Any stalemate in negotiations to end both Iranian aggression in the Strait of Hormuz and their nuclear program should warrant the resumption of the bombing campaign against Iran. Greater destruction of Iran’s infrastructure may be needed to compel its military and political capitulation.
Before the ceasefire, the hyperbolic rhetoric in vogue among the administration’s critics was that the United States’s bombing operation against Iran, “Operation Epic Fury,” had crossed, or was about to cross, a legal line into “war crimes.” What this assertion belies is an appeasement ideology masquerading as sanctimonious condemnation.
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In March, NBC News at the White House questioned: “Why is the president threatening what would amount to potentially a war crime with the US military?” The New York Times featured an opinion piece entitled: “America is Abandoning Morality.” That opinion piece was then followed, days later, by a New York Times news article, entitled “Trump Revels in Threats to Commit War Crimes…,” conferring further journalistic credibility on the charge.
NO, TRUMP IS NOT COMMITTING WAR CRIMES IN IRAN
Nevertheless, the contemplated targets, as the president suggested, were power plants, bridges, and other infrastructure targets that serve both military purposes and civilian life. These so-called “dual-use” targets could be considered lawfully targetable despite the protestations platformed by many in the news media.
For example, according to a 2025 published Yale Law Journal article, expounding upon the legality of targeting dual-use infrastructure, under the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual, electrical power stations are “generally recognized to be of sufficient importance” to a state’s military functions “to qualify as military objectives during armed conflicts.” According to the journal authors, “the United States has played a critical role in both popularizing the idea of dual-use objects and spreading the practice … during the 1991 Gulf War, in which the U.S.-led coalition’s response to Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait included airstrikes on Iraq’s electrical infrastructure and bridges.”
What was then, in 1991, “shock and awe,” patriotically glorified by many in the national news media during the liberation of Kuwait, is now categorized as a despicable “war crime.”
For another historical comparison, the current Iran campaign is comparable to the 78-day NATO bombing effort against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from March 14, 1999, to June 9, 1999.
The NATO targets destroyed in that 1999 air campaign included 50 highway and railroad bridges, oil refineries, nine of Serbia’s major electric power generating facilities, and a number of Serbian electric power transmission towers.
According to a 2001 published Rand Report, the attacks on electric power targets produced major power disruptions of significant duration throughout Serbia, causing electrical blackouts and a lack of running water in many cities, towns, and villages. By the beginning of June 1999, Belgrade was receiving only about 6% of its normal power supply, and without electricity, the pumps providing the water for drinking, bathing, and sewage became inoperative for the civilian population.
Following that military campaign, allegations were made that senior political and military figures from NATO countries committed violations of international humanitarian law. Consequently, a United Nations Prosecutor and Special Committee were charged with investigating the conduct of the war by NATO.
In June 2000, a “Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia | International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia” was released.
The U.N. prosecutor concluded that: “On the basis of the information reviewed, however, the committee is of the opinion that neither an in-depth investigation related to the bombing campaign as a whole nor investigations related to specific incidents are justified.”
The findings of the investigation went on to state: “In all cases, either the law is not sufficiently clear or investigations are unlikely to result in the acquisition of sufficient evidence to substantiate charges against high level accused or against lower accused for particularly heinous offences.”
While Western legal experts pontificate on the proper, humane conduct of modern warfare, Iran demonstrated before the ceasefire no such compunction, indiscriminately lobbing cluster munition missiles at civilian targets in urban areas.
WHY DO ‘WAR CRIMES’ ACCUSATIONS NEVER APPLY TO IRAN?
The fact that the United States is even now negotiating with Iran’s perpetrators of mass murder, of its own people, and other genocidal atrocities committed by its terrorist proxies in Yemen, Syria, and Gaza, doesn’t seem to rankle the professed morality of leftist ideologues.
Meanwhile, the sophistry and polemics of the war crime smear undermine the president’s negotiating leverage and do nothing to advance the cause of freedom and the defeat of a state sponsor of terrorism that indisputably threatens the entirety of the Western world and our Middle East allies.
Barry Ziman is a novelist and government relations professional residing in Northern Virginia.
