I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!). Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a low error rate. TFA discusses 50 specific strikes all of which missed via automated analysis. That doesn't seem the same.
I don't disagree there. But this is not a case of hallucination, and an existing website is a signal, not a determinant, of the real situation on the ground.
However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated. One that does not seem to be present in TFA or any analysis that I've read. In fact, the article itself quotes those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target.
So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it.
> there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties
How did you verify this? Because I’ll remind you, the U.S. administration denied responsibility for some time before owning up to this due to public pressure. Absent public pressure, I guess we would’ve had zero mis-strikes.
> so this already is a low error rate
As a father of similarly aged daughters, I can’t express enough how grotesque and disturbing the term “error rate” is here.
We targeted and killed young children. Plain and simple.
> However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated.
Let’s take the opposing assumption that this target was carefully evaluated then. Please reason through the implications now?
> So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it.
TFA is from The Guardian while GP you responded to specifically called out the NYT analysis. These are different things. Maybe reading the GP's suggested source would leave you with a different set of questions?
I will try to respond to all these independent threads, but we can't continue all of them at once.
> . “These aren’t just nameless, faceless targets,” he said later. “This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time.” The targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones.
> The air force’s own targeting guide, in effect during the Iraq war, said this was never supposed to happen. Published in 1998, it described the six functions of targeting as “intertwined”, with the targeteer moving “back” to refine objectives and “forward” to assess feasibility. “The best analysis,” the manual stated, “is reasoned thought with facts and conclusions, not a checklist.”
> A former senior government official asked the obvious question: “The building was on a target list for years. Yet this was missed, and the question is how.”
---
> Please reason through the implications now?
It was a mistake. My girls are about to enter this level of school, as well (cool parent card). A mistake/error/tragedy can all accurately be used to describe this. It's horrible it happened. All I'm saying is that no process is perfect. It is not excusable, but it is unfortunately understandable how it happened in this situation.
> 1000s
1000s is fairly easily understood. 1/1000 is inferred b/c as you say, "public pressure" sprang up immediately after this one bombing. Iran regularly posts pictures and videos online, and human rights orgs are clamoring to find evidence. Either we are really good at suppressing the world except for this one case or there aren't that many schools being bombed. We cannot be simultaneously horrible at picking targets and suppressing evidence and also great at it in every other case. Planet labs themselves provided the pictures - they are freely available.
Yes maybe the machine lumbers on, stomping on kids, or maybe we've learned our lesson and are now perfect, but this seems like the kind of mistake that can happen, and it seems likely that the analysts involved here are now benched and I wouldn't be surprised if some corrections are happening internally. These are human beings, despite what the article would have you believe, that are doing the best they can.
> we targeted and killed young children
We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
We're going to quickly get into hypotheticals here. There's a lot of open threads, and believe me I hate with the fullest extent of the word violence against children. We can leave it at that.
It feels like an appreciation for hypotheticals or givens is missing here. One can simultaneously be against the war and the bombing in general, and also accept it as a given and then think about a certain situation being understandable within that given.
I can't answer why they would do it, but I don't think it's unusual for these people to knowingly strike civilian targets that they believe will have children present. In the famous Pete Hegseth leaked Signal chat, they were discussing bombing a residential apartment building in the middle of the night because they thought a single target was there visiting his girlfriend. Obviously that carries a high risk of killing children, and in that particular case the Secretary of Defense and Vice President were intimately involved and celebrated after learning that the building had collapsed. If those at the very top are willing to move forward with bombing civilians asleep in a residential building, I have to believe that everyone below them in the chain of command is expected to follow their lead.
This is very different from targeting civilians as a goal in itself, which is what it would have had to be if this was not just negligence, but intentional, as GP suggested. Parent correctly points out that there's both no political incentive for that, and that it's not realistic from a psychological point of view, given reasonable assumptions about human nature.
