When no more military targets can be identified, the terror bombing begins.
By John Leake
Courageous Discourse
March 14, 2026
Two days after the bombing of Dresden in February 1945, British Air Commodore Colin Grierson told journalists that the goal of firebombing the ancient and beautiful city was to take out its communications and transportation capacity. He then added that bombing the civilians helped to destroy "what is left of German morale."
Howard Cowan, an Associated Press war correspondent, wrote a story about bombing Dresden that the military press censor at SHAEF allowed to be published. Cowan's report stated "Allied air bosses have made the long awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of great German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler's doom."
I was reminded of Cowan's story this morning when I saw President Trump's statement to an Axios reporter that there is "practically nothing left" to target in Iran. He was apparently referring to identifiable military targets.
Trump's statement suggests that if the aerial bombardment of Iran continues - a campaign that Pete Hegseth just vowed to continue with even greater fury - it will largely be targeting civilian infrastructure like the oil refineries near Tehran bombed by Israeli forces a few days ago.
I suppose that an imaginative military mind could argue that the refinery was a military target, but the victims were Iranian civilians who were heavily exposed to toxic petroleum smoke.
This morning I received an e-mail from a friend in Australia in which he referenced my post ( When the Mask Slips) of yesterday in which I mentioned that my grandfather would have been shocked by President Trump cracking jokes about sinking an Iranian ship off the coast of Sri Lanka.
My Australian friend had the chutzpah to tell me how my grandfather would have felt, and that my grandfather would have rebuked me for writing intemperate statements about our Commander-in-chief. I use the word chutzpah for my own comic relief, because the following definition by the American humorist Leo Rosten never fails to make me laugh out loud.
That quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.
Here I should confess that, though I never heard my grandfather speak in a jeering and disrespectful way about killing his German adversaries, he had a different attitude towards the Japanese.
One of his two brothers was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked, and he was nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on that day. As a result of his brother's testimony-and as a result of U.S. propaganda against Imperial Japan-my grandfather was very hardhearted about Japanese soldiers and civilians, though I still never heard him joke about killing them.
He believed the firebombing of Tokyo (killing 100,000 civilians in one night) and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (killing approximately 200,000) were purely strategic actions that were necessary for ending the war. I never debated him about this, but now I'm not so sure.
By the time the US Army Air Forces firebombed Toyko (Operation Meetinghouse) on March 9-10, 1945, the Japanese military, especially its Navy, was largely in shambles. The U.S. Naval blockade had succeeded in creating enormous shortages, and the 1944 Japanese rice harvest had been exceptionally poor due to labor and fertilizer shortages and bad weather.
By August 1945, some military planners argued that starving the Japanese people to death with the ongoing blockade was more cruel than dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such was the calculus of total warfare.
How the American people will feel about bombing Iranian civilian infrastructure and civilians will depend on the following two things:
- How much military censors and the mainstream media prevent them from learning about it
- The religious and cultural attitudes of Americans about Iranian civilians
After arming Saddam Hussein in the 1980s to wage war against Iran, the U.S. government under President George H.W. Bush concluded that Saddam was too much of a loose cannon. For his part, Saddam claimed that his country and finances had been so exhausted from fighting Iran for eight years that he had no choice but to invade Kuwait, which he accused of horizontal drilling into Iraqi fields.
The U.S. military attacked Saddam's army to force him out of Kuwait during the first Gulf War of 1990-91. Though the U.S. left Saddam Hussein in power, it nevertheless-in coordination with the UN-imposed sanctions on the country, thereby crippling its economy, infrastructure, and basic civil services.
By 1996, UNICEF and other humanitarian organizations published estimates that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died due to malnutrition and preventable illnesses during this period. The resulted in international criticism of U.S. and UN policy.
During a May 12, 1996, interview on CBS's 60 Minutes, then-UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright was asked if the death of half a million Iraqi children because of U.S.-led sanctions was a price worth paying, she replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price-we think the price is worth it."
IF the Iranian government continues to defy the U.S. and Israeli strategic bombing campaign-just as the governments of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, North Korea, and North Vietnam proved defiant to U.S. bombing campaigns-the civilian population of Iran will be severely punished in the weeks ahead.
I suppose many of our politicians will share Madeleine Albright's sentiment that "the price is worth it."
This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.