To the Editor:

Re “President Repeats Threat to Target Cultural Sites” (news article, Jan. 6):

President Trump has threatened retaliation against Iran by striking Iranian sites including “some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture.” If carried out, this threat would constitute a war crime under international instruments such as the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which the United States has joined. The American military has a proud history of avoiding intentional damage to and destruction of cultural sites, which began with President Abraham Lincoln’s law of war manual, known as the Lieber Code.

Cultural heritage represents the record of our shared human achievement, the surviving remains from the past and the places that are sacred to the present. Protected cultural sites include religious and historic structures, cemeteries, libraries, archives, museums and archaeological sites.

The Department of Defense Law of War Manual specifically prohibits “acts of hostility … directed against cultural property” in the absence of military necessity. Now, the president is threatening to target cultural sites in Iran whose rich cultural heritage spans from the earliest evidence of human domestication of plants and animals to ancient majestic Achaemenid cities and richly tiled Islamic shrines and mosques. Iran is home to 24 World Heritage Sites and thousands of other places that are part of our global shared heritage.

The world community, including the United States, has rightly condemned the intentional destruction of cultural heritage for decades. Hitler’s Germany, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic State and the Assad regime in Syria intentionally destroyed cultural heritage in the absence of any military necessity. If Mr. Trump carries out this threat, the United States will join the ranks of these destroyers of the world’s cultural legacy.