The claim I'm responding to is "I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed." I agree it's unusual for anyone in the US military to drop a bomb primarily because they want to kill some children. I think it is not unusual for people involved in bombing campaigns to anticipate killing children and move forward anyway.
> This is very different from targeting civilians as a goal in itself
Targeting a single person which might be a valid target had war been declared, while also intentionally striking many civilians around them, is the same as targeting those civilians. You knew the bomb you dropped was going to kill them, and you pressed the button. It makes no difference who the primary "target" is.
Otherwise, countries would just bomb all the civilians and all their infrastructure and medical facilities and schools with the excuse that they heard from an unnamed source that there was a combatant nearby, like israel does in Palestine.
No evidence has shown up suggesting there was some sort of compelling target in the school. As foul as Trump and Hegseth may be, they aren't cartoon character villains. The Occam's razor explanation is that this was an intelligence failure and a tragic mistake.
There are no cartoon villains in general, that's the point GP is making by using the word "cartoon". Let's use some common sense, it's not like Trump and Hegseth got together and sneaked in the school on the list of targets just because they liked the idea of children being killed. It's naive to suggest this is a possibility worth considering.
Yeah, going to have to go ahead and disagree with you there boss. The man Hegseth in all his 'no quarter' bravado is only affirming his own mother's claim that he is a piece of shit. respectfully of course, I would not put it past him to kill some kids for a political or terrorism reason (the parents).
just because you assume that trump and hegseth aren't cartoonishly evil, doesn't mean they aren't. looking at america's actions for a long time, the occam's razor explanation is that america is cartoonishly evil. the reason you struggle with that is about emotions, not logic. and i get it.
Your first two quotes are about targeting in the Iraq War; specifically how the breakdown in careful analysis, precipitated by the new systems, led to the exact mis-targeting they were trying to solve. That’s what the entire article is about.
And your third quote is from an ex-official commenting on the event after the school strike happened.
These quotes contradict your original point, ie they show how careful analysis has been designed out of the system.
> We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
This sounds incredibly naive. For starters, plausible deniability due to diffuse responsibility is a thing.
“Of course we don’t target schools and kill children, this was a system error.” But the message gets sent regardless and meanwhile we have people arguing back-and-forth over grains of sand because they took an action with deliberate plausible deniability.
Of course they didn’t intend to kill the children, they only intended to disperse the strikers by setting their tents on fire. It was simply a mistake.
> I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
Because they’re openly callous and contemptful of anyone they don’t consider a heritage American? Because the admin has already abused children to lure out parents in their anti immigrant push?
And that’s before getting into the Epstein file allegations and if he raped and killed kids already.
I’m gonna throw it back on you, how can you believe that this admin cares if foreign kids die?
we are speaking politicians who make a habit of bluster and liking "shows of force" and are openly contemptful of the lives of those who don't agree with or look like them
some of them believe that it is their religious duty to start this war and make it heinous enough to start ww3 and bring forth the return of jesus christ
I think you are ascribing a level of systems thinking and care about consequences which one cannot simply assume is there
if you were to, say, start with an assumption that some of the actors have the mental patterns and world model of an angsty, self-centered teenager, or younger, then you might draw different conclusions
You have evidence in front of you on a weekly basis of these people being that evil and that stupid, and we’re coming up on 2 years of that playing out.
It's incredible, after all the grotesque stories about rape, torture and murder of children, men and women during the Iraq war, active support of genocide (and 10s of thousands of children murdered by Israel, on purpose), prisoners rape and child imprisonment, a "secretary of war" and president publicly admiting to war crimes and saying things like "negotiate with bombs" you still "refuse to believe" that anyone in decision chain wouldn't do anything like this.
My comment is to say the US has proven how brutal they are consistently through all the wars of aggression they have waged in the past several decades. They do not see their "enemies" as human. I can't fix anything unfortunately.
The terrorists that struck the World Trade Center targeted a building too.
