The "war crime" outcry is simply another collaboration between America's enemies, the media, and the Democrat Party.
By J.R. Dunn
American Thinker
April 9, 2026
Over the last couple of days, we've been hearing that, once the Dems take the midterms, they'll immediately start preparations to try Donald Trump for war crimes in Iran. The loudest voice here - as is usually the case - is James Carville (actually, what he said was more like "We gone git that-theah Donal' Trump for woah crimes roun' heah."), but he hasn't been alone .
Is there any truth to this ? What they're referring to, it seems, is President Trump's announcement that he intends to target infrastructure, particularly power generation and bridges, in the next round of air strikes if the Iranian government refuses to come to terms.
On the face of it, there's nothing to this. Both power stations and transportation infrastructure are legitimate targets of war and always have been. Both - along with most other infrastructure targets - are used by belligerents to carry out military actions. Energy generation is obviously useful in powering military equipment and installations. Roads and bridges are used to transport supplies and shift military forces. Which, ipso facto, makes them legitimate targets. That they're also used for civilian purposes doesn't change things. (There has, interestingly enough, been a lot of thought put into this question of interwoven purposes and usage by legal and military scholars. The principle here is called " double effect," referring to the fact that some militarily beneficial actions could also harm innocent third parties. The conclusion has been that if an asset is crucial to military action and is not mainly used for civilian purposes, it's a target. You can drop a bridge. You cannot, ethically, bomb a hospital full of civilians just because it has a couple dozen enemy wounded inside.)
The U.S. has never been a war-crime nation, that is, a nation that commits war crimes as a matter of policy, like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. The occasional war crimes committed by the United States tend to be borderline incidents dictated by circumstance. These would arguably include the Feb. 15, 1944 bombing of the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino at the orders of the incompetent Gen. Mark Clark (the only general in history to be sued by his own men), and the incendiary bombing campaign against Japan in the closing months of WW II.
The Cassino abbey was struck after a months-long campaign in which Allied forces were stalled at the foot of the mountain. The frustrated Clark ordered the raid as something of a last-ditch effort. While it destroyed the 6th-century abbey - one of the glories of western civilization - it completely failed to drive out the Germans. (In a bitter irony, the dull-witted Clark had been presented with a solution to his tactical dilemma by French general Alphonse Juin, who suggested using French Moroccan mountain troops to attack German positions from the rear. After the failed raid, Juin was allowed to carry out his attack. It successfully enabled the Allies to take the mountain.)
In Japan, Gen. Curtis LeMay was facing the utter failure of the U.S. bombing campaign, largely due to the successful decentralization of industry by the Japanese. So he turned to mass incendiary raids that, while they shattered industrial targets, also killed thousands of civilians. (LeMay, I might add, was not at all the ice-cold Iron Man depicted by many, even supporters such as Victor Davis Hanson. He was deeply troubled by the results of the raids, telling an aide, "If we weren't winning this war, we'd all hang for war crimes." To his credit, LeMay prefaced the second run of raids in late spring with leaflet flights over Japanese cities, warning the inhabitants that the B-29s were coming and to get their families out while there was still time, thus saving thousands of lives.)
Egregious as they may have been, such actions simply do not match deliberate and willful atrocities such as the Holocaust and the mass slaughter of innocent Russians by the Nazis, or the ensuing revenge massacres by the Soviets at the end of the war - not to mention the mass rape of nine million German women. We're not built that way. The U.S., after all, is the country that spent six decades and billions of dollars developing precision weapons that would prevent dilemmas like that of 1945 Japan from arising.
There is another class of events that are sometimes errantly labeled as "war crimes" and pinned on the U.S. That is the collateral damage incident in which civilians are killed by accident. In December 1943, at the Italian port of Bari, the U.S. had stored a large amount of mustard gas - a lethal war gas - on shipboard to act as a deterrent against Nazi plans to use similar weapons against U.S. troops. A Luftwaffe air raid on Bari damaged the ship, spilling large amounts of the gas into the harbor, at which point a fortuitous German bomb blew up an ammunition ship docked nearby. The explosion sent massive waves of gas-laden water into Bari, killing thousands of civilians (the total is unknown even today). Ghastly as this was, it doesn't rank as a war crime by either side. The same can be said about the alleged "school strike' early in the Iran campaign, which, even if true (the passage of time with no solid evidence presented makes it look more and more like a propaganda effort aimed at U.S. media), is as much due to happenstance as anything.
So, no - nothing the U.S. has planned will result in a war crime. This despite the novel weaponry that some commentators (such as Mark Halperin ) expect to see in action. Iran is attempting to set the stage for such accusations by placing human shields around their power plants, but international law is clear about this: the results of such actions are on them. (As it stands, the footage I've seen shows the civilians gathered on the other side of a highway from the installations. The current run of U.S. precision weapons wouldn't so much as bend a hair on their heads.) The "war crime" outcry is simply another collaboration between America's enemies, the media, and the Democrat Party. Dems being Dems - there's no news there.
This article was originally published on American Thinker.