimes. As part of his plan to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages” and wipe out a “whole civilization”, Trump has threatened to destroy such civilian infrastructure as desalination plants, electrical-generating facilities and bridges.
Even if there is some military use of these facilities – soldiers drink water, deploy electricity, drive over bridges – the anticipated “concrete and direct military advantage” of destroying them pales in comparison to the likely civilian consequences. That violates international humanitarian law’s rule of proportionality.
In other words, it is not enough for something to be a dual-use object. If the civilian harm of targeting the object is disproportionate to the military gain, it cannot be attacked. For example, destroying a country’s electricity-generating capacity has cascading effects throughout a modern society, disrupting sanitation, refrigeration, hospitals and other necessities.
That is why the international criminal court has charged four Russian military commanders with the war crime of attacking electrical infrastructure in Ukraine. The Pentagon did carry out such attacks in 1991 during the first Gulf war, but after Human Rights Watch and others documented these disruptive and often deadly results, Pentagon doctrine changed.
During the 1999 bombing of Serbia to protect Kosovo, the........