US has a history of war against Iran and killing innocent civilians

In war truth is the first casualty except for the US war on Iran on February 28, when the first casualties were primary school girls killed in their classrooms in southern Iran.

The Italian prime minister called for a firm condemnation of “the massacre of girls” and responsibility for killing 160 people, most of them schoolgirls, to be swiftly acknowledged.

It hasn’t yet but the evidence suggests that the attack happened during the surprise strike on Iran on February 28 with tomahawk missiles fired from a US guided missile destroyer in the Arabian Sea.

In the absence of evidence of how it happened, it would be wrong to suggest it was deliberate, just as it would be wrong to suggest it was an accident. What it certainly could not have been is that the Iranians killed their girls: nations under attack do not kill their own young.

The idea that the Iranian government would kill their own children to demonise the US and Israel is a fantasy flogged by the US president who is famously unreliable even if he has access to the best intelligence of what happened. It is a conspiracy theory comparable to the mother of all conspiracy theories – the one that holds that the attack on America on 9/11was organised by the CIA to demonise the Arab world.

On being questioned by a BBC reporter about the killing of the Iranian schoolgirls, the US war minister Pete Hegseth said that his department was investigating the incident but that the US does not target civilian targets. Earlier in the week he boasted that US forces were no longer restrained by politically correct rules of engagement – he forgot that the purpose of rules of engagement is to make sure US commanders do not target civilians contrary to the Geneva Conventions.

Actually it is a crime under the US War Crimes Act for commanders intentionally or recklessly to attack civilian targets, and although prosecutions in US are rare, in the case of the tomahawk attack that killed so many young girls, political pressure will outlast the Trump presidency for a full investigation on whether the targeting of the school girls was reckless or as a result of the relaxation of rules of engagement or both.

One of the nasty features of this war is the vulgar boasting by the US president and Hegseth. It is as if they relish the killing and destruction they are inflicting on Iran even though the US has been responsible for Iran’s attitude problem towards the West.

They forget that the US has a history of political interference and war against Iran as well as for killing innocent civilians and destroying Iranian oil installations in the Persian Gulf.

In 1988 a US destroyer, the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner over the Persian Gulf killing all 290 passengers, which the evidence suggests was in reckless disregard of the fact that the airliner was climbing rather than diving to attack.

In an action for damages a US court held the US is immune from liability for tragic military errors in a war zone irrespective of the legality of the war. But in 1996 the US paid $61.8 million ex gratia to the victims when it settled a case brought by Iran in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) after the court ruled it had jurisdiction to consider whether US had shot down the airliner unlawfully.

In a parallel case Iran claimed that between 1987-88 the US navy attacked Iranian oil platforms in the Persian Gulf, actively siding with Saddam Hussein in the final stages of the Iraq-Iran war 1980-88. The US claimed its attack was in self-defence, but after a careful examination of the evidence the ICJ rejected it acted to repel an imminent attack. 

Then as now the US was not under armed attack from Iran. On the contrary, it had covertly supported Iraq led by Hussein who invaded Iran in 1980. The US supported Hussein for eight years in his war against Iran culminating in the tanker war between them in 1987-88. 

The US became more actively involved in the tanker war at the behest of Kuwait to secure oil traffic in the Persian Gulf – much like it will have to do in the current war. US military involvement in the end forced Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to agree to a ceasefire that still holds good.

But relations between Iran and the US deteriorated probably as a result of the fact that Iraq was itself invaded twice since the ceasefire with Iran. In 1991 the US led a coalition of 34 countries – including the UK, France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria – to oust Iraq from Kuwait it had invaded in 1990.

Iraq was invaded again in 2003, this time unlawfully by the US and UK, ostensibly to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) but in reality to remove Saddam Hussein from power. No weapons of mass destruction were found but Hussein was removed and eventually hanged for the massacre of 148 Shia men and boys in 1982.

About 65 per cent of the population of Iraq and 90 per cent of the population in Iran are Shia and although they are part of the same of branch of Islam they differ on the separation of religion from politics.

Paradoxically, the Shia Islam practised by the followers of Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq known as quietism, where clerics guide the spiritual life of the people but do not rule politically, is more in keeping with the Persian character than the theocratic model known as velayat in Iran introduced by Ayatollah Khomeini after the 1979 revolution.

Like the Greeks, the Persians have two historical influences – the ancient and the more recent religious influence: Orthodox Christianity in the case of the Greeks and Shia Islam in the case of the Persians. But whereas the Greeks have managed to blend the two reasonably well of late, the Persians have yet to find the blend that reconciles the two.