The Left and some on the Right went crazy over President Donald Trump's recent tweet.
He warned that if the Iranian regime did not cease blocking the international Strait of Hormuz, he would hit its dual military-civilian infrastructure. He promised that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again."
Trump may have used sloppy nouns.
But he obviously meant that the murderous civilization/culture of radical Iranian theocratic Islam would cease to exist and won't come back, once its power plants and transportation systems central to the regime were cut off.
Why do we know that?
Because, unlike most prior American wars, Trump has never targeted dual-use infrastructure – not in bombing ISIS, not in removing the Venezuelan thug Nicolás Maduro, not in the 2025 bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities, and not in the present war – with the exception of a key bridge central to the regime's efforts to move around and spare missile assets from bombing.
Ever since Trump announced that "help is on the way" to the Iranian people, the entire aim of the five-week war has been to target selectively the command and control of the regime and its military assets.
The goal was to diminish its threats abroad, while weakening and humiliating the mullahcracy at home – so that soon the Iranian people might at last be able to overthrow the odious theocracy.
Trump's critics know all that.
But they see political advantage in tagging Trump as a Strangelovian madman, no different from the Nazi criminals in the docket at Nuremberg.
A few less unhinged argue his rhetoric nevertheless comes across as unpresidential.
Perhaps.
But it may be no accident that his Gen. Curtis LeMay-like bluster might have applied pressure on the Iranians to reopen negotiations.
On Monday, the Democratic Borg was declaring Trump a savage maniac. By Tuesday, it was blasting him as a TACO ("Trump always chickens out") for not carrying out what the day before they had dubbed a war crime.
The common denominator was an overarching deranged hatred of the president, given his critics can never decide whether he is Adolf Hitler or Neville Chamberlain.
But since the Left has called for investigations of war crimes, by all means let them begin.
Obviously, Trump's critics conveniently no longer buy the argument of "dual use." It posits that the juice powering an evil enemy is its roads, bridges, fuel, and electricity. To disable them supposedly shortens the war and the killing.
In World War II, we leveled a dozen Japanese cities because the Tokyo junta had outsourced the assembly of weapons to urban neighborhood workshops.
We joined the British in leveling Dresden by targeting German transportation.
Perhaps the Left will now remove the iconic names of Democratic Presidents Roosevelt and Truman from our buildings and monuments?
Truman should be a twofer boogeyman. He ordered every bridge in North Korea and hydroelectric plant to be incinerated during the Korean War.
How about the Lyndon Johnson/Richard Nixon bombing of North Vietnam? Their war machine annihilated most of its civilian infrastructure in efforts to force the communists to negotiate.
The 42-day bombing in the First Gulf War targeted power stations, roads, bridges, and dual-use government buildings.
Should we go back and Trotskyize its strategic architects – George H. W. Bush and Gen. Colin Powell?
Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly is one of Trump's fiercest critics in pressing the war criminal charge. Perhaps he too should be post-facto investigated by the International Criminal Court given that in 1991 he was a pilot in an air force that frequently hit bridges and other dual use targets.
How about the "noble" NATO effort in Serbia?
According to the logic of current critics, there must be lots of war criminals still to be found who were involved in that merciless 1999 bombing of Belgrade.
Former President Bill Clinton's gambit wrecked all the bridges on the Danube and often left over a million civilians without power.
Will we indict former President Barack Obama for ordering over 500 targeted predator assassination strikes on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border without congressional authorization that included killing four American citizens?
Perhaps we can reinvestigate Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, and Susan Rice, the architects of the 2011 "unlawful" and congressionally "unauthorized" seven-month bombing of a mostly inert Libya.
And why not reexamine Obama? He snubbed the 60-90 War Powers Act window, which required him to obtain congressional authority to continue that mindless devastation.
The Libyan wreckage included civilian ships, port facilities, TV buildings, telecommunications, and government offices – and left the country an utter mess that continues 15 years later.
The left-wing and paleo-Right fury has far exceeded any legitimate critique of strategy and tactics.
It has now become not just incoherent but crazed, given many despise Trump more than they do the murderous Iranian regime.
And now they add the wage of rank hypocrisy to their serial untruths.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of "The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won," from Basic Books. You can reach him by emailing authorvdh@gmail.com.