“We took over the cargo. We took over the oil. It’s a very profitable business”
Jon Queally for Common Dreams
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| Irony of ironies: Trump and the Iranians agree Trump is a pirate |
“We took over the cargo. We took over the oil. It’s a very profitable
business,” Trump said with a smile as the friendly crowd at the Forum Club in
Palm Beach, Florida, cheered him on.
“We’re sort of like pirates, but we’re not playing games,”
Trump added before calling the Iranian “bullies” who had to be confronted.
“The only good thing about Trump—only thing!—is that he
sometimes says what we all know to be true,” said journalist Mehdi Hassan, “but
don’t expect an American president to say, admit, out loud.”
In a social media post, the Iranian Embassy in New Zealand said: “No need to confess, President, the whole world already knows you. By the way, those who, with performative noise, constantly talk about ‘international law’ and ‘freedom of navigation’… don’t want to condemn piracy now?”
While using the US military to seize the contents of ships
may be profitable to somebody, it’s not entirely clear who that might be.
So far, the estimate for what Trump’s war of choice against
Iran over the last two months has cost US taxpayers in the immediate term
ranges from $25 billion, which is what the Pentagon itself said
this week, to upwards
of $100 billion. Over the long term, including the increased cost of gas
and groceries due to the economic disruption and the care of veterans involved in
the war, the costs of the war—which remains historically unpopular among the US
public—could exceed $1 trillion.
Mark P. Nevitt, a retired US military lawyer and now an associate professor at Emory University School of Law, argues that the series of maritime blockades imposed by Trump on Iran has created a “legally surreal moment” in the ongoing conflict.
“The United States is
simultaneously observing a ceasefire with Iran while enforcing a naval
blockade—a belligerent wartime operation that has no legal basis in
peacetime,” explained Nevitt in a column for Justice Security on
Friday. “Normally, the imposition of a naval blockade ends a ceasefire, because
a blockade is itself a belligerent act.”
While there are established legal frameworks for naval
blockades during wartime, legal scholars have asserted from the outset of the
war—when the US and Israel launched unprovoked bombings of Iran on Feb. 28—that
the war itself is illegal under international law.
While the existence of the blockade, an overt act of war,
means the US and Iran remain in active military conflict, Trump himself and the
Pentagon made the untenable claim this week that because a tentative ceasefire
is in place, the US is not engaged in war—thereby trying to sidestep a 60-day
threshold under the War Powers Act of 1973 which mandates the president either
get permission from Congress to continue the war or end military operations
completely.
As Nevitt puts it, “the United States is neither fully at
war nor fully at peace according to its own logic.”
In his assessment, which makes distinctions between maritime
law under normal circumstances versus laws of war and blockades during active
military conflict, Nevitt said the Pentagon’s position that it can enforce a
total blockade of ships coming or going from Iranian ports by interdicting or
boarding “sanctioned vessels of any flag state anywhere in the world is
remarkably broad and lacks a sound legal basis in international law.”