If we aren't going to have a military doctrine that cares about who's in the building, we will be treated the same by our enemies. I don't think we want that.
If I recall we saw two planes. We did not see any individual as such in the planes, did we? We saw some passports; not sure that this proves much at all. We also had WTC 7 going down and the strike on the other building (was it in Washington) but not much aside from this.
I am not saying the-cake-is-a-lie, everything was fabricated, mind you. What I am saying is that IF we are going to make any conclusions, we need to look at what we have, and then find explanations and projections to what is missing. For instance, any follow-up question such as damage to a building, can be calculated by a computer, so this is not a problem. The problem, though, is IF one can not trust a government, to then buy into what they show or present to the viewer. Hitler also used a fake narrative to sell the invasion of Poland, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
That does not mean everything else is a false flag or fake, per se, but I do not automatically trust any allegation made by any government. You can look back in history and wonder about attempts to sell explanations, such as Warren Commission and a magic bullet switching directions multiple times. Again, that can be calculated via computers, so that's not an issue per se; the issue is if they made claims that are factually incorrect and/or incomplete.
> Either we are really good at suppressing the world except for this one case or there aren't that many schools being bombed. We cannot be simultaneously horrible at picking targets and suppressing evidence and also great at it in every other case.
...is a logical fallacy (false dichotomy). It presumes a level of intent that isn't necessarily present.
For an example of how these might coexist, I'd encourage The Toxoplasma of Rage, which is a long essay that frequently comes up here:
The idea is that rage is its own, self-replicating emotion, and given the medium of the Internet, it's possible that some memes have no purpose other than self-perpetuation. A story about a girls' school being blown up is self-replicating: it gets people riled up enough to share it. A story about a random factory, or some dead person's house, or an empty patch of desert is not really. It's entirely possible that attacks on these happened hundreds of times in the Iran war, but if it did, I would never know about it. I probably wouldn't care about it. Those are not stories that go viral, they don't have enough emotional valence to make people care. And the media knows this, and so they don't bother to seek them out or run them.
And in fact, a handful of illegal targets get hit each day, according to HRANA. HRANA is an Iranian human rights org that was banned in Iran during an election and has since been re-established in the US. They are a reliable source.
If you scroll down to the "Facilities Protected Under International Humanitarian Law", you will see a list of non-military targets. That part is never empty in these reports.
This feels like moving the goalposts. The OP and the preceding comments are pretty clearly talking about the targeting mistake aspect of this incident, not the war itself. You're moving the discussion from the former to the latter to it easier to argue that US is in the wrong, but if the argument is that the war was unjust to begin with, then do you really need a school getting bombed to push you over the edge? After all, even if they bombed an IRGC compound and only killed soldiers, those soldiers are still people's sons, fathers, husbands. Even if there's no deaths, you could still make the macroeconomic argument that any economic losses are impoverishing the Iranian people.
No, I am fine with parent's take. We treat children as absolutely innocent (which they are, regardless of the way anybody tries to spin this or ie Gaza), and killing children is extra heinous crime compared to killing adult, same with rape etc. Children rapist get extra special treatment in jails, often from other murderers and society is largely fine with that.
As a parent, even when cutting off most of the emotions related to this horrible war crime, I am unfazed and unconvinced by such, even if well meaning whataboutism.
>I am unfazed and unconvinced by such, even if well meaning whataboutism.
No, it's not whataboutism, it's moving the goalposts. Consider the following exchange:
Alice: "McDonalds mistreats its workers by paying them below the minimum wage"
Bob: "No they don't. They all get paid at or above the local minimum wage"
Charlie: "Well that doesn't matter, because McDonald's still mistreats its workers because it's a capitalist institution, which by definition means they're siphoning the fruits of the worker's labor"
Even if you agree with Charlie's point, at the very least it's in poor taste to bring it up in a conversation specifically talking about the minimum wage. Otherwise every discussion about some aspect of [thing] just turns into a plebiscite about [thing].
