Comment on The worst and second worst time to enter into war. by saarnok

Parent Post: The worst and second worst time to enter into war. · In Reply To

saarnok · 10/1/2026, 12:47:47 AM · permalink

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dickie · 10/1/2026, 3:48:32 AM · permalink

I got out of the U.S. Army in 1998, between the Gulf wars. I had signed a six-year enlistment and got out after two years as a conscientious objector. M60, M249 SAW and M16A2 era, with a few units in the division starting to get M4s.

As for the training, I am telling you what happened to me. In basic training I sat through the Geneva Convention instruction. Later, during field training, the senior drill sergeant told us that if we came across a wounded enemy, do not render aid, double tap him. Then he told us not to tell the captain.

I never claimed every soldier was taught that. Your relatives and friends had their experiences. I had mine. I am going to trust my firsthand memory of my own training over secondhand accounts of what other veterans apparently never told you.

And the official rule was on my side. A wounded enemy who is incapacitated and no longer fighting is protected. That was part of why I eventually got out as a conscientious objector. I am capable of killing someone. I was not willing to kill someone simply because the government told me to, particularly if the people giving orders were willing to ignore the rules they had just taught me.

Imagine having a moral line.

On Minab, nobody is claiming the U.S. bombed a girls' school because America hates Iranian girls. That is your argument, not the U.N.'s.

Your theory is essentially that Iran treats girls horribly, therefore Iran had the better motive to bomb its own school.

Maybe investigate that. But motive is not evidence of who fired the weapon.

Within days, the U.S. military's own preliminary investigation was reportedly pointing toward likely U.S. responsibility. Trump nevertheless blamed Iran without evidence, then two days later said he did not know enough about what happened.

That reminds me of something you wrote yourself:

«“Logic isn't what you feel should have worked. Logic is what DID work.”»

Exactly.

“Iran hates girls, so Iran probably did it” fits your theory. I am interested in what the evidence says happened.

If evidence eventually shows Iran did it, fine. Follow it there. I have no interest in defending Iran.

But “motive, means and opportunity” identifies someone worth investigating. It does not let you discard contrary evidence because the suspect fits the story better.

And that is why this connects to your original argument about preemptive war.

You are asking me to trust government officials to decide that a future threat is serious enough to start killing people before an attack happens.

I want a much higher standard of evidence and accountability than that.

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saarnok · 10/1/2026, 10:22:13 PM · permalink

Well, I'd be loath to trust or advise to trust government officials, but as poor as their reputation is, the reputation of the UN is worse, at least in my opinion.  
  
Almost no one can even comprehend the brutality of war. Often not even those people who were in it. There's a sort of denial that they could be the sort of person who'd do "something like that". Everybody is someone who'd do "something like that", with very few exceptions.  
  
I knew a SAW man from Vietnam.  
  
One patrol a sniper wounded a man in a clearing and he needed to lay down suppressing fire from the presumed angle of attack while they rushed out to pull the wounded man out, which the sniper would superficially wound from time to time to insure they'd attempt to rescue him, thus expose them to fire.  
  
The sniper it turned out was located at the far right arc of his sweep. He had slugs embeded in the stock of his M60 after that.  
  
I don't think that incident reminded him to observe the Geneva convention.  
  
My uncle earned a silver star for dragging three men to safety under heavy fire in Vietnam. He was a medic. Never carried a gun. Never so much as criticized the US.  
  
My father was concientious in Korea when that status wasn't even an option. He was told he would be building roads, etc., then they handed him a gun and he refused.  
  
They eventually settled for busting him to a cook, and he neither built roads nor fought the enemy.  
  
But he was a cook in "The Punchbowl" of Korea.  
  
And, I knew a man I can't actually name, lest I dishoner his memory. I can tell you he was part of the "Dirty Dozen". I can tell you he admitted to shooting the knees out of a Vietnamese kid rather than let him carry a bomb into camp.  
  
I can tell you he bragged about the week he'd gone without dreaming of beating someone to death while he slept.  
  
I can tell you how he bawled like a baby at my brother's funeral. How he called my mother "momma" at her funeral.  
  
I can tell you about the WW2 veteran who went to sleep as the BAR opperator fended off a Japanese night raid and left a killing field a man could walk accross without ever stepping on dirt. How the soldiers sat on dead bodies to eat lunch as they stopped the burial detail for lunch.  
  
But, I want to be very, very, extremely clear.  
  
I do NOT diminish your service or experiences.  
  
I'm just aware of a lot of experiences.  
  
My father in law despised Patton beyond measure. But, Patton was the reason he survived North Africa, Italy, Germany.  
  
