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President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth vowed to bomb Iran into the “Stone Ages” in concerning statements on Wednesday night harkening to Vietnam War-era atrocities, as the U.S. and Israel carry out strikes on life-supporting infrastructure in Iran.

In his prime time remarks to the U.S. public on Wednesday night, Trump said that, over the next two to three weeks, the U.S. will “hit [Iran] extremely hard.”

“We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong,” he said, referring broadly to the country of roughly 93 million people.

He repeated his threats to target crucial energy infrastructure — which would constitute the crime of collective punishment — if there is not a “deal” to end the war soon. “If there is no deal, we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously,” he said. “We have not hit their oil … because it would not give them even a small chance of surviving or rebuilding. But we could hit it.”

Hegseth touted Trump’s dire threats in a short post on social media following the president’s speech. “Back to the Stone Age,” he wrote.

US Killed Children in Iran Using New Missile That Explodes Into Pellets

Trump has repeatedly threatened to destroy water and energy infrastructure in Iran. The U.S. and Israel have already targeted major oil and gas facilities in Iran, despite Trump’s claim, and other crucial life supporting facilities, like Israel’s strike on a pharmaceutical factory that made cancer drugs on Tuesday.

The “Stone Age” threat has been widely attributed to Curtis LeMay, who served as a top U.S. military commander during World War II and the Cold War. LeMay had a reputation as an advocate of fierce aerial bombing, leading the U.S.’s strategy of firebombing Japan during WWII, among other horrific campaigns.

In his 1965 autobiography, LeMay said that his “solution” to resistance faced by the U.S. in North Vietnam was to tell fighters there to “stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age” with aerial and naval power.

But this phrase is so cruel that even “Bombs Away” LeMay later denounced it. “I never said we should bomb them back to the Stone Age. I said we had the capability to do it. I want to save lives on both sides,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post in October of 1968.

The U.S. carried out countless atrocities by air on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, wantonly carpet bombing civilians and massacring an estimated 4 million people in Vietnam and its neighbors. Unexploded bombs left behind are still killing people to this day, decades later.

Legal experts have warned that Trump and Hegseth’s rhetoric — as well as many aspects of the war itself — have raised concerns that the U.S. and Israel are committing serious violations of international law in their war on Iran.

A letter signed by over 100 international law experts published Thursday denounced the war as a “clear violation of the United Nations Charter.”

“[T]he conduct of United States forces since, as well as statements made by senior government officials, raise serious concerns about violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including potential war crimes,” the letter says.

“Recent statements from senior U.S. government officials describing the rules governing military engagement as ‘stupid’ and prioritizing ‘lethality’ over ‘legality’ are profoundly alarming and dangerously short-sighted,” the experts went on, referring to statements by Hegseth. “These claims, particularly in combination with the observable conduct of U.S. forces, are harming the international legal order.”

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Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering international affairs, politics, and labor. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter and Bluesky.

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