There is a pattern emerging that is too important to ignore.
The same people who justified, participated in, or cheered military strikes on infrastructure over the last twenty years are now telling you that similar actions in Iran are war crimes.
They are not confused. They are not misinformed. They are revealing something about themselves that you would be wise to remember forever.
They cannot be trusted. Not on this. Not on the next one either.
What a War Crime Actually Is
Before naming names, the substance deserves clarity.
Striking infrastructure is not, by itself, a war crime. Power plants, bridges, rail lines, fuel depots, and communications nodes have been treated as legitimate military targets for as long as modern warfare has existed, under one condition: they contribute to the enemy’s warfighting capability. That principle is codified in the law of armed conflict. It has been the operational doctrine of the United States military across multiple administrations, including Democratic ones.
The United States and NATO struck bridges, power grids, and communications infrastructure in Serbia in 1999.
The United States struck electrical systems and transportation networks in Iraq in both Gulf Wars.
Coalition doctrine across Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen has targeted fuel systems, logistics corridors, and command networks as standard practice.
You can argue proportionality in specific cases. You can argue about prudence and strategic wisdom. What you cannot honestly argue is that striking infrastructure is categorically illegal. That is not the law. That is not history. That is not reality.
An actual war crime under the Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols requires deliberate targeting of civilians or civilian objects with no military purpose, use of prohibited weapons, denial of quarter, or deliberate acts of inhumane treatment. The test is not whether an action causes civilian suffering. War causes civilian suffering. The test is whether military necessity justified the action and whether proportionate precautions were taken.
That is the standard. Hold it there. Now look at the people applying a different one.
Barack Obama: The Benchmark Nobody Will Apply
Barack Obama left office, celebrated by the people, now calling Trump a war criminal.
The same media figures, the same foreign policy voices, the same elected officials who are horrified by infrastructure strikes in Iran were largely silent through eight years of the following:
Obama armed rebel factions in Syria that included an Al Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, as part of a broader effort to topple Assad. Weapons intended for vetted moderate rebels ended up in the hands of groups the United States officially designated as terrorist organizations. This is documented. It is not disputed. The people receiving those weapons were the same ideological network responsible for September 11.
Obama pursued a nuclear agreement with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that released over one hundred billion dollars in frozen Iranian assets and lifted sanctions that had been strangling the IRGC’s financial architecture. The money did not go to Iranian hospitals or schools. It went to Hezbollah. It went to the Houthi missile program. It went to the proxy infrastructure that has spent the years since working to kill Americans and Israelis. He was helped across the finish line by American senators, some of them Republican, who believed they were sophisticated diplomats while they helped underwrite an apocalyptic regime’s survival. They were not sophisticated. They were naive at best and complicit at worst.
Obama intervened militarily in Libya without a congressional declaration of war, without a coherent post-conflict plan, and without meaningful accountability when the country collapsed into a failed state. Libya became a slave market. It became a transit point for weapons flowing across North Africa. It became a base of operations for militant networks the intervention was supposedly designed to contain. The people who cheered that intervention are largely the same people now invoking international law to constrain this one.
Obama authorized the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki by drone strike in 2011. Al-Awlaki was a terrorist who deserved to die. He was also an American citizen. He received no trial. He received no due process. The administration argued the strike was lawful under a classified legal memo that the public was not permitted to read. Two weeks later, a separate drone strike killed al-Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son, also an American citizen, also without trial. This happened inside a country that the United States was not at war with. The same voices now citing constitutional principles and international law to constrain presidential war powers said almost nothing.
Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in anticipation of things he had not yet done. He is still treated as a moral authority by the people who are currently demanding that military officers disobey orders they disagree with. The inconsistency is not incidental. It is the argument.
Mark Kelly: The Specific Case That Ends the Debate
Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona flew combat missions as a Navy aviator. He is a decorated veteran with real service and real sacrifice. None of that is in question but his smears this week show he has lost all credibility.
Kelly flew strike missions. Naval aviation in the conflicts of his era targeted infrastructure. Communications systems. Logistics. Command facilities. The doctrine he operated under is the same doctrine being applied in Iran today. He knows this. He is not confused about what military strikes on infrastructure look like because he has done it.
Kelly is now publicly framing Trump administration strikes on Iranian infrastructure as potentially unlawful and urging military members to consider whether orders are legal before obeying them. He is doing this while knowing, from personal operational
experience, that what is happening in Iran falls within the same framework of lawful combat operations he executed himself.
This is not a man who has developed a new understanding of international humanitarian law. This is a man who has decided that political opposition to the current president is worth more than intellectual integrity. He is using the credibility of his uniform, a uniform he is no longer wearing but prominently invokes, to launder a political argument as a moral one.
When a former combat aviator who struck infrastructure tells active duty military members that striking infrastructure might be an unlawful order worth refusing, he is not protecting the rule of law. He is attempting to use the confusion he is causing about the rule of law as a political weapon while hiding behind a record that directly contradicts the argument he is making.
That is a specific kind of dishonesty that deserves a specific kind of accountability.
What They Are Actually Doing
This is not just fringe internet trolls. These are senators, former cabinet officials, tenured academics, network anchors, and retired military officers with significant platforms and institutional credibility. They have decided that political victory in the moment matters more than the integrity of the moral and legal frameworks they claim to defend.
When public figures mislabel lawful military actions as war crimes, they are not engaging in sloppy rhetoric. They are doing something deliberate and something dangerous. They are placing political pressure on military commanders to second guess lawful orders. They are attempting to delegitimize operations through accusations they know to be overstated. They are blurring the line between unlawful conduct and lawful combat in a way that makes disciplined military decision making harder.
And they are degrading the very concept they claim to protect.
If everything is a war crime, nothing is. The term loses its meaning. And when the term loses its meaning, the ability to identify and punish actual atrocities, real ones, documented ones, ones committed by people the global community needs to hold
accountable, goes with it. You cannot spend the currency of moral outrage on partisan point-scoring and then expect it to purchase anything when you actually need it.
They know this. They do not care. That tells you everything about what this is.
What You Should Take From This
You are watching people demonstrate, in real time and in public, that their moral judgments are not anchored to stable principles. Their vocabulary of outrage expands and contracts based on who holds power. Their legal analysis arrives pre-formatted to serve a conclusion they reached before reading the law.
You do not have to guess whether they will be consistent the next time. They have already shown you they will not.
That does not mean you ignore everything every critic says. It means you weigh sources the way they deserve to be weighed. A person who told you drone striking American citizens without trial was acceptable has permanently told you something about how
they reason. A senator who struck infrastructure and now calls infrastructure strikes potentially criminal has permanently told you something about his relationship to truth.
Hold that information. Use it.
War is already chaotic enough. The information environment is already polluted enough. You cannot afford to outsource your moral reasoning to voices that have demonstrated, publicly and repeatedly, that they will adjust their standards to fit the moment.
Understand what is legal and what is not. Understand what serves a military objective and what crosses a genuine line. And understand the difference between those things and whatever the person speaking happens to need you to believe this week.
Precision in moral language is not a luxury. In wartime, it is a necessity. And the people blurring it on purpose are not your guides through this moment. They are part of the problem you are trying to see through.
See the comment for more information.
I will post later about what the pause may be showing us and why many people are demonstrating they have no credibility for a different reason, because they do not understand what is happening or why it is happening.
Thank the Lord for the opportunity to observe and learn so much. Many wicked people are unmasking themselves in ways that are more clear than at any time I can remember.
Clayton Wood is a Knoxville pastor, lawyer and contributing writer for TriStar Daily.
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