“It is the plot and the act of aggression which we charge to be crimes.”

– Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson

With Spain and Austria refusing to allow their airspace to be used for the massive, unprovoked U.S. bombardment of Iran, there is international denunciation of this illegal action; and the initiation of the U.S. carpet bombing of Iran is clearly unlawful in view of the UN Charter, the Kellogg Briand Pact, the Geneva Protocol, and the Nuremberg Charter of 1945.

Yet the charge of “illegality” is weak and papery considering the thundering condemnation of any such war of aggression by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson in his opening of the Trial of the Major War Criminals in Germany in late 1945, which stands as one of history’s most significant authorizations of international law and order. Unvarnished facts regarding of thousands of U.S. bombing raids against Iran’s cities, and the resulting thousands of casualties and fatalities, show that the aggression is not just illegal but criminal. Jaywalking is illegal. Bombing schoolgirls is criminal.

In Justice Jackson’s Nov. 21, 1945 opening statement he noted, “A basic provision of the Charter is that to plan, prepare, initiate, or wage a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, or assurances, or to conspire or participate in a common plan to do so, is a crime.” He reminded the court that for 20 years, “The Geneva Protocol of 1924 for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes … declared that a war of aggression constitutes an international crime.”

Yet Jackson understood the dilemma of the Nuremberg prosecutors, warning that “[T]he ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law.” How else to prevent presidents, chancellors, prime ministers, cabinet secretaries, military commanders, or kings from criminally launching wars than to prosecute the war heads themselves?

So Justice Jackson explained that the criminalization of wars of aggression must be understood and enforced universally, declaring: “[W]hile this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn, aggression by any other nations including those which sit here now in judgment.”

The criminality of U.S. military actions against Iran, against Venezuela, and against civilian speed boats in international waters may have been foreseen by Secretary Pete Hegseth who today defends troops charged with war crimes as “heroes.” Hegseth has tried for years, according to the Wall St. Journal, to end the military’s use of “stupid rules of engagement” which protect civilians and civilian objects like hospitals, schools, and religious sites. Mr. Trump shares Hegseth’s disdain for the laws of war, having pardoned Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher who was accused by his own troops of a war crime in Iraq for stabbing to death, in front of the platoon, a wounded 17-year-old prisoner, and then taking a selfie with the corpse. (Gallagher found not guilty of murder in a chaotic court martial, only found guilty of posing with the corpse.)

Later in the course of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Justice Jackson explained even more emphatically why Trump, Hegseth, the General Staff, and the military’s field commanders ought to end up in the dock for their massacres in Iran: “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” 

John LaForge, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Co-director of Nukewatch a nuclear power and weapons watchdog group.

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