The ashes of war spread hate for America |
The ashes of war spread hate for America
The phone call came after the first missile hit. A father in Minab, in southern Iran, was told his daughter had survived a strike on her elementary school. He headed there immediately in his car, but before he could reach her, a second missile struck. She was dead by the time he arrived.
By the time the dust settled at Shajareh Tayyebeh that February day, at least 175 people were dead, most of them children. Evidence points to U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles using targeting data that was years out of date.
More than 100 international law scholars from Harvard, Yale and Stanford have since declared the broader U.S.-Israeli campaign a violation of the United Nations Charter. They cited Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s declaration of “no quarter, no mercy” as a statement that may itself constitute a war crime under international humanitarian law. The legal case is serious and demands a hearing.
This month, the attack on a bridge near Tehran was a first step toward strikes on infrastructure that would have devastating effects for Iranian civilians. Before the fragile ceasefire announced on April 8, President Trump threatened to destroy every Iranian power-generating plant, and obliterate the country’s water desalination systems. He said, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Bombing a school with outdated intelligence is a crime stemming from negligent aloofness. Deliberately destroying a civilian population’s transportation system, water and power is a war crime by design.
There is a body of research that leaders and military planners have consistently failed to absorb. Civilian suffering does not pacify populations. It radicalizes them — not immediately, and not always visibly, but history has documented the same response across cultures and centuries. War-related trauma scars societies, creating cycles of violence that outlast the original conflict by generations, long after the nation that caused them has moved on.
When the U.S. entered Afghanistan in 2001, it justified the arrival of troops as liberators of a population the Taliban had brutalized. Within a few years, wedding parties were being struck from the air, killing the innocent; said Patricia Gossman at Human Rights Watch, night raids on villages “turned into summary executions targeting people who had the bad luck to live in a contested district.”
The military understood what was happening. As a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served two rotations in the country described it, Afghans “held those grudges and they did accumulate over time, not only in an individual action, but in the narratives our enemies were building about us being indiscriminate killers.” The abuses fed the insurgency and made political dialogue nearly impossible.
Twenty years and trillions of dollars later, the Taliban rule Kabul again. They did not win in Afghanistan through superior ideology. They won it back because the U.S. spent two decades making their argument for them — in villages whose names never made the evening news, among families whose grief had nowhere to go except sideways into the movement waiting to receive it.
Afghanistan was not the only place where U.S. intervention failed miserably. Hostile action there and across Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen — promoted to eliminate terrorism — killed more than 400,000 civilians directly, with indirect deaths estimated in the millions. Decades of military operations have not reduced the global threat landscape; it has expanded.
The bombing of the elementary school in Minab is not just an atrocity or a crime. Those who survive, the siblings of those who didn’t, the fathers who arrived too late — they could not care less about the Pentagon’s investigation. What they carry is grief and rage that spreads through the culture like a cancer.
The children now being shaped in the wreckage of Iran are not an abstraction. They are a specific cohort of survivors, mourners and witnesses, defined by the knowledge of who killed those they love. Every bomb that kills a child creates a future enemy. Violence doesn’t buy security — it opens accounts of hate, with interest, across decades and generations.
David Marks is a veteran investigative journalist and documentary producer whose work has appeared on the BBC and PBS, including “Nazi Gold,” which re-evaluated Switzerland’s neutrality in World War II.
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