TFA is from The Guardian while GP you responded to specifically called out the NYT analysis. These are different things. Maybe reading the GP's suggested source would leave you with a different set of questions?
> . “These aren’t just nameless, faceless targets,” he said later. “This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time.” The targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones.
> The air force’s own targeting guide, in effect during the Iraq war, said this was never supposed to happen. Published in 1998, it described the six functions of targeting as “intertwined”, with the targeteer moving “back” to refine objectives and “forward” to assess feasibility. “The best analysis,” the manual stated, “is reasoned thought with facts and conclusions, not a checklist.”
> A former senior government official asked the obvious question: “The building was on a target list for years. Yet this was missed, and the question is how.”
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> Please reason through the implications now?
It was a mistake. My girls are about to enter this level of school, as well (cool parent card). A mistake/error/tragedy can all accurately be used to describe this. It's horrible it happened. All I'm saying is that no process is perfect. It is not excusable, but it is unfortunately understandable how it happened in this situation.
> 1000s
1000s is fairly easily understood. 1/1000 is inferred b/c as you say, "public pressure" sprang up immediately after this one bombing. Iran regularly posts pictures and videos online, and human rights orgs are clamoring to find evidence. Either we are really good at suppressing the world except for this one case or there aren't that many schools being bombed. We cannot be simultaneously horrible at picking targets and suppressing evidence and also great at it in every other case. Planet labs themselves provided the pictures - they are freely available.
Yes maybe the machine lumbers on, stomping on kids, or maybe we've learned our lesson and are now perfect, but this seems like the kind of mistake that can happen, and it seems likely that the analysts involved here are now benched and I wouldn't be surprised if some corrections are happening internally. These are human beings, despite what the article would have you believe, that are doing the best they can.
> we targeted and killed young children
We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
We're going to quickly get into hypotheticals here. There's a lot of open threads, and believe me I hate with the fullest extent of the word violence against children. We can leave it at that.
I think you and I disagree on what the situation is here. I don't think it was necessary to bomb Iran and it feels like you are saying we did.
I can't answer why they would do it, but I don't think it's unusual for these people to knowingly strike civilian targets that they believe will have children present. In the famous Pete Hegseth leaked Signal chat, they were discussing bombing a residential apartment building in the middle of the night because they thought a single target was there visiting his girlfriend. Obviously that carries a high risk of killing children, and in that particular case the Secretary of Defense and Vice President were intimately involved and celebrated after learning that the building had collapsed. If those at the very top are willing to move forward with bombing civilians asleep in a residential building, I have to believe that everyone below them in the chain of command is expected to follow their lead.
Targeting a single person which might be a valid target had war been declared, while also intentionally striking many civilians around them, is the same as targeting those civilians. You knew the bomb you dropped was going to kill them, and you pressed the button. It makes no difference who the primary "target" is.
Otherwise, countries would just bomb all the civilians and all their infrastructure and medical facilities and schools with the excuse that they heard from an unnamed source that there was a combatant nearby, like israel does in Palestine.
Can your logic be used to justify these strikes?
1. this was an intelligence failure and a tragic mistake.
2. Trump and Hegseth are (like) cartoon character villains.
If we aren't going to have a military doctrine that cares about who's in the building, we will be treated the same by our enemies. I don't think we want that.
If I recall we saw two planes. We did not see any individual as such in the planes, did we? We saw some passports; not sure that this proves much at all. We also had WTC 7 going down and the strike on the other building (was it in Washington) but not much aside from this.
I am not saying the-cake-is-a-lie, everything was fabricated, mind you. What I am saying is that IF we are going to make any conclusions, we need to look at what we have, and then find explanations and projections to what is missing. For instance, any follow-up question such as damage to a building, can be calculated by a computer, so this is not a problem. The problem, though, is IF one can not trust a government, to then buy into what they show or present to the viewer. Hitler also used a fake narrative to sell the invasion of Poland, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
That does not mean everything else is a false flag or fake, per se, but I do not automatically trust any allegation made by any government. You can look back in history and wonder about attempts to sell explanations, such as Warren Commission and a magic bullet switching directions multiple times. Again, that can be calculated via computers, so that's not an issue per se; the issue is if they made claims that are factually incorrect and/or incomplete.
> Either we are really good at suppressing the world except for this one case or there aren't that many schools being bombed. We cannot be simultaneously horrible at picking targets and suppressing evidence and also great at it in every other case.
...is a logical fallacy (false dichotomy). It presumes a level of intent that isn't necessarily present.
For an example of how these might coexist, I'd encourage The Toxoplasma of Rage, which is a long essay that frequently comes up here:
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Toxoplasma-Of-Rag...
The idea is that rage is its own, self-replicating emotion, and given the medium of the Internet, it's possible that some memes have no purpose other than self-perpetuation. A story about a girls' school being blown up is self-replicating: it gets people riled up enough to share it. A story about a random factory, or some dead person's house, or an empty patch of desert is not really. It's entirely possible that attacks on these happened hundreds of times in the Iran war, but if it did, I would never know about it. I probably wouldn't care about it. Those are not stories that go viral, they don't have enough emotional valence to make people care. And the media knows this, and so they don't bother to seek them out or run them.
Because they’re openly callous and contemptful of anyone they don’t consider a heritage American? Because the admin has already abused children to lure out parents in their anti immigrant push?
And that’s before getting into the Epstein file allegations and if he raped and killed kids already.
I’m gonna throw it back on you, how can you believe that this admin cares if foreign kids die?
some of them believe that it is their religious duty to start this war and make it heinous enough to start ww3 and bring forth the return of jesus christ
I think you are ascribing a level of systems thinking and care about consequences which one cannot simply assume is there
if you were to, say, start with an assumption that some of the actors have the mental patterns and world model of an angsty, self-centered teenager, or younger, then you might draw different conclusions