17,000 Bombs

 The U.S. military has all but admitted at this point that they blew up a school full of children in the opening hours of our ongoing war of aggression against Iran. 

But, having tacitly confessed this much, they claim this incident was wholly unique. There is only "one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions," as one military spokesperson told Congress earlier this year. 

The implication being: okay, we may have hit that school; but all the other thousands upon thousands of bombs we dropped on the country never killed a single other civilian. 

This was always improbable on its face. The Intercept noted this week that U.S. and Israeli forces "struck more than 17,000 separate targets in 40 days — a rate of strikes near unprecedented in modern conflict."

Many of these strikes appeared deliberately aimed at civilian infrastructure—which Trump himself went out of his way to threaten (remember "Bridge Day"?)

The claim that not a single one of these other strikes accidentally landed on a civilian always beggared belief. 

I'm reminded of the Scottish writer Tom Leonard's observation about the U.S.'s "mass bombing" of Iraq during the first Persian Gulf War (another time in history when the U.S. military claimed an improbable minimum of civilian casualties): 

"Anyone," he writes, "who has not willfully shut out the thought of what must be the effect of [...] dropping 2,500 planeloads of bombs on their country every day for seven weeks, would not require an envoy from the United Nations to warn them of humanitarian disaster."

Likewise, how about the effects of dropping 17,000 bombs in just over a month?

Regardless of how plausible or otherwise we may have found the military's earlier claims though, the Intercept for the first time this week produces inescapable evidence that large numbers of innocent people really have died from this war. 

They spotlight the story of one Iranian family who lost five children in a single strike—one of them an infant no more than 20 days old. 

"What crime had my 20-day-old grandchild committed?" as one member of the family asked. 

The crime of being born Iranian, I guess. 

I am reminded of Dwight Macdonald's words of withering irony, in response to those who blamed civilian populations in World War II: "Even the baby, judging from its silence, lacked a sense of responsibility[.]"

"The dark is filled with means which are/ Men’s plots to murder children," to quote Stephen Spender. 

The administration will of course still say that this is the price one must pay for a non-nuclear Iran (even though they're really now just trying to restore the status quo in the Strait of Hormuz that prevailed before their own needless war). 

In response, we can only cite another passage from Spender's poem: "No cause is just unless it guards the innocent as sacred trust. No truth but that which reckons this child's tears an argument."