When Hegseth Says “Lethality” He’s Talking About Killing Iranian School Girls

I’m going to give our “Secretary of War” a little credit. I will assume that even someone as openly bloodthirsty as Hegseth would not deliberately blow up a school building filled with little girls. But this tragic accident that led to the death of at least 165 Iranian girls between the ages of 7 and 12 was the direct result of Hegseth’s policy.

The main point of the “woke” rules of engagement that Hegseth has constantly derided, and told the military to ignore, is to prevent tragic accidents like the bombing of a girls’ school in the middle of the day. The rules are designed to try to minimize civilian casualties.

This means reviewing designated bombing sites to make sure they are, in fact, military targets. Also, even if the target is a legitimate military target, the timing is supposed to be adjusted to minimize the risk of civilian casualties. This can be as simple as bombing a site in the middle of the night instead of during business hours, when there are people working or shopping in the area.

This is exactly the sort of review that Hegseth has gleefully ended. So even if he didn’t tell the military to target a girls’ school, his orders virtually guarantee that tragedies like this one will occur.

It also is important not to be distracted by the possible role of AI in this disaster. It really doesn’t matter whether AI or a human in the Pentagon picked out the girls’ school as a target. There is no shortage of humans who can make very big mistakes. The important point is that Hegseth eliminated the necessary review of targets that likely would have prevented the school from being hit.

It is also worth mentioning that even those who are not troubled by our military committing a classic act of terrorism (blowing up a girls’ school is about as terrorist as it gets) should be bothered by Hegseth’s shoot then aim approach. While Trump has never been clear about the reason he decided to go to war in Iran, on some days he has said it is about liberating the Iranian people from an authoritarian government. He has many times encouraged the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government.

This sort of attack, that needlessly killed these schoolgirls, is not going to lead Iranians to believe we are on their side. The fact that Hegseth’s military could not be bothered to do the most basic checking before the strike shows total disregard for the lives of Iranians.

If this point is too subtle, imagine that we had done a strike that accidentally led to the killing of 165 Jewish Israeli girls. There would be hell to pay, as there should be.

And just to be clear, the attack on the girls’ school has nothing to do with a “fog of war” or firing in self-defense story. This was at the very start of the war. No one was firing anything at the US. Team Hegseth had all the time in the world to review its initial set of targets. They chose not to take it.

In this respect, it is worth noting that Trump has refused to acknowledge that the US military was responsible for the strike. Instead, he has absurdly claimed that Iran did the strike itself, using a missile it does not have. Even Trump knows that blowing up a girls’ school cannot possibly advance his war aims, whatever they happen to be on a given day. (It can be a useful distraction from the Epstein files.)

Hegseth’s policy of “maximum lethality” is about blowing up girls’ schools and other civilian targets that the military’s rules of engagement were designed to prevent. This is Hegseth’s policy and, by extension, Trump’s.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.