Donald Trump is being credited with the warped strategic rhetoric of “bomb them back into the Stone Ages.” I am old enough to remember General Curtis LeMay. In 1965, General LeMay, who later tried to qualify his statement, reportedly said of Vietnam and consequently the Vietnamese people were going to bomb them into the Stone Age. Unfortunately, President Trump is threatening to adopt a more insidious belief by LeMay with his TACO strategy in Iran: “I’ll tell you what war is about,” LeMay once said. “You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough[people] they stop fighting.” As of this writing, Mr. Trump is threatening to annihilate an entire population. What is most frightening is that many in the MAGA movement have broken the glass of the moral compass and are willing to be led down the path into murderous barbarism.
Six members of the Democratic caucus recorded videos reminding service members that disobeying an unlawful order is not only prudent but also that they will be held criminally accountable. Of course, the expected hue and cry came from the administration and the Trump minions. It is now abundantly clear that those Democrats were right because Mr. Trump told the US and the world, “A whole civilization will die tonight[Tuesday], never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote on his social media platform. I thought we had gotten past that sort of callous civilian military leadership that filtered down to field officers such as Lt. William Calley in the My Lai massacre.
For those of you who are not ancients like me, Calley led a massacre of civilian villagers in Vietnam, fueled by anger and vengeance. Calley helped introduce the words “search and destroy” to my generation’s lexicon when he led a deadly assault on over 300 innocents, including women, children, and the elderly. His defense was that he was following orders. Then both Democrats and Republicans, writ large, decried the action of Calley, and his actions bolstered the anti-war movement. Listening to Defense Secretary Hegseth use theocratic rhetoric to justify and prosecute war has passed sacrilege and sprinted into pure evil. So, as of the writing of this piece, Tuesday at 5:35 pm, a new ultimatum was issued by Mr. Trump, saying the civilization will die as of 8 pm.
One would guess that the off-ramp offered earlier in the day by the Pakistani Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, of a two-week pause (which I am sure he knows is Trump’s favorite decision avoidance speak), may prompt him to call a halt to Mr. Trump’s immediate plans to commit a war crime. One of the things countries have learned from Mr. Trump’s public displays of pique is that not only complimenting him but also mimicking him works. The Pakistani proposal read like a post from Mr. Trump: “Diplomatic efforts for peaceful settlement of the ongoing war in the Middle East are progressing steadily, strongly and powerfully,” Sharif said in a post on X. I suppose if he had signed it, thank you for your attention to this matter, Shehbaz Sharif, it would be too obvious.
Hopefully, the military has rid itself of the Lt. Calley(s) and replaced them with enough officers, even after the Hegseth purge, who are willing to say no to immorality. If not, The Hague awaits.
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