by Victor Davis Hanson
Trump’s critics cry “war crimes” while ignoring decades of U.S. precedent—revealing less a legal argument than a reflexive, and deeply selective, political outrage.
The Left and some on the Right went crazy over a recent Trump tweet.
He warned that if the Iranian regime did not cease blocking the international Strait of Hormuz, he would hit its dual military-civilian infrastructure. He promised that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
His wording may have been sloppy, but Trump obviously meant that the murderous civilization/culture of radical Iranian theocratic Islam would cease to exist and wouldn’t come back once power plants and transportation systems crucial to the regime’s survival were cut off.
Why do we know that?
Because, unlike in most prior American wars, Trump has never targeted dual-use infrastructure—not in bombing ISIS, not in removing the Venezuelan thug Nicolás Maduro, not in the 2025 bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, and not in the present war—with the exception of a key bridge central to the regime’s efforts to reposition missile assets to avoid air strikes.
Ever since Trump announced that “help is on the way” to the Iranian people, the entire aim of the five-week war has been to selectively target the regime’s command and control and military assets.
The goal was to diminish its threats abroad, while weakening and humiliating the mullahcracy at home—so that soon the Iranian people might at last be able to overthrow the odious theocracy.
Trump’s critics knew all that.
But they see political advantage in tagging Trump as a Strangelovian madman, no different from the Nazi criminals in the docket at Nuremberg.
A few less unhinged people argue that his rhetoric nevertheless comes across as unpresidential.
Perhaps.
But it may be no accident that his Gen. Curtis LeMay-like bluster might have pressured the Iranians to reopen negotiations.
On Monday, the Democrat Borg was declaring Trump a savage maniac.
By Tuesday, it was blasting him as a TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) for not carrying out what the day before they had dubbed a war crime.
The common denominator was an overarching, deranged hatred of the president, as his critics can never decide whether he is Adolf Hitler or Neville Chamberlain.
But since the Left has called for investigations of war crimes, by all means let them begin.
Obviously, Trump’s critics conveniently no longer buy the argument of “dual-use.” It posits that the juice powering an evil enemy is its roads, bridges, fuel, and electricity. To disable them supposedly shortens the war and the killing.
In World War II, we leveled a dozen Japanese cities because the Tokyo junta had outsourced the assembly of weapons to urban neighborhood workshops.
We joined the British in leveling Dresden by targeting German transportation.
Perhaps the Left will now remove the iconic names of Democratic Presidents Roosevelt and Truman from our buildings and monuments?
Truman should be a twofer boogeyman.
He ordered every bridge and hydroelectric plant in North Korea to be incinerated during the Korean War.
How about the Lyndon Johnson/Richard Nixon bombing of North Vietnam? Their war machine annihilated most of its civilian infrastructure in efforts to force the communists to negotiate.
The 42-day bombing campaign in the First Gulf War targeted power stations, roads, bridges, and dual-use government buildings.
Should we go back and Trotskyize its strategic architects—George H. W. Bush and Gen. Colin Powell?
Sen. Mark Kelly is one of Trump’s fiercest critics in pressing the war crimes charge. Perhaps he, too, should be post facto investigated by the International Criminal Court, given the fact that, in 1991, he was a pilot in an air force that frequently hit bridges and other dual-use targets?
How about the “noble” NATO effort in Serbia?
According to the logic of current critics, there must be lots of war criminals still to be found who were involved in that merciless 1999 bombing of Belgrade.
Bill Clinton’s gambit wrecked all the bridges on the Danube and often left more than a million civilians without power.
Will we indict Barack Obama for ordering more than 500 targeted predator assassination hits on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border without Congressional authorization, strikes that ended up killing four American citizens?
Perhaps we can reinvestigate Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, and Susan Rice, the architects of the 2011 “unlawful” and Congressionally “unauthorized” seven-month bombing of a mostly inert Libya.
And why not reexamine Obama? He snubbed the 60–90 War Powers Act window, which required him to obtain congressional authority to continue that mindless devastation.
The Libyan wreckage included civilian ships, port facilities, TV buildings, telecommunications, and government offices—and left the country an utter mess that continues 15 years later.
The left-wing and paleo Right fury has far exceeded any legitimate critique of strategy and tactics.
It has now become not just incoherent but crazed, since it appears that many despise Trump more than they do the murderous Iranian regime.
And now they add the weight of rank hypocrisy to their serial untruths.
Victor Davis Hanson
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/04/09/by-all-means-let-the-war-crimes-trials-begin/
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