The only reason Iranian bombs aren’t hitting America is because their range isn’t long enough. Iran-commanded forces (located in Iran, Lebanon, Yemen) have been targeting civilians for many years.
You believe that anyone who lives on stolen land is not a citizen and deserves to be bombed? Americans live on stolen land too, as does much of the rest of the world population.
If it was 1570, it would absolutely be valid to remove settlers from the Americas. If fact the Pueblo Revolt is considered to be one of the more successful and justified acts of indigenous resistance.
Ok, it sounds the principle here is if any land was stolen in the 20th century the people who live there now aren’t citizens (regardless if they are children or not) and deserve to be bombed? I hope nobody tells the balkans.
Crazy that saying 'all Israeli's and Israel supporters are fair targets to kill' (and later stated this includes children) is not just not dead, but not even downvoted here.
This is just your opinion. The tragedy here is that there are people with similar opinion and bombs at their disposal that feel complete impunity and go around murdering in the world
Also, remembe the CIA co-staged a coup in Iran in 1953. That's one fact, nor just opinion.
I suspect if the IRGC accidentally blew up a school next to a military base in Oklahoma, they would find it in them to condemn those who made such an innocent mistake.
That's all speculation. What we know is that the US agressed Iran without provocation and in the midst of negotiations and started by blowing up a school and not owning up to it. And now they have threatened multiple times with destroying the civilian energy infrastructure, which is a war crime.
Please ask yourself if there is true evil in the world. People who are willing to kill children on purpose, or maim them, or burn them with acid, or commit other bad things I wont get into.
Then ask yourself if bad things can happen despite good intents. Truly horrible things, in fact, despite effort to prevent them.
Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B.
And ask if we were trying to target people from group A or group B.
This is not an "ends justify the means" argument, I hope. But if you want to count bodies as some kind of justification for or against war because apparently morals can be reduced to addition and subtraction, you might as well at least classify the dead and causes correctly.
> Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B.
false dichotomies are a common rhetorical method (and sometimes useful) to argue your way to a moral justification, but that doesn't make them reflect reality
There is no A and B. You want to force a situation where B is pure good intent and we either have to choose that or choose A where there is only bad intent. The reality is, this war is about ego, power and money as much as it is about any "good intent". The decisions to start the war were made with a full knowledge of the risks and costs it would entail, with almost all of those being externalised to other people than those taking the choices.
Nobody taking those choices should get to just opt out of moral responsibility with some easy "A / B" logic.
We (US) are definitely in Group A. We killed and are continuing to kill more innocent people (including children) than everyone else combined but are always hiding under “oh, we really good guys here, just shit happens while we are bombing around the world for decades for no particular reason until we eventually lose and leave”)
Evil is commiting atrocious acts for self-interest. This is a description of US foreign policy (not exclusively, of course). Killing 150 schoolchildren is unfortunately but a fraction of a drop in the bucket of atrocities committed by either the US or Israel.
No it isn't. You're assuming perfect information, when the reality is nowhere near as clear. I certainly believe that Iran killed a lot of protesters recently. Undoubtedly some of them were innocent. Some others were collaborators; Israel is well known to be engaged in a shadow war with Iran and to have infiltrated a large number of people within the Iranian security apparatus. I'm thus extremely skeptical of any specific claims around numbers for the foreseeable future.
The problem with this simplistic utilitarianism is that assumes a degree of omniscience that doesn't exist. You can excuse any atrocity by claiming it's an unavoidable by product of a high-minded end. Life rarely presents neat classic trolley problems, and even if it did there are many unknowns; for example, are you sacrificing the life of one saint to save five serial killers? Absent this information I'd opt to save one person, but would be doing so with the awareness that I might be making a very bad decision for which I'll have to take responsibility.
In this case, the trolley is in a whole other country. Unilaterally attacking it (while negotiations were ongoing) is regarded by most experts as a blatant violation of international law and that's the primary reason nominally allied countries are refusing to assist.
