> the US claims that there was a threat of attack

What the US claims is really not a strong source of anything, and I'm saying that as an American. The most compelling reasoning is that Israel was going to do something so US decision makers decided joining was the best worst decision, and I'm being very bend over backwards generous with that. Anything else is just excuses trying to cover it up. It seems obvious now that there was no stopping Israel from their strike on Iranian leadership. It was too ripe of a target, they have been emboldened by current US admin, so at that point it was in for a penny, in for a pound mentality.

If the US thought an Iranian retaliation from an Israeli strike would be to attack US assets, then the world would possibly have some sympathy. No rational person could condone an outright first strike just because we thought something was going to happen. Yet the fact that in the "we think they will do something" spit balling never suggested shutting the down the strait seems very suspect as well.

> the enrichment of nuclear material to military grades while constantly threatening the elimination of Israel.

Iran has supported a treaty on elimination of weapons of mass destruction in the middle east, Israel has been the blocker of it, only actor in the region that has nukes, and isn't in the NPT.

As a non-signer of the NPT, military aid to Israel is also illegal under US law, so we play along with strategic ambiguity and pretend they don't have them.

>Iran has been waging war since the Islamic Revolution

On who?

"it is unfortunately understandable how it happened in this situation."

I think you and I disagree on what the situation is here. I don't think it was necessary to bomb Iran and it feels like you are saying we did.

> If you do - how can you? Why would they?

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.

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.

Just pointing out that this...

> 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:

https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Toxoplasma-Of-Rag...

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.

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.

> 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?

The US has hospitals and schools on military bases.

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.

> 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.

Group A also include starting a war for bad reasons and then "accidentally" killing school children as a result.

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”)

> 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.

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 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.

Also, how is that relevant?

There are plenty of military bases next to elementary schools in the US.

Where do you think the kids of soldiers go to school?

We do. Grocery stores (commissaries) and residential units as well.

The only reason Iran would attack the US is because we back the terror colony of Israel. No Israel, no war.

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 don't think they did, and anyway you're just trying to redirect to a different question.

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.

That's a non excuse.

I live near a military base, and there is a daycare, school, rec center, pub, ice rink, church, and grocery store, open to the public, and not managed by the military. All of it is on land owned by the military, but outside the wire.

The fact that these facilities exist on military land near a base (which a hostile government would surely argue IS the base) does not mean that the people in those buildings have it coming.

Does that make it not a school, somehow? Or are we cool with killing kids just because their parents might be in the military? I'm not clear what the excuse being made actually is.

To be fair, we don't really have the capacity to run satellite surveillance on each and every target we select to engage in a sneak attack.

I think sometimes people watch hollywood movies and get the impression that it represents a kind of cataloging of our military capabilities. A demonstration of what we can do to our enemies. With the underlying subtext being "don't mess with us."

I just want to gently suggest that not everything we see in movies is factual with respect to military or intelligence capabilities.

I'm an old timer. I got off the bus at Quantico in 1991. But even though I'm not in right now, I'd feel confident in betting that we don't have the capacity to surveil that many targets via satellite for, say, 1 week, prior to our attack.

(Of course, when I got off the bus at Quantico in '91 I also would have been just as confident in betting that the US would never engage in a first strike. So what do I know?)