At present the United States has yet to go to war with Iran following Donald Trump’s decision last week to assassinate one of its top generals, and the response from the Middle East that “severe revenge” will be taken against those behind the attack, i.e. America. Nevertheless, the president spent the weekend giving the world a preview of what his leadership might look like should things escalate to that point, which might be best characterized as “typical Trump but even more batshit.”
The president kicked things off on Sunday by threatening to destroy dozens of Iranian cultural sites should the country retaliate for the killing of Qasem Soleimani, which would, [checks notes], be considered a war crime under international law. Tweeting from Mar-a-Lago, Trump warned: “Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have 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!” (Such a move “would be a war crime,” Kelly Magsamen, a former official at the National Security Council and the Pentagon, told the Washington Post. “DOD has very professional planners who take their obligations and fidelity to law seriously. Any military planner, any U.S. soldier would know that. The fact that the president of the United States doesn’t know that is profoundly frightening to me. If he does know it and he’s still saying it, that’s even worse.”)
Later, using characteristically insane capitalization, Trump ranted: “The United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment. We are the biggest and by far the BEST in the World! If Iran attacks an American Base, or any American, we will be sending some of that brand new beautiful equipment their way…and without hesitation!” The true pièce de résistance of the afternoon, though, came when he declared that tweets are the same thing as formal notifications to Congress, and that, apparently, he has the same regard for the War Powers Act of 1973 as he does the Charmin Ultra Soft in the Oval Office powder room.
While aides presumably put him down for pre-dinner nap in the hopes that he would wake up in a slightly less belligerent mood, such was not the case. Aboard Air Force One on Sunday night, Trump repeated his threats to reporters, and threw in a few against Iraq to boot, telling the pool: “We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s [in Iraq]. It cost billions of dollars to build—long before my time. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it…If they do ask us to leave,” he added, we won’t do it on “a very friendly basis. We will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.” Circling back to his intention to commit war crimes against Iran, he told the group: “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.”
As you can probably imagine, Democrats were not thrilled with the performance or the suggestion that the president of the United States doesn’t need to consult Congress about attacking other countries. “Targeting civilians and cultural sites is what terrorists do. It’s a war crime. Trump is stumbling into a war of choice,” Senator Chris Murphy a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted. “A war entirely of his making. A war that will get thousands of Americans killed. Congress must stop him.”
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