You're giving the regime far more of the benefit of the doubt than they deserve. Their crimes are well documented.
Aside from that, the risk of accidentally bombing a school is also an unknown quantity. So we're looking at "risk of leaving the regime in place" vs "risk of accidentally bombing kids". Feels plenty trolly-ish to me.
No matter how inept or corrupt the process, the fact is some bombs fell out of the sky and killed a bunch of unelected dictators who just weeks ago murdered thousands of their own countrymen. In my eye, this is an excellent precedent. If it means paying a few more dollars for gas, so be it.
The us has over 150 elementary schools on military bases. If you use a more colloquial definition of military base, many many national guard armories are on the same block as elementary schools or even right next to them.
Can you cite anything that says all iranian military bases are next to elementary schools? If they are on ALL bases, that makes hitting an elementary school on base less forgivable, not more, because if its a fact of every iranian military base, it's a lot harder to claim good intelligence and also that they didn't check that the part of base being bombed was the school.
No. No childs life is worth some hypothetical regime change. There is no greater evil in this scenario than a hypothetical greater good attempts at justifying this.
The people that run hospitals, build safety devices, approve drugs, issue insurance, etc etc all do. I certainly hope the people that drop bombs do too.
Look up Value of a Statistical Life, Value of a Statistical Life Year, and Age Weighting.
> Accidentally killing a bunch of kids would likely be worth it, morally speaking, if it led to the destruction of the Iranian regime.
It most absolutely is not and I struggle to believe you can build a valid argument that links bombing school children as necessary for the fall of Iran’s government.
How you win a war, especially one as lopsided as this invasion is, is as important as winning. I cannot so easily sleep at night knowing we are committing horrific atrocities during an invasion we chose to launch against a country thousands of miles away with zero military capacity to harm us here at home.
Some children being killed is an inevitable part of war. Do you agree with the statement "No war has ever been worth the results."? If yes, then okay end of conversation. But if not then we need to talk about acceptable mistake rates and where this falls, because zero mistakes is not possible. Note that I am not defending the strike here, I'm saying that the criticism needs more depth.
I might not know your personal background, but I have a hard time imagining you come from a lineage that has experience the cost of one of those.
The list of today's remaining colonies is short enough[0] that it is worth considering whether decolonization was "an idea that reached its time" in the late 20th century ; and given that there are examples of peaceful revolutions (eg India and West Africa) it is worth asking whether more places could have undergone peaceful transitions, and whether the cost in human lives and atrocities born within a decade of war doesn't outweigh the cost of the colonial system dying by itself within the same order of magnitude of time.
But then again, I think you're veering us somewhat off-topic as I'd consider a "colonial freedom war" to be a revolution (the people overthrowing their overlord) which is quite different from the topic at hand here, war between nation-states.
Which part do you think is a strawman? Because one of the people that replied to me does appear to think that no war has ever been worth the results. It's a legitimate point of view, and that's why I asked if it was your point of view.
For the rest of this post I'm assuming it's not your point of view.
I'm very much not trying to strawman you, I'm trying to improve your argument. If any wars are considered "worth it, morally speaking", then single mistakes can't be enough to invalidate the war. We need to talk about how many mistakes happen and how they happen. We need to say how much is too much, and "zero mistakes" is not compatible with "some wars are worth it". The idea that we could have both in the real world is self-deception.
1. This isnt an invasion, just a bombing campaign.
2. Of course it would be better to not kill any kids, but thats just not how war works. Mistakes will be made, that doesnt mean eliminating the number one funder of terror in the world isnt worth it. Even if the next regime hates the US/israel just as much they will likely spend much less supporting terror groups because they know theyll just get bombed again.
3. Of course this is all if the bombing campaign actually worked. It didnt, and thats no surprise, which is why the whole thing is pretty clearly immoral imo.
> zero military capacity to harm us here at home.
