231–240 of 427 posts
Turning a military building into a girl's school, and then having this school right next to other military buildings - is this something that happens often? Or were there ulterior motives behind it?
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I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!). Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a l…
And a very very true one. If the US military had maps at least the quality of local tourist ones, or Google Maps, they could have know basically the location of every ice cream shop, supermarket, school, and military building. I would say that should be pretty much a prerequisite for launching an attack, (at least map out the city block around the target). The US has been eying to strike Iran for decades. Mapping ene…
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I think nobody with a couple of neurons still buys the "every school and hospital in Gaza were Hamas, so we bombed them" nazi-zionist rhetoric.
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In this case, they would have discovered it was a school with a Google search, basically. There’s no excuse.
Or the vast satellite network we run. Pretty easy to see it's school children going in and out of the area.
I think sometimes people watch hollywood movies and get the impression that it represents a kind of cataloging of our military capabilities. A demonstration of what we can do to our enemies. With the underlying subtext being "don't mess with us."
I just want to gently suggest that not everything we see in movies is factual with respect to military or intelligence capabilities.
I'm an old timer. I got off the bus at Quantico in 1991. But even though I'm not in right now, I'd feel confident in betting that we don't have the capacity to surveil that many targets via satellite for, say, 1 week, prior to our attack.
(Of course, when I got off the bus at Quantico in '91 I also would have been just as confident in betting that the US would never engage in a first strike. So what do I know?)
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> If you do - how can you? Why would they? I can't answer why they would do it, but I don't think it's unusual for these people to knowingly strike civilian targets that they believe will have children present. In the famous Pete Hegseth leaked Signal chat, they were discussing bombing a residential apartment building in the middle of the night because they thought a single target was there visiting his girlfriend. O…
This is very different from targeting civilians as a goal in itself, which is what it would have had to be if this was not just negligence, but intentional, as GP suggested. Parent correctly points out that there's both no political incentive for that, and that it's not realistic from a psychological point of view, given reasonable assumptions about human nature.
Targeting a single person which might be a valid target had war been declared, while also intentionally striking many civilians around them, is the same as targeting those civilians. You knew the bomb you dropped was going to kill them, and you pressed the button. It makes no difference who the primary "target" is.
Otherwise, countries would just bomb all the civilians and all their infrastructure and medical facilities and schools with the excuse that they heard from an unnamed source that there was a combatant nearby, like israel does in Palestine.
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I will try to respond to all these independent threads, but we can't continue all of them at once. > . “These aren’t just nameless, faceless targets,” he said later. “This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time.” The targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones. > The air force’s own targeting guide, in effect during t…
"it is unfortunately understandable how it happened in this situation." I think you and I disagree on what the situation is here. I don't think it was necessary to bomb Iran and it feels like you are saying we did.
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And a very very true one. If the US military had maps at least the quality of local tourist ones, or Google Maps, they could have know basically the location of every ice cream shop, supermarket, school, and military building. I would say that should be pretty much a prerequisite for launching an attack, (at least map out the city block around the target). The US has been eying to strike Iran for decades. Mapping ene…
What if the enemy sets up hopsitals and schools on military bases?
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Does that make it not a school, somehow? Or are we cool with killing kids just because their parents might be in the military? I'm not clear what the excuse being made actually is.
It's definitely not cool to have a school adjacent to a military base. Not saying this specific attack was justified, but whoever allowed this, let alone if it was done intentionally as a strategy, also has blood on their hands.