Killing schoolchildren is wrong. Let's start with that for today's comment on this war.
(This is the first of a set of four comments on the US and Israeli war with Iran this week, looking at it from four different points of view: economic, political, constitutional and, today ... human. )
As the war began, children at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School were already in the two story building dedicated to their education, a building in the town of Minab, one with walls painted with pink flowers. A missile slammed into that building midmorning, leaving rubble and dead bodies.
Survivors of the first strike gathered in a hall, and there became victims of a second strike. In all there were apparently 175 people killed, 108 of them children.
The first response of the President of the United States was, "In my opinion and based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran. They're very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions."
The second of those sentences reads like an important qualification of the first. POTUS was not saying that Iran deliberately bombed and killed its own schoolchildren as a false flag operation. He was saying, rather, that they intended to hit something else, but they are bad shots with missiles. Every accusation is a confession with this crowd. On a very generous reading of the situation, someone in the US was actually a very bad shot.
Within days, The New York Times was reporting, and the administration was pointedly not denying, that the strikes were US initiated, and that they happened because the US Central Command was relying on target coordinates on outdated data provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
How can one defend this sort of 'collateral damage'? One could, I suppose, in principle make a 'runaway trolley' argument, i.e. one could say that Iran is akin to a runaway train and the US/Israel alliance is a bystander who sees that the trolley is about to runover a large number of people, so they are entitled to pull a switch that will re-route it, even if pulling a switch results in the killing of a smaller number of people.
Personally, I think this sort of event shows what is wrong with that sort of argument. Let us just stay with this: killing schoolchildren is wrong. The defense/war department people responsible must be identified and punished. For now the Supreme Court has decided that a sitting President can't be punished for such things. But it hasn't extended that immunity to anyone else. That opinion serves as no shield for War Secretary Pete Hegseth.
It doesn't matter who did it. It would not have happened but for Trump's illegal war. He, and the Republicans in Congress who allow it, are responsible for every death on both sides of the war.
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