Trump, Hegseth and the Language of War Crimes

He’s out of ideas, a mind running on empty.  Increasingly, he is also short of reason, zapped by geopolitical addling and meddling.  Now that US President Donald J. Trump has reached an uneasy understanding with Teheran that a two-week ceasefire should apply to the warring parties (Israel, as usual, has its own elastic interpretation as it continues attacking Lebanon), it is worth considering the warring language he has been using since February 28.  Of note is the shrill wording of various ultimata he has directed at Iran.

On April 7, the President seemed to flirt with the notion of genocide in promising that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back.  I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”  With biblical promise, he was certain that “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World” was about to befall humanity.  “47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end.”

On Easter Sunday, another message was posted bellowing that “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran.  There will be nothing like it!!!”  Strong language followed. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards,” he railed in making reference to Iran’s restrictive hold on the Strait of Hormuz, “or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!”  Showing a mind turned to slurry, America’s commander-in-chief then praised Allah.

A few days prior, the President issued another threatening note to his adversaries.  “If there is no deal, we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants, very hard and probably simultaneously.”  This came after strained suggestions that Iran’s new leadership was seeking a ceasefire but could expect nothing without the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.  “Until then, we are blasting Iran into oblivion, or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!!”

No degree of lexical polishing, ducking and adjustment escapes the central tenet of such words.  They show a lack of discrimination, a lack of proportion, and can only amount to war crimes, either in terms of promised or ongoing operations.  Article 52 of the Geneva Convention Additional Protocol I, for instance, makes it abundantly clear that attacks shall only “be limited strictly to military objectives”.  Targeted objects shall only be those that “make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture, or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.”  Article 57 affirms that “constant care shall be taken to spare the civilian population, civilians and civilian objects.”  A number of precautionary steps to ensure that aim are enumerated, including, for instance, verifying “that the objectives to be attacked are neither civilians nor civilian objects”.

In a measured assessment of Trump’s spray of promised annihilation published in Just Security, Margaret Donovan and Rachel VanLandingham, both former uniformed military lawyers, also consider the grave effects of such statements on serving personnel.  “[W]e know the president’s words run counter to decades of legal training of military personnel and risk placing our warfighters [sic] on a path of no return.”  Such rhetoric did not merely “undermine US legitimacy and global standing” but posed “a significant risk of moral and psychic injury for servicemembers.”  They further imperilled soldiers by placing them at risk of future prosecutions for war crimes that would not fall within the statute of limitations.

To Trump’s chilling language can also be added various sinister remarks from Secretary of Defense (or War, as he prefers) Pete Hegseth, who has soiled the conventions of international humanitarian law by expressly declaring that “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” will be shown.  That’s the Lieber Code, the Hague Conventions, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court out the door, perhaps unsurprising from a man who had claimed that US forces should pursue “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”

Far from being unbecoming aberrations, these comments from Trump and Hegseth are not out of character in the history of American warfare. The no-quarter logic was habitually demonstrated during the Civil War, notably when it came to killing captured Black American soldiers.  Historian George S. Burkhardt goes as far as to suggest that an unofficial policy existed among the Confederates that they could execute Black American soldiers and their white officers captured in combat fighting for the Union.  This pattern of no prisoners and no quarter would again assert itself in such theatres of conflict as the Philippines, when, in September 1901, Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith demandedof Major Littleton Waller that no prisoners were to be taken in the aftermath of a surprise attack on the island of Samar which left 54 American soldiers dead.  “I wish you to kill and burn,” he growled, insisting that the island of Samar be turned into a “howling wilderness”.  Ditto the ferocious combat shown in the Pacific during the Second World War, when merciless no-quarterism was manifest as US forces made their way towards Japan.

Having noted all three examples, Ali Sanaei of the University of Chicago observes that such instances are not only unlawful but diagnostic.  “It appears when war is not imagined as reciprocal combat but as punitive domination over populations thought incapable of deserving the usual protections.”  Whatever gilded rhetoric on notions of freedom issue from the Trump administration when it comes to the Iran War, it has become increasingly clear that distinctions between foe and non-combatant have fogged up and vanished, leaving the sort of stubborn resistance that demands punishment.  Yet, even as statute books are blotted and conventions maligned, the stubborn continue to prevail.

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