President Donald Trump’s war on Iran could come back to bite him years down the line, a retired general has warned.
Retired Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson, who served in the U.S. Army for over three decades, gave the 79-year-old commander in chief a history lesson as the clock ticks toward Trump’s Tuesday night deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
“Well, we already knew that Donald Trump was a pretty bad president, but now we know that he’s an absolutely terrible commander in chief as well,” Anderson told CNN News Central on Tuesday morning. “This guy is just not competent in terms of leading this force. He has not set clear objectives—clear, definable objectives—that the military can truly execute.”
In a menacing Truth Social post early Tuesday morning, Trump said that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if Tehran refuses to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway where about 20 percent of the world’s gas and oil supply passes through.
“However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?” Trump said. “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”
The post swiftly set off calls from Republicans and Democrats alike to invoke the 25th Amendment, which lays out a succession plan in the event of presidential incapacity.
Anderson reminded Trump of what happened in World War II, when the Nazi officials were held to account at the Nuremberg trials.
“I think that at 8 p.m. tonight, I believe that he’ll figure out a way to either extend the deadline, because there’s no way that he can do what he says he’s going to do, which is to bomb every single civilian target in the theater and in Iran,” he said. “If he were to do that, it would be… the commitment of a great war crime.”
![Nazi defendants (L-R front row) Hermann Goring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Wilhelm Keitel sit in the dock of their war crimes trial at Nuremberg circa 1945-1946. [The world's media, international officials, lawyers and human rights activists converged in The Hague on February 11, 2002 on the eve of Slobodan Milosevic's historic war crimes trial. The former Yugoslav leader, accused of masterminding ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the 1990s,] faces the biggest European war crimes trial since Hitler's henchmen were tried at Nuremberg after World War Two.](https://www.thedailybeast.com/resizer/v2/QY6IRK7JIZGGREZAPHRNPBNKNM.JPG?auth=6d4fb64cd166b47549838086ce8d28c708ad7792424b597a567fed4e9a6a6e72&width=800&height=624)
“I’m old enough to remember the Nuremberg trials and how we’ve held the Germans accountable after the atrocities they committed during World War II. And I’d hate to think, you know, five, 10 years from now, we’d be doing same kind of thing with American soldiers and leaders that made decisions that were being directed by the President of the United States that are illegal,” he added.