The houthis harmed the US quite a bit by destroying American ships and harming global trade. In fact their actions were arguably far more harmful to the average american than any domestic terrorist attack could possibly be because of the economic impact that effected every single american.
First, this is completely untrue. Hamas and Hezbollah have been launching missiles at Israel literally nonstop for 20 years. The houithis have and will continue to launch missiles at US assets along the Bab al-Mandab Strait. All of these missiles came directly from the iranian regime. Those groups are an arm of the Iranian government
Thats not the point though. There is no reason for either party to respond proportionally in a war. Going to war against an equal weight class as idiocy, sun tzu figured that one out forever ago.
So Iran kills untold innocent children and innocents but because they havent yet launched an attack on american soil(they absolutely could) its immoral to stop them from killing more children and innocents? Doesnt make sense to me. Thats before we even get to the major economic damage their terrorist network has caused. The US morally must just sit back while Iran funds and arms the group that routinely shuts down global trade and costs americans billions?
> So Iran kills untold innocent children and innocents but because they havent yet launched an attack on american soil(they absolutely could) its immoral to stop them from killing more children and innocents?
israel has killed even more "untold innocent children and innocents", so you should expect to continue finding no global sympathy or solidarity for them as they, an aggressor, initiate a war of choice against someone else.
By your logic, israel has greater causus belli against themselves than iran. Yet we don't see israel warring against itself. The only conclusion is that israel doesn't actually care about kids being killed, and started this war for totally different reasons.
We literally just deployed 5000 troops to Iran after weeks of bombing. We are boots on the ground and our belligerent president literally calls it a war. It is disingenuous to bicker over whether we can call our attack an invasion. If it was happening to us we certainly would call it one.
Hand wavy “that’s war for ya” nonsense isn’t appropriate for a serious discussion of ethics. Especially when discussing bombing a school.
> Hand wavy “that’s war for ya” nonsense isn’t appropriate for a serious discussion of ethics.
I was responding to whether the "invasion" could have been accomplished without killing the kids. I dont think that's realistic.
The separate question of whether it's worth it morally to topple the regime given kids will die I think is pretty simply yes. Iran's funding of terrorism kills and will continue to kill far more kids than died in this strike. Iran's funding of Hamas has been partially responsible for the terrible conditions Gazans are subject to. Even if Israel is mostly responsible for that I think conditions will improve if Iran cuts Hamas off. Same with Yemen, if Iranian funding is cut off conditions for the 15 million children there will improve. So yea for me personally Ive got no problem with a bombing campaign that will undoubtedly accidentally kill some civilians if it means the Iranian regime is toppled.
Killing children in an unprovoked attack to stop somebody else from potentially killing children in the future doesn't seem like a moral take to me, even if "someone else" killed more in the past or will in the future. In particular, because it actually sends the message that it's ok to kill children as long as you get what you want in the end. Not a great precedent. Perhaps that is the root of where your utilitarian morals diverge from some others' morals.
Unfortunately for everyone, now the US and israel killed a bunch of kids, and reinforced that precedent for others with these sorts of flimsy justifications, *and* everything will be the same or worse in Iran, especially for civilians. So lose-lose-lose.
> Even if Israel is mostly responsible for that [conditions in the Gaza region of Palestine] I think conditions will improve if Iran cuts Hamas off.
We can already see the outcome of that in the West Bank region of Palestine: no hamas, yet israel still exercises ultimate control via violence, and keeps oppressing and killing Palestinians and taking or destroying their stuff with impunity, especially as of late.
There's no indication israel would be more generous to Palestinians in the Gaza region of Palestine if hamas wasn't there. Palestinians in Gaza see what israel does to Palestinians in the West Bank, and want no part of it. Who can blame them? It's sick.
Conditions in the west bank are far better than in gaza for what its worth. If all the million kids in gaza got to live in conditions as good as the west bank kids get the bombing would be worth it for that alone.
