US President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age.”
Minutes later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth doubled down on his rhetoric with a short post simply calling X “back to the Stone Age.”
Bombing a place into the Stone Age usually refers to carpet bombing a place, destroying all modern infrastructure to reach a primitive state.
But these threats by Trump and the United States are not new, building on Washington’s decades-long legacy of threatening countries with carpet bombing during military operations, and often carrying out such threats.
Here, we will take a closer look at President Trump’s recent statements and what U.S. presidents have said and done to date.
What did President Trump say about Iran in his speech?
“We’re going to hit them very hard over the next two to three weeks and bring them back to the Stone Age, where they belong,” President Trump said in a prime-time address to the nation, referring to Iran.
Trump also said that “discussions continue” and added that the conflict could end within the same period.
The current war against Iran began on February 28, when the United States and Israel launched attacks. Tehran counterattacked by targeting Israel and Gulf states.
More than 2,000 Iranians have been killed in the war so far. Thousands of civilian facilities, including hospitals, schools, universities, and pharmaceutical factories, have been attacked by Israel and the United States.
Janina Dill, a professor of global security at the University of Oxford, told Al Jazeera that if President Trump’s “Stone Age” threats imply that the United States will destroy buildings and structures that define modern society, “this would be illegal because it would mean directing attacks against civilian objects.”
Structures and buildings that characterize modern society include energy infrastructure, telecommunications structures, private industry, and educational, cultural, and medical facilities.
“The announcement that it will be targeted nevertheless would be an announcement of a systematic and serious violation of long-standing international laws of war,” Dill said.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), international humanitarian law prohibits the deliberate targeting of civilian goods during war.
“This statement is particularly appalling because it denies claims that the United States is fighting the Iranian regime, and instead suggests a war against the Iranian people and broader society.”
Iran is home to humanity’s oldest civilization, an empire that built canals, highways, an army, a modern monetary system, and made great advances in science, medicine, and philosophy, more than 1,000 years before the birth of the United States.
Has the US made similar threats before?
The phrase “bombarding the Stone Age” is widely associated with U.S. Air Force officer Curtis LeMay in the context of the U.S. threat to North Vietnam in LeMay’s 1965 book, The Mission with LeMay.
“We’re going to bomb them into the Stone Age,” he wrote. Mr. LeMay played a central role in the carpet bombing of Japanese cities in World War II, killing between 240,000 and 900,000 people, rose to become chief of staff of the Air Force during the Vietnam War, and retired the year his book was published.
Although he was no longer in power during America’s bloodiest campaign in Vietnam, American leaders appear to have faithfully followed Curtis’ advice.
vietnam war
The Vietnam War arose from France’s attempt to restore control over colonial Indochina after World War II. The communist-led Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, fought against France and defeated France in 1954.
Vietnam then briefly split along the 17th parallel. North Vietnam was under the communist regime led by Ho Chi Minh, and South Vietnam became an anti-communist state with support from the United States.
The United States steadily became more involved, moving from financial aid and military advisors to the South Vietnamese government in the 1950s to full-scale military intervention in the mid-1960s, including large-scale troop deployments and extensive bombing.
In December 1972, President Richard Nixon ordered a major bombing campaign against North Vietnam, specifically Hanoi and Haiphong, known in the United States as the “Christmas Bombing.”
The United States also conducted intensive bombing raids in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, claiming to target enemy bases and supply routes.
Overall, millions of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed or wounded in the war.
First Gulf War
In August 1990, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein ordered an invasion of Kuwait, accusing its leaders of overproducing oil to keep prices down and damaging Iraq’s war-torn economy after a long conflict with Iran for much of the 1980s.
Iraq justified its invasion by reviving long-standing territorial claims to Kuwait dating back to the Ottoman-era and British-era borders.
Iraqi forces rapidly overran Kuwait, capturing the capital within days and forcing Kuwait’s 13th emir to flee to Saudi Arabia. Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah led the Kuwaiti government in exile while Iraqi forces took control of his homeland.
In January 1991, at the request of Kuwait and several Gulf neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia, the United States led a global coalition of dozens of countries, including Western countries, Arab states, and other Muslim-majority countries, to forcibly remove Iraqi forces. This invasion was named “Operation Desert Storm.”
Against this backdrop, former US Secretary of State James Baker met with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in Geneva on January 9. At that meeting, Baker threatened to bomb Iraq “back into the Stone Age” if the United States did not withdraw from Kuwait.
Some analysts say that, especially since the 1991 Gulf War, the United States has increasingly relied on precision-guided weapons to target specific military and strategic locations rather than indiscriminately bombing entire cities.
But other analysts argue that the U.S. bombing of Iraq effectively amounted to carpet bombing, as the U.S. military dropped so many unguided, or “stupid,” bombs that caused widespread damage to infrastructure and urban areas.
After 9/11
On September 11, 2001, 19 al-Qaeda hijackers captured four U.S. airliners. Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York, another crashed into the Pentagon in Virginia, and one crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers resisted.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed and the attack prompted the United States to launch a global “war on terror” targeting al-Qaeda and other groups it designated as terrorist organizations.
Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president from 2001 to 2008, said after the attack that US official Richard Armitage had warned that Pakistan would “return to the stone age of bombing” if it refused to join the war against the Taliban.
Did the US carpet bomb other countries?
During World War II, the United States carpet-bombed not only Japanese cities, but also Asian cities such as the Philippines, which were controlled by the Japanese military.
During the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, the United States conducted heavy bombing raids on North Korea, which some officials said destroyed nearly every town. U.S. bombing destroyed 95 percent of North Korea’s power generation capacity and more than 80 percent of its buildings.
