President Donald Trump threatened to commit war crimes against Iran over the weekend, less than one week after he ordered the killing of one of its top military commanders in an airstrike in Baghdad. The assassination of Qassem Soleimani, who acted as an Iranian version of John le Carré’s Karla for more than two decades, sparked a chaotic backlash. Coalition operations against ISIS have halted, perhaps indefinitely, after Iraq’s parliament voted to expel all foreign troops. Tehran said it would remove all restrictions on uranium enrichment, scrapping one of the last remaining checks imposed by the 2015 nuclear deal.

What’s more, Iranian leaders and their allies have also angrily threatened some sort of retaliation against the United States. Trump offered some threats of his own in response. He wrote on Saturday:

Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!

Trump’s remarks are nothing short of monstrous. Besides intentionally killing or harming civilians, targeting a country’s cultural sites is among the least defensible acts that any military could commit during an armed conflict. No legal, moral, or tactical rationale exists that would justify bombing the ruins of Persepolis, the mosques and shrines of Qom, the museums of Tehran, or any other part of Iran’s ancient heritage. The threats alone confirm Trump’s unfitness for the presidency. The possibility that he will carry them out means the House should gird itself for the necessity of impeaching Trump a second time.

Campaigns of cultural destruction are a hallmark of history’s worst regimes.

Campaigns of cultural destruction are a hallmark of history’s worst regimes. Nazi Germany went to great lengths to stamp out Polish cultural identity during World War II by burning down libraries, museums, and palaces wherever possible. Mao’s Red Guards did incalculable damage to China’s historical treasures during the Cultural Revolution. The Taliban drew international outrage in 2001 when it used dynamite and anti-tank weaponry to demolish colossal third-century sandstone Buddha statues in Afghanistan. More recently, ISIS militants carried out a wave of vandalism to destroy antiquities and archaeological sites throughout their territory in Iraq and Syria.



Trump’s threatened actions would easily rank alongside these crimes if they are carried out. History, after all, is merely a record of what’s survived: the documents and manuscripts that were preserved, the temples and monuments that weren’t destroyed, the names and stories that were remembered. We will never really know what we’ve lost over the centuries and millennia. All that each generation can do is to preserve what it has inherited and protect it from those who want to erase it for racial, ideological, or nihilistic reasons.