On Tuesday you watched a sitting American president walk into the hall of the United Nations, an organization whose Charter opens with a promise “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” and weigh out loud the future generations of an entire nation as if they were chips on a card table he had every right to sweep onto the floor.
Here is what he said, word for word. “I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?”
Then he went further:
“Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
Read the last word of that threat one more time, because the word he chose was generations.
Generations belong to people. A nation loses its future generations only when someone ends the lives of its children, the mothers carrying them, the grandparents raising them, and the civilians who never had a say in this war. When a president threatens a country’s future generations, he puts every child in that country inside the threat. Think of it this way. A man who threatens to burn down your family’s future has threatened your kids, and he never has to say their names out loud for the threat to land on them. *When a president threatens a nation’s future generations, every child in that nation becomes the target of his words.*
Who lives in the blast radius
Iran is home to roughly 92 million people. Most of them have never fired a missile or closed a shipping lane in their lives. They are schoolteachers in Shiraz and newborns in Tabriz hospitals. The UN’s human rights chief said it plainly: civilians with no power over the decisions behind a war pay its highest price.
You already know what this war does to them. On February 28, a United States Tomahawk missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab. The UN mission’s findings put the dead at 156 to 157, and about 120 of them were schoolchildren who died alongside their teachers. Think about the drop off line at your own grandkids’ school on a Monday morning, with the backpacks and the lunch bags, and then picture about 120 of those children gone in one strike.
In May, CENTCOM’s commander said preliminary Pentagon findings tied the strike to US forces. Last week, a UN fact finding mission found reasonable grounds to believe US forces committed war crimes in two strikes that day. Washington disputes responsibility for the second strike, in Lamerd. The children had no vote in this war, and about 120 of them paid for it with their lives.
This speech fits a pattern. In April, after more than two weeks of threatening Iran’s bridges and power stations, he posted that a whole civilization would die, and back in March his Defense Secretary had already set the tone by saying of Iran’s regime, “No quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”
The rules on the books
Here is what the law says, and why the words themselves, with no bomb attached, count under several of these rules. Hold each one in your head the way a juror holds an exhibit.
The 1907 Hague Regulations, Article 23(d), make it “especially forbidden… to declare that no quarter will be given.” The United States ratified this treaty in 1909. In plain English, the rule protects enemy fighters who try to surrender, so no commander gets to announce ahead of time that everyone dies, even the ones with their hands up. The Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual, section 5.4.7, extends the rule to fighting on the basis that there will be no survivors and to threatening the adversary with denial of quarter. Threatening the Islamic Republic with “no chance of survival” fits that language closely.
Congress took that rule and made it American criminal law in the War Crimes Act, 18 U.S.C. section 2441(c)(2), which makes violations of Article 23 of the Hague Regulations a federal war crime, a law Congress wrote and one that binds every American, the one in the Oval Office included.
Additional Protocol I, Article 40, reads: “It is prohibited to order that there shall be no survivors, to threaten an adversary therewith or to conduct hostilities on this basis.” Look at the middle clause. It bans the threat itself. The United States signed this protocol and never ratified it. US officials have publicly endorsed the principle that no adversary be threatened with a no survivors order, and the Red Cross treats the rule as longstanding customary law, which means nations are bound by it through settled practice.
The grandmother in Isfahan and the baby in Tabriz get their protection from Article 51(2) of that same protocol: “Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.” The Red Cross treats this one as customary law as well.
The steepest charge to prove sits in the Genocide Convention, Article III(c), and its federal twin, 18 U.S.C. section 1091(c). The United States ratified the Convention in 1988 and made “direct and public” incitement to genocide a federal crime. Courts demand proof that the speaker intended to destroy a protected group and that the call was direct.
Older than the airplane
This rule has deep roots. Lincoln’s Lieber Code prohibited no quarter threats in 1863, and the logic is practical enough that anyone who has ever cornered a frightened animal in a garage understands it right away: an enemy who believes surrender won’t be accepted has nothing left to lose, so every soldier on the other side fights to the death. After World War II, a US military tribunal at Nuremberg prosecuted German commanders in the High Command Case on a war crimes count that included refusal of quarter. The ban on no quarter threats is older than the airplane, and no presidential podium repeals it.
Your move
Call your senators and your representative. Ask them one thing on the record, whether they condemn threatening a nation’s future generations. Share these statutes with your family and your group chat, and make every elected official answer to the law their own country wrote.
A threat of annihilation spoken at the United Nations is a policy statement, and the whole world heard it, so hold him to the words he chose and make sure your representatives in Washington hold him to them too before he steps up to another podium.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
From the New York Times (free access- my treat)
He is going to nuke Iran to win the midterms. His handlers better wake the F up. THEY are 100% responsible for this insanity
Just one of many war crimes including bombing a school filled with innocent children, extrajudicial boat bombings, and killing survivors of those bombings, to name a few.