After Killing Little Girls, We Strut and Preen
Hegseth today: "This was never meant to be a fair fight. And it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they're down, which is exactly how it should be."
A friend mentioned sorrowfully that our reckless and immoral surprise attack on Tehran had not only killed that country’s leader — an 86-year-old man with six children and many grandchildren — but also his one-year-old granddaughter.
“Where’d you hear that?” I asked in surprise.
“Russian media, of course,” she replied.
Of course. Inconvenient facts like that tend to get buried. If you care, you have to go digging for them.
Deep online searches of American media turned up a few, terse mentions of a collateral-damaged grandchild. For example, early on, CNN reported we had just killed top officials “along with Khamenei’s daughter, grandchild, daughter-in-law, and son-in-law.” But no details were offered, in particular no age for the grandchild. The New York Times and The Washington Post have never even reported that much.
I asked an AI chatbot to find photos of the toddler my government had just murdered. It warned that neither the BBC nor Reuters had vetted such photos for me to look at.
“Death and Destruction from the Sky, All Day Long”
At one point, I had the AI chatbots confused, because they didn’t know which freshly murdered child I wanted to see.
I ended up on X, where the Iranian foreign minister shared a photo of back-hoes digging graves for the more than 160 children, mostly girls aged 7 to 12, killed in the bombing of an elementary school.
Our national security mandarins are frantically trying to manage this elementary school / mass murder situation. The New York Times stepped up to explain that the school had the bad taste to be situated “next to a naval base belonging to Iran’s most powerful military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio added that “the United States would not deliberately target a school,” which is pretty close to an admission that Operation Epic Fury has already accidentally vaporized a bunch of little girls.
It’s only day four of this reckless, pointless, unprovoked, immoral attack on another nation. We’ve so far, in just four days, killed more than 1,000 civilians. We went out of our way to murder their national leader and about 40 other top political leaders — along with at least one toddler — at a time when we were in active diplomatic negotiations (about a deal to keep them away from future nuclear weapons).
Who trusts a country that enters into diplomatic negotiations, and then sneak-attack incinerates the leadership of the other side?
The Iranians had gone into the weekend talking optimistically about the course of these negotiations. They cited “significant progress,” “very good progress,” and the foreign minister was upbeat about starting another round of talks in “perhaps less than a week.”
In fact, the reason so many Iranian leaders were assembled this weekend almost certainly was to discuss our latest American proposals.
At which point, we Pearl Harbor’d them.
Below is the footage, as released by the Trump Administration (which proudly documents its own inexcusable crimes):
Trump’s first attack on Iran — a 12-day bombing campaign in July — was also a sneak attack in the midst of a diplomatic negotiation. Who will talk with us again, ever, about anything?
“You see,” Trump explained yesterday, “we were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first. They were going to attack. If we didn’t do it [i.e., kill them], they were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that.”
“Based on the way the negotiation was going, I think they were going to attack first. And I didn’t want that to happen.”
So it’s diplomacy for paranoid dingbats?
The origin story of this four-day-old war keeps getting revised. Two days ago, the Secretary of State’s explanation was that Israel had whistled and we had come running obediently. But that was a bit too humiliatingly on-the-nose. Hence the latest explanation which is, literally, that Trump knew in his gut the Iranians were about to attack!
No evidence has ever been offered that the Iranians were about to attack.
But the entire White House Administration is dutifully parroting this nonsense about Trump’s “strong feeling”.
“The bottom line is this: The president determined we were not going to get hit first. It’s that simple, guys,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered the priceless summation that “the president had a feeling — again, based on fact — that Iran was going to strike the United States.”
Meanwhile, even if none of it makes any sense, Secretary of War Hegseth insists that “America is winning: Decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy.”
“We are only four days into this, and the results have been incredible. Historic, really,” Hegseth said at a press conference this morning. “They are toast. And they know it.”
We blew apart more than 160 pre-teen girls sitting at their desks in a school, and blew apart (or incinerated, or crushed to death) a one-year-old in a murderous sneak attack on her grandfather. Yet the Secretary of War chooses to boast happily about turning the Iranians into “toast.”
“Iranian leaders [will be] looking up and seeing only U.S. and Israeli air power, every minute of every day, until we decide it’s over,” Hegseth continued. “B-2s, B-52s, B1s, Predator drones, fighters controlling the skies, picking targets. Death and destruction from the sky all day long. … This was never meant to be a fair fight. And it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
We don’t fight fair, we punch down, we kill children. Is any of this supposed to make me proud? Because mostly it just makes me want to see all of my elected and appointed leaders on trial.
I came across your account with the outrage titling you gave to to this post. I scrolled back to see what you wrote about Oct 7th when Hamas attacked innocent people… crickets? I call that hypocrisy..
Matt, they have literally been murdering innocent's in the West for decades via terrorists (not to mention the thousands upon thousands of Iranians that have been executed for political purposes). You can criticize a lot about this war, but to argue that it's not morally justified is spitting in the face of the millions of this regime's victims.