Here’s What Doves And Hawks Think About The UN’s Iran War Crime Report

Foreign policy hawks and anti-war advocates are sharply divided over a new United Nations report accusing U.S. forces of committing war crimes during strikes in Iran, with critics demanding accountability and defenders of the campaign pushing back on the findings.

The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran said Thursday there are reasonable grounds to believe U.S. forces carried out two strikes on civilian sites that constituted war crimes, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office. U.N. investigators said the Minab school was a clearly identifiable civilian site and found no evidence it was being used for military purposes, while concluding that U.S. forces failed to adequately update targeting information before the strike, according to the U.N. mission.

One of the U.S. findings centered on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, which was struck on Feb. 28 near an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval complex, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office. More than 150 people were killed in the attack, including roughly 120 schoolchildren, according to the mission.

The administration’s public account of the Minab strike shifted over time. Trump initially said the attack “was done by Iran” on March 7, according to CBS News. Two days later, Trump said he “just [didn’t] know enough about it,” acknowledged that the strike was under investigation and said he was “willing to live” with whatever the investigation found, according to CNN.

“The U.S. attack on the Minab school was – at best – indiscriminate and without regard to the very real possibility that there would be civilian deaths,” Gerry Condon, a Vietnam-era veteran and member of Veterans For Peace’s board of directors, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “That is the very definition of a war crime, and it is important that the U.N. fact-finding mission has established these facts.”

“This has been the finding of numerous media outlets and human rights groups,” World BEYOND War Executive Director David Swanson told the DCNF. “Under the U.N. Charter, every constituent part of the illegal war on Iran is without the shadow of a doubt a crime. If we play along with the general practice of avoiding that fact, and treating even the most widely confirmed and egregious atrocities as, at worst, ‘possible war crimes,’ then these attacks on schools are obvious members of that class.”

The Trump administration snapped back at the U.N. report, saying that Iranians are the only group that has perpetrated war crimes during the Iran War.

“The U.N. Human Rights Council has accomplished nothing for human rights while spouting unserious nonsense for decades,” White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly told the DCNF. “The only party in this conflict that has committed war crimes is the Iranian regime, which has murdered thousands of its own people, killed Americans overseas, executed acts of terrorism in the Strait of Hormuz, and launched indiscriminate attacks against its neighbors in the region. The President is courageously ensuring that such an evil country never possesses a nuclear weapon, which will make the entire world safer and more stable.”

Some experts piled onto the comments from the White House, even going a step further and calling for sanctions against the individuals at the U.N. who produced the report.