One of my good friends was a 'didybop' wearing headphones when "Bay of Pigs" went down, and to this day celebrates the assasination of Kennedy. He could overhear the orders as they came through. He absolutely blames JFK for getting hundreds of good men killed after promising them backup.  
  
If you want to discount my analysis as someone who wasn't there... more than fair enough. Fabulous even.  
  
You say you were advised to commit 'war crimes' by a man who was more interested in your survival than satisfying "rules of war"? I guess. Sounds like a man I'd like to know. Cause he risked his entire carrear and retirement to do it.  
  
I once had the extemely unpleasant task of convincing a very good man to back off pursuing a romantic entanglement with a very fine girl by pointing out that he'd served with men who'd proven their worth to him. Not all of them came back. And I challenged him to think of just ONE he'd be comfortable to see hook up with the girl in question.  
  
There was never an answer to that question.  
  
You went to war one thing. You returned another.  
  
You learned values that don't translate to the civilian realm while insisting to yourself that they must. They don't.  
  
When things break, they don't break cleanly for the most part.  
  
I get the luxury of advocating for whatever seems prudent from my vantage. No matter how viscerally I manage to project myself into the shoes of those who bear the actual costs, I genuinely cannot know what that cost is.  
  
Biggest problem is; I'm not sure you can either.  
  
And, you were there.

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dickie · 10/1/2026, 3:57:47 AM · permalink

I went looking for a historical comparison to the Minab school strike.

It is harder to find one than I expected.

On Feb. 28, a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, was struck during the opening U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran. [Amnesty International documented 156 people killed, including 120 children](<https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/03/usa-iran-those-responsible-for-deadly-and-unlawful-us-strike-on-school-that-killed-over-100-children-must-be-held-accountable/>). Its investigation found that the school building was directly struck with guided weapons.

I cannot establish that Minab was the deadliest military strike on a functioning school in history. Historical records and the circumstances of individual attacks are too different to make that claim responsibly.

But I have not found a modern example that closely matches it in both circumstances and number of children killed.

One of the closest is **Bahr el-Baqar, Egypt, in 1970**. Israeli aircraft bombed a primary school during the War of Attrition. Forty-six children eventually died. Israel disputed Egypt’s account of the target, while journalists who visited the site reported finding a destroyed school and no obvious military equipment. The incident was serious enough to become the subject of U.N. Security Council proceedings. [The U.N. Yearbook records the dispute and casualties here.](<https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-199486/>)

Forty-six children.

Minab: 120.

There is another comparison that may be even more relevant to the question of U.S. accountability.

In **Mansourah, Syria, in 2017**, the U.S.-led coalition bombed a former boarding school being used to house displaced families. The coalition said it believed the building was an ISIS intelligence headquarters and weapons facility.

[Human Rights Watch investigated the site](<https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/09/25/all-feasible-precautions/civilian-casualties-anti-isis-coalition-airstrikes-syria>) and found substantial evidence that large numbers of civilians were living there.

The coalition initially maintained that no civilians had been harmed.

A U.N. commission later concluded that about **150 of roughly 200 people living in the school were killed**. [Human Rights Watch summarized those findings here.](<https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/03/09/year-fog-war-not-lifting-over-deadly-raqqa-strikes>)

More than a year after the attack, the coalition finally acknowledged that civilians had been killed, admitting to 40 deaths. [Human Rights Watch documented that reversal here.](<https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/07/05/overdue-us-admission-civilians-were-killed-syria-strike-still-insufficient>)

Mansourah was not a functioning school at the time. It was a school building being used as a civilian shelter. That makes it different from Minab.

But the accountability pattern is difficult to ignore.

A school building is bombed.

Outside investigators find large numbers of civilian casualties.

The initial military account does not match what investigators find on the ground.

Months pass before meaningful acknowledgment.

There are older examples too. In **1943**, a German bomber struck Sandhurst Road School in London, killing 38 children and six teachers. [The school still commemorates the victims.](<https://sandhurstprimary.lewisham.sch.uk/our-school/>)

That was during the Second World War, using 1940s bombing technology.

Minab happened in 2026 with modern precision-guided weapons.

That is what makes the comparison so disturbing.

This was not merely a tragic school casualty somewhere in the vicinity of a huge bombing campaign. Amnesty found that the school building itself was directly struck with guided weapons.

And seven months later, the United States still has not provided a satisfactory public accounting of why.

I cannot say Minab was the worst school bombing in history.

I can say that after looking for comparable state military attacks on functioning schools, **a strike killing 120 children appears historically exceptional**.

That deserves considerably more attention than it has received.

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