Manu Joseph: Why the deaths of more than 100 schoolgirls should be reason enough to end the Iran war

On 28 February, an American Tomahawk struck Shajareh Tayyebeh, a girls’ elementary school in Minab in southern Iran. This cruise missile, which costs at least $1 million, was probably the most expensive thing ever to enter that school. Some children survived. But then came another Tomahawk, sent precisely to kill survivors and saviours in a tactic that is nattily called ‘double-tap.’ Then, according to reports, there was a third one.

According to Iran, more than 175 died, most of them school children. In a video of the aftermath, scores of adults are seen trying to clear debris on the school’s campus, their wails and screams filling the air.

At first, US President Donald Trump said that Iran may have struck its own school, but a preliminary report of the US military suggests that it struck the school by mistake. The school was very close to Iranian military structures that were being struck around the time. It was once a military building, it claimed, and the Tomahawk had old data.

Since the tragedy, the war has continued. The world is not so heartless that it does not care about what happened in the school. In a world that has become more practical than ever, the event does not appear to be pivotal. But even in such a cold rational world, we still need one ideal. If you have mistakenly bombed a school, you cannot say ‘oops’ and move on.

I think ‘oops’ is the correct word here because America tends to acknowledge its military mistakes but rarely apologizes. Even in a practical world, killing more than 100 children attending school should override any moral case to continue the war.

Why? We must not grant rationality so much privilege that we have to answer why the accidental bombing of a school should be a pivotal event in a war.

Trump has come to represent a defining character of our age—pragmatism. He does not deny the existence of moral values, but insists that he will create his own, not defer to some council of eggheads. One of Trump’s closest advisors, Stephen Miller, recently stated the doctrine plainly: “We live in a world governed by strength, by force, by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

Such a view makes sense to a large section of the new global middle-class and the rich. Every guy who considers himself ‘practical’ behaves as though the idea is some great private epiphany and that it somehow makes him modern.

But then, practicality is, as Miller himself notes, as ancient as us. It is idealism that is new and probably something that an animal could not have thought up—the idea that the strong should care for the weak. Idealism is so tough that most of its proponents only achieve its beta version, widely derided as ‘hypocrisy,’ which is still a form of decorum and decency.

I do not say that cold rational people who wage wars are mindless. The Iran war is not mindless. We can follow the rational train of thought of its central players.

The leaders of America and Israel felt that the degradation of Iran in the 12-day war of June 2024 gave them a rare and extraordinary window of opportunity to ensure Iran never becomes a nuclear power, and they acted. If Iran ever managed to make nuclear weapons, they would be a potent deterrent.

This is precisely why Iran seemed intent on building nukes, no matter what its late supreme leader said in his opinion statements. If Iran had such weapons, America and Israel would probably not have attacked it.

Partly, Iran was attacked because Hamas, a terrorist group that it was known to have funded, launched a savage terror attack on Israel in October 2023, killing over 1,200, taking nearly 250 hostage and provoking the Gaza war that followed, which left over 70,000 dead, a majority of them women and children.

So, in my view, this is not a mindless war. It had been building up. What has changed is that Israel had had enough trying to win the goodwill of people who don’t live there. Once it stopped trying, having suffered vicious terror attacks, it succeeded in Gaza the way it had never before, and then wished to destroy the Iranian regime that it has long considered a sponsor of terror. So it is not very hard to see the point of the war waged by Israel and the US.

Even so, all I say is that no matter how rational a war is, if an expensive mistake is made, the war has to end. A world where over a 100 school children can be blasted by three missiles and it is only called ‘collateral damage’ is not a world that is worth living in, and this too is a cold rational view.

There can be an argument against this emotional stance. You could say that if a war can end because a school has been struck, there would be sick regimes that would hide behind schools. I don’t think it is an accident at all that a former military structure became a school. It may have actually been by design. Even so, civilization demands that human shields should work. If an enemy manages to hide behind children, you do not shoot. Rational warriors should find other ways to win a war.

But for the moment, it appears that we live in a world where over a 100 dead schoolgirls cannot end a war, but the surging price of oil just might.

The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’.