Trump's Monstrous Threats Against the Iranian People

It is not an exaggeration to say that the president is threatening genocidal violence against the people of Iran

The president marked Easter with more deranged threats against the country and people of Iran:

The US president gave Iran until 8pm eastern time on Tuesday to reopen the crucial shipping lane after earlier threatening to unleash “hell” in an expletive-laden social media post.

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday. “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

The president is making explicit threats to commit massive war crimes against the civilian population. He means to inflict collective punishment on tens of millions of people because their government will not yield to his unhinged demands. He is treating the Iranian people as hostages, and he is threatening to shoot the hostages if he doesn’t get what he wants. The message the president has sent amounts to telling the Iranian people, “Trump, or I burn the country.”

It is not an exaggeration to say that the president is threatening genocidal violence against the people of Iran. Trump has referred to Iranians as “animals” in a chilling echo of Israeli officials’ statements at the start of the genocidal war in Gaza. He said this morning that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back” if Iran does not capitulate. This is eliminationist language directed at a country of more than ninety million people. These are the words of a madman, and coming from the head of a nuclear weapons state they are terrifying.

It should be clear by now that this is a war on the Iranian people, and it was never going to be anything else. The aggressors want to wreck Iran and leave it in ruins. That should have been obvious from the start after what the Israeli government did to Gaza and is currently doing to Lebanon with Washington’s full support, but now it is undeniable.

Trump’s Iran policy has always been defined by collective punishment. His “maximum pressure” sanctions have impoverished the Iranian people and strangled their economy for the last eight years. Attacks on civilian infrastructure in his criminal war threaten the entire population with even greater deprivation and hardship. As ever, the destruction is the point. The president is not really trying to achieve anything. He simply wishes to punish and harm those that will not submit to him.

We might hope that the military would refuse the president’s illegal orders to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure, but we have to assume based on the boat attacks in the Caribbean and the Pacific that this won’t happen. The boat attacks were the most clear-cut case of deliberately targeting civilians, and those orders were carried out apparently without any resistance. The president and the Secretary of Defense are both war crimes enthusiasts, and it seems that no one serving under them is inclined to say no when they order more crimes.

The president has frequently demonstrated that he is a menace to the world and unfit to remain in office, and he has done so again. He ought to be impeached and removed. The fact that we know this won’t happen even after these monstrous, genocidal threats is an indictment of the Republican Party and of our entire political system. If they won’t remove the president, Congress must urgently cut off funding for this war.

If the president orders more attacks on Iranian civilian infrastructure, it is certain that Iranian forces will respond in kind against similar targets in Israel and the Gulf states. The economic shock from the war will get even worse. Attacking civilian targets in Iran will lead to even more devastating consequences for the region and the world, and it will bring endless shame on the United States. As always, the Iranian people will be the ones to pay the highest price for the vicious and indefensible policies of our government.