Authored by Brett Wilkins via Common Dreams
A Republican senator apologized this week for what US military investigators have reportedly determined was an American missile strike on a girls' school in southern Iran that killed around 175 people—mostly children—amid continued sidestepping by President Donald Trump, who has blamed Tehran for the massacre.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.)—who supports the US-Israeli war on Iran—first apologized for the attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab during a Monday interview with NBC News senior national political reporter Sahil Kapur. "It was terrible," Kennedy said. "We made a mistake... I’m just so sorry it happened."
Kennedy repeated his apology Tuesday on CNN, telling political correspondent Kasie Hunt: "The investigation may prove me wrong. I hope so. The kids are still dead, but I think it was a horrible, horrible mistake. I wish it hadn’t happened. I’m sorry it happened."
Reuters first reported last week that US military investigators believe American forces carried out the school strike, a preliminary conclusion that came on the heels of a New York Times analysis that found the US was "most likely to have carried out the strike" due to its near-simultaneous bombing of a nearby Iranian naval base.
This week, Iranian officials displayed fragments from what is believed to be the Tomahawk missile used in the school bombing. The remnants were marked with the names of two US arms companies, a Pentagon contract number, and the words "Made in USA".
On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that the ongoing military probe has determined that the US launched the Tomahawk strike, which paramedics and victims’ relatives said was a so-called "double-tap," in which the attacker bombs a target and then follows up with a second strike meant to kill survivors and first responders. Investigators attribute the strike to a "targeting error," according to the Times.
This, as Trump—who warned as his illegal war started that "bombs will be dropping everywhere"—continued sidestepping blame for the attack. On Saturday, Trump said aboard Air Force One that "based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran."
Two days later, the president falsely claimed that Iran has "some" Tomahawk missiles and may have used one of them to bomb the school. Iran has no Tomahawks—which are highly restricted and sold only to a handful of close allies—and the US does not sell weapons to the Iranian government, with the notable exception of the Iran-Contra Affair, when the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Tehran in order to fund anti-communist Contra terrorists in Nicaragua.
Other senior Trump administration officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and US Ambassador to the United Nations Michael Waltz have declined to back the president’s claims and have instead deferred to the ongoing military investigation. Kennedy told NBC News and CNN that the school bombing was unintentional.
"Other countries do that sort of thing intentionally, like Russia," he told Kapur. "We would never do that intentionally."
Since then-President George W. Bush launched the so-called Global War on Terror following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, more than 430,000 civilians have been killed in over half a dozen countries, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
In 2020, the Costs of War Project reported a 330% rise in civilian casualties in Afghanistan following the first Trump administration’s move to loosen military rules of engagement meant to protect noncombatants. While campaigning for president in 2016, Trump infamously vowed to “bomb the shit” out of Islamic State militants and “take out their families”—a war crime—and after his election he ramped up bombing of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries, killing thousands of civilians.
The Biden administration subsequently attempted to tackle the issue, publishing the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan (CHMR-AP), which laid out a series of policy steps aimed at preventing and responding to the death and injury of civilians. However, since returning to office, Trump has effectively sidelined the plan. Prioritizing “lethality,” Hegseth said at the outset of the current war that US forces won’t be bound by “stupid rules of engagement.”
Israel, which is bombing Iran along with US forces while simultaneously striking Lebanon and Gaza—where an estimated more than 250,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded during 29 months of what many call a "genocidal war"—dramatically loosened its rules of engagement following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack, effectively allowing for an unlimited number of civilian deaths in any strike targeting any member of the militant resistance group, no matter how low-ranking.
According to leaked Israel Defense Forces data, 5 in 6 Palestinians killed by the IDF through the first 19 months of the US-backed war were civilians. Hundreds of Iranian and Lebanese civilians have been killed by US and Israeli attacks since February 28. US and Israeli use of artificial intelligence systems to select bombing targets exponentially faster than any person has also raised concerns regarding a lack of meaningful human oversight. One former IDF officer said AI enabled a “mass assassination factory” in Gaza. Last year’s US and Israeli attacks on Iran also killed hundreds of civilians, according to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran.
Kennedy’s apology—which some observers dismissed due to the senator’s support for the war and rejection of a war powers resolution meant to limit Trump’s ability to attack Iran without the legally required congressional approval—is still notable, as US leaders, and especially Republicans, are usually highly reluctant to say they’re sorry for civilian deaths.
For example, after the USS Vincennes accidentally shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, killing all 290 civilians aboard, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush—who was running for president—infamously declared, “I’ll never apologize for the United States of America, ever; I don’t care what the facts are.”
Two years later, Bush, then president, awarded the Vincennes officer in charge of air warfare a commendation medal for the “heroic achievement” of “quickly and precisely” downing the civilian airliner. The ship’s captain was also honored with the Legion of Merit for his “outstanding service.”