Trump chose to kill those girls in Iran

I was telling you about how the absence of a national emergency pretty much defines how Americans see the war against Iran. Poll after poll suggests a majority of Americans refuses to believe they were in danger and rejects the idea that the war is being done in their name.

Indeed, Donald Trump’s claims of imminent military threat are so unbelievable that even the Associated Press assigned possession of the war directly to him, with all the implications that go with personal ownership. When the Senate Republicans stopped a war-powers bill last week, the AP said they voted down the effort to end “Donald Trump’s war against Iran.”

Given the reality that “we don’t walk around thinking that at any moment an Iranian ballistic missile is going to land on our head,” as maga stalwart Marjorie Taylor Greene put it last week, it makes sense that other official claims are being taken as equally unbelievable. Pete Hegseth keeps talking about the war as if it weren’t war but a fun, no-consequences video game. "This was never meant to be a fair fight,” the secretary of defense said. “And it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they're down, which is exactly how it should be."

At the same time, however, Hegseth wants us to believe that the US is prosecuting the war according to high moral principles. When asked if the US had bombed a girls school in southern Iran on the first day of the war, he said “the only side that targets civilians is Iran.” When asked the same question, the president said, in his opinion, “that was done by Iran.”

No, it was done by the US. That’s the conclusion of US military investigators, according to Reuters. Times reporters did their own independent analysis and came to the same conclusion. “A body of evidence assembled by The New York Times — including newly released satellite imagery, social media posts and verified videos — indicates the school building was severely damaged by a precision strike that occurred at the same time as attacks on an adjacent naval base operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.”

So the president is lying, but lying is just part of his desire for power without responsibility. He started this war for his own reasons. (I think he thinks it will help prevent a takeover of the Congress by the Democrats.) The US military has bombed civilians in previous times of war, but those acts might be forgiven when seen in the context of self-defense. Iran did us no harm. As the AP said, it’s “Donald Trump’s war.” He chose to kill those schoolgirls.

And then lie about it.

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