President Trump shouldn’t, can’t, and won’t tell the U.S. military to attack Iranian cultural sites. This bears noting in light of the furor that has followed Trump’s Twitter warning on Saturday.
….targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2020
Trump seemingly doubled down on his threat on Sunday, warning, “They’re allowed to kill our people, they’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way.”
Actually, it does work that way.
The first point here is that this is all probably a misunderstanding of definitions.
Consider Trump’s original tweet that the United States has already “targeted 52 Iranian sites … important to Iran and the Iranian culture.” That strongly implies the U.S. military has identified those prospective targets and briefed them to Trump or his team. And that’s a critical point to observe in the context of how the U.S. military develops targets for a strike.
It does so with an extreme attention to what constitutes a lawful target and with a specific eye to mitigating civilian casualties. Even where hostile forces are fixed in the locale of a cultural target such as a mosque, strike approval is rarely given. It’s not just the commander who must decide on the legitimacy of a strike, but military lawyers embedded within the targeting and command teams. The same is true of the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Certainly, this process would exclude targeting of civilian targets. The exception, of course, is a full-scale nuclear war.
But with Trump saying that 52 targets have already been identified, he’s effectively saying that the military has presented those targets to him. And that means the targets are not “cultural” sites as we would perceive them. They are likely military command targets inside Tehran.
What if Trump tried to override this process and demand strikes against cultural sites such as Isfahan’s Friday Mosque?
In that scenario, the military leadership, likely including Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, would almost certainly threaten to resign. They recognize that to launch such an attack would be utterly incompatible with military honor and the nation’s values. It would make America a moral partner to Russia, China, and Iran: adversaries who value life only as long as it kneels to their interests. America is better, and must be better, than that.
Finally, let’s imagine that Trump was determined to continue with his cultural targeting even after the Joint Chiefs had very publicly resigned. Assuming he was not removed from office by impeachment or the cabinet’s invoking of the 25th Amendment, Trump would still find himself no closer to his desired outcome.
After all, the law of war, as inscribed in military training and doctrine, requires commanders and their subordinate officers to act with great care in the protection of civilian life and objects. It would thus be the moral and legal responsibility of any U.S. military officer and noncommissioned officer to refuse an order to target civilian cultural sites, absent Iranian use of those sites for an ongoing military purpose.
In short, Trump probably meant something else with his threat. But even if he didn’t, it’s a moot point anyway.
[Read more: Trump warns Iran of ‘massive retaliation’ if it responds to Soleimani killing]