> Conditions in the west bank are far better than in gaza for what its worth.
'The brutal apartheid ongoing in the West Bank isn't as bad as the brutal genocide ongoing in Gaza' isn't the best flex for israel, especially since they're perpetrating both.
obviously before the latest wave of israel's genocide in Gaza, the oppression, control, and lack of freedom in the West Bank region of Palestine were worse than Gaza. Plus the West Bank still experiences israel imprisoning and killing Palestinian civilians and taking or destroying their land and stuff with impunity
the observant reader might notice that the common factor behind the misery in both regions of Palestine is not hamas, but israel
also, consider reading the first half of the post to which you responded – we were talking about the wisdom and morality of killing kids to achieve your objectives, and then also miserably failing to achieve your objectives. Your thoughts? Still worth killing the kids when it was for nothing?
And a very very true one. If the US military had maps at least the quality of local tourist ones, or Google Maps, they could have know basically the location of every ice cream shop, supermarket, school, and military building.
I would say that should be pretty much a prerequisite for launching an attack, (at least map out the city block around the target). The US has been eying to strike Iran for decades.
Mapping enemy targets is basically one of the biggest tasks (in scope) intelligence agencies undertake, and can be done in peacetime.
There was no extreme time pressure here, this was just a lack of due diligence and operational sloppiness.
One of the key stated goals of this war, is to have the Iranian people topple their totalitarian government, thereby avoiding having to fight a ground war, and as such, goodwill is extremely important.
The damage this strike did to that goodwill outweighs any potential military advantage the US possibly could get out of it.
Not sure if astonishingly credulous or just pretending.
Iran claims 600 schools have been damaged, with over 1000 students killed. I doubt the veracity of those numbers, but not as much as I doubt the US claims of benign omniscience in targeting and invulnerability from being targeted.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that the US should not be in this war at all. How people have already moved on from that to making monstrous posts like this makes me sick.
Who said there’s only been one mis-strike among 1000s of sorties? There’s been one mis-strike so egregiously wrong that even the western media call it out. There would be many more that don’t make it onto the front pages of first world media.
>>I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!).
What a ridiculous take. What does "originally was" mean? Maybe you wanna say "previously was"? That building was converted to a school 10 years ago! The intelligence they relied on is 10 years old!!!!! It's recklessness and stupidity dressed as bravery and courage.
> Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a low error rate.
This is giving them too much credit.
Hegseth has already shown himself to entirely disregard the notion of War Crime, even by the US military's own already controversial standards. The double strike on the boats in the caribbean are literally the textbook example in US military textbooks of what not to do, and that it is a warcrime.
This was no mistake. It was the obvious outcome of a pattern of reckless action.
For someone that interested in precision of supporting claims with evidence, you make pretty ridiculous and completely unsupported claims yourself, like "there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties".
Why? You just saw I got the point without reading it.
Am aware content of media coming from either side is so normalized there is little value giving either my attention for free. I am not susceptible to Fox News fear mongering and already read 1984 among others. Neither are going to say anything novel. They're just engaged in barter for food and shelter.
I spent the time engaged in more useful endeavors to those around me and myself.
It's almost as if AI's purpose is to shift blame, saying that the 'computer did it', in which case these deliberately unreliable AI systems are used, so that responsibility can be avoided, or smeared across the command chain, so every person was only responsible for an innocious part of the whole disaster.
A computer can never be held accountable Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
The New York Times are the same people who spread the lie about Iraq having WMDs, they are not credible, and in fact have been proven to be incredibly biased when it comes to wars in the Middle East.
Israel and the US targeted many schools in Gaza. They killed tens of thousands of children. This strike was clearly intentional and very much in line with all other Zionist actions.
I don't disagree there. But this is not a case of hallucination, and an existing website is a signal, not a determinant, of the real situation on the ground. However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated. One that does not seem to be present in TFA or any analysis that I've read. In fact, the article itself quotes those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target.