A 2,000-Pound Bomb

 Trump is very obviously telegraphing his desire at this point to wriggle out of the war he started with Iran. But that doesn't mean he won't still commit various crimes and obscenities in his flailing efforts to do so.

One of those obscenities was plastered across the front of the New York Times yesterday. A visual analysis from the paper showed an enormous crater where had once stood a family home. Three people reportedly died in the strike: a mother, a father, and their two-year-old child. 

None of them appeared to have anything to do with the military. They were by all evidence civilians. The father drove a taxi for a living. 

Though "no response is recorded from the two-year-old" on the question of his war guilt and responsibility, as Dwight Macdonald would mordantly put it. 

This all happened in the dead of night—while the family slept. That's when a 2,000-pound bomb burst through their ceiling and ended their lives (though it left two of the couple's other children alive but injured—and, of course, orphaned). 

"A clock on a wall inside one of the ruined houses had stopped just before 3:40 a.m. local time, minutes after Central Command said it had started striking Iran that night," the Times notes. 

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

The Times sums up the legal status of this apparent U.S. strike: 

“The attacking force must take all feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm, including in its selection of munitions, times of attack and, whenever circumstances allow, by issuing effective advance warnings,” said Tom Dannenbaum, a professor of law at Stanford University.

The choice of a 2,000-pound munition in a densely populated area, he added, “is very difficult to reconcile with” that obligation.

All the more so when the strike is committed in the name of a totally unnecessary war of aggression for which there was not the slightest legal or moral justification. 

Harold Pinter's words protesting against the Iraq war in 2003, alas, appear all too relevant once again to the state of American foreign policy: 

Here they go again,

The Yanks in their armoured parade

Chanting their ballads of joy

As they gallop across the big world

[...] 

The gutters are clogged with the dead

The ones who couldn't join in

[...]

Your head rolls onto the sand

Your head is a pool in the dirt

Your head is a stain in the dust

[...]

And all the dead air is alive

With the smell of America's God.