On July 3, 1988, Iran Air Flight 655 took off from Bandar Abbas bound for Dubai. It was an Airbus with 290 passengers on board, 66 of whom were children. It was flying within a civilian air corridor, on schedule, and transmitting the standard commercial aircraft code. Seven minutes later, two missiles fired from one of the world’s most advanced air defense ships, the USS Vincennes, shot it down over the waters of the Strait of Hormuz. There were no survivors.
Washington said it had been a mistake. The crew (military experts) had mistaken a 50-meter-long passenger plane for a small US-built F-14 fighter jet. Weeks later, Vice President George H. Bush, in the midst of an election campaign, summed up his country’s philosophy better than any history book: he would never apologize on behalf of the United States, no matter what the facts might be. He won the election.
Unsurprisingly, in 1990, the captain of the Vincennes, William Rogers, received the Legion of Merit for his service. It wasn’t until 1996, to settle a lawsuit before the International Court of Justice, that Washington paid some $62 million to the victims’ families. It did so without admitting any liability. The argument that the USS Vincennes had warned the captain of the commercial Airbus did not hold up: the warning was issued on a military radio frequency—much like the decrees that colonists read to the natives in a language they did not understand.
On February 28, 2026, in the early hours of what the Pentagon dubbed—as if it were a video game—Operation Epic Fury, a Tomahawk missile struck the Shajareh Tayebeh Elementary School in Minab, 80 kilometers from the Strait of Hormuz itself. It was the morning session, and 170 students were in class. As neighbors and some parents rushed to pull the children from the rubble, the second strike hit. 175 people died; 120 girls and boys, most between the ages of seven and eleven. In military academies, this tactic for racking up casualties is called a double tap. It was used in 2019 during the bombing of the Baghuz market in Syria, which killed 70 civilians and which the “special command” concealed until Colonel Dean Korsak leaked the information.
Washington’s initial reaction to the massacre of children in Minab was the same as always: denial. President Trump insinuated that Iran was responsible, even though Iran does not possess Tomahawk missiles. Then, when geolocated videos and satellite imagery made the lie untenable, the second word from the playbook appeared: error. The Pentagon itself concluded that Central Command had set the coordinates using outdated data from the Defense Intelligence Agency. The building had once been part of a Revolutionary Guard base, but by 2016 it had been converted into an elementary school. According to sources cited by CNN, the target-selection system itself warned several times that this information needed to be reviewed. The warnings were ignored for the sake of convenience. There was a rush.
Anyone in the world, with a phone and Google Maps, can see the Shajareh Tayebeh school. You can see the playground where the girls were playing, the nearby hospitals, the small neighborhood shops—each one marked and labeled with its name. A ten-year-old boy in Bogotá or Atlanta could have verified what the most expensive military in history failed to do. The military capable of reading a car’s license plate from space could not read the sign on a school it was about to bomb.
A regrettable mistake? A mistake? Regrettable? What always happens in the same way has another name: Global Apartheid. The West’s mistakes never strike a school in Tel Aviv or a mosque in Kuwait. They strike the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad, where in 1991 more than 400 civilians died while sleeping in what Washington mistook for a command post. They fall on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, bombed in 1999 because, once again, of an outdated map. They fall on Qana, a UN shelter in Lebanon, as they did in 1996, when Israel bombed and killed 106 people, many of them children. Tel Aviv said it had been a mistake. It made the same mistake again in 2006 when it bombed the same city, killing nearly a hundred more refugees. They fell again, also by mistake, in Sana’a, Yemen, in 2016, when Saudi Arabia bombed a funeral, killing more than 140 people with U.S.-made GBU-12 guided bombs…
Eight months after the 2026 massacre at the school in Minab, the full investigation remains tucked away in some drawer. In September, an independent United Nations mission concluded that the attack had been a war crime, and that the lack of verification had gone beyond mere negligence. Any compensation? Any apology? Neither—just more bombs and more threats. Bush had said it with brutal cynicism nearly forty years ago: no matter what the facts may be.
The facts were never the problem. The problem is value. Not moral value—which in official speeches is always infinite—but real value, the kind measured in contracts and on the stock market. Each Tomahawk costs two million dollars. Every missile fired is a missile that will have to be replaced, and every purchase order means billions in profits. War is not a market failure. It is one of its most profitable products. For the psychopaths and billionaires who own the world, human life is not a value but an adjustment variable. 120 dead children in a distant country do not appear on any quarterly balance sheet. They are an “operating expense.”
But no dominant system can sustain itself without the passive complicity of those at the bottom—without the complacency, cowardice, or indