Lethality Is a Double-Edged Sword

     They say the first casualty of war is the truth. Next on the list would have to be children. Despite all our rhetoric about surgical strikes and targeting military installations, an unconscionable number of children continue to lose their lives in our forays into mechanized violence.

     Take the missile strike about two weeks ago on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran. Investigators have concluded that a Tomahawk missile hit the building on February 28, and, despite the president’s efforts to blame the strike on the Iranians, it is almost certain now that the US fired the missile that killed 175 people, mostly elementary schoolchildren. Apparently the military planners were relying on outdated intelligence that indicated that the facility was part of a naval base used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards. But video data show that the school grounds were fenced off from the base sometime between 2013 and 2016.

     This could all be classified as a tragic mistake but for the decisions that preceded it and made it not only possible but also likely. In 2019 Congress passed a law requiring the Pentagon to mitigate civilian harm in its military targeting. The Civilian Protection Center of Excellence was designed to limit the number of noncombatant casualties by making sure strikes are directed at military sites only. But last year Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reduced funding for the Center by approximately 90 percent. Politico reports that “the team that handles civilian casualties at Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has dropped from 10 to one.” One person to weigh in on the more than 5,500 airstrikes that have been launched in the two weeks of the war. It’s no wonder that civilians are being killed. It’s practically inevitable.

     Secretary Hegseth has repeatedly expressed his disdain for quaint concerns such as rules of engagement or anything “woke” or “politically correct” that would limit the military’s lethality. But lethality is a double-edged sword: without reasonable safeguards the sword will cut those you don’t intend to strike. Like 175 schoolchildren and their teachers.

     I am a committed pacifist—I believe the way of Jesus is the way of nonviolence and peacemaking, and I don’t see how a culture of aggression and militance can be reconciled with Jesus’s teachings and example. Others, I know, disagree, and many have made thoughtful arguments backing their views. I respect that. But I find nothing thoughtful about a defiant recklessness that can kill with no apparent remorse and that even removes sensible obstacles in order to do its killing without oversight.

     War is ugly, brutal, and lamentable in every circumstance. But war with no justification (or conflicting justifications), war fueled by testosterone and chest-thumping bravado, war that recklessly kills children and flippantly blames it on somebody else is something more than lamentable. It is evil. We need to name it as such and do whatever we can to put a stop to it.