Editorial | Trump’s cultural nihilism

As serious and as dangerous as that might be, put aside for a while the geopolitical implications of the assassination, ordered by Donald Trump, of General Qassem Soleimani, the charismatic and powerful leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force.

For, what says more about Mr Trump, and the absence of strategic thinking his decision seems to betray, is his counterpoint to Iran’s threat of reprisal for General Soleimani’s killing. He threatened to destroy Iranian cultural sites. Merely entertaining the thought, much more than articulating it, marks Donald Trump as a cultural philistine, and potential war criminal, which further undermines America’s reputation for decency and global leadership.

Moreover, should Mr Trump follow through on his threat, it would place the US president, and his administration, on the plane as recent cultural heathens like the Taliban in Afghanistan, Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and the Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists of Mali, who, six years ago, burnt old manuscripts and despoiled relics in the ancient Malian town of Timbuktu.

This newspaper makes no comment on General Soleimani’s role, through his Quds Force and militia’s supported by Tehran, in projecting Iran’s influence on the Middle East. The United States and its allies say that his was a malign influence. Yet, most agree that killing General Soleimani has not only created a martyr, but was an attack at the very centre of the Iranian leadership, which Tehran will find hard to ignore, overlook, or forgive. Tehran has promised revenge. The prospect of greater instability in an already unstable region has worsened.

Mr Trump’s response to Iran’s warning of retaliation is to retort that he has a target of 52 Iranian sites, “some of them very high-level and important to Iranian culture”, which he would hit “very fast and very hard”.

Iran, in recent decades, has been caricatured as a backward country of turbaned and bearded mullahs. Many people, including, perhaps, Mr Trump, were, until now, unaware of Iran’s rich history, as the cradle of the Persian Empire, following Muslim conquest in the seventh century. These civilisations have left many historic and cultural monuments across Iran.

WAR CRIMES

Indeed, there are 24 UNESCO-protected heritage sites in Iran, including the sprawling Persepolis archaeological complex, dating back to before 500 BC as the capital of the Achamenid Empire. Up to 50 more cultural sites have tentative UNESCO cover, some of which are probably on Mr Trump’s hit list. They are the world’s heritage.

The deliberate destruction, or damage, of these treasures by Mr Trump would be the same, and given America’s declared subscription to higher moral values, in some respects worse, than the Taliban’s destruction, in 2001, of the 1,500-year-old giant, cliff-face Buddhas of Banyan in central Afghanistan; or of Islamic State’s damage to the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Palmyra in Syria in 2015.

Moreover, attacking these sites would be to breach the 1954 Hague Convention on the protection of cultural property during armed conflicts, which the United States helped to draft, and to which it formally became a state party in 2009. The convention calls for parties in conflicts to “refrain from any act of hostility” against cultural property, including “by way of reprisal”.

Further, the Hague Convention is underpinned by UN Security Council Resolution 2347 of 2017, which, in the face of the recent actions by terror groups, condemns the destruction, counterfeiting and smuggling of cultural treasures and asks states to actively take action against such behaviour.

So, should Donald Trump direct US military officers to attack Iran’s cultural sites, they should know that they can refuse to execute those orders on the basis that they are illegal and could constitute war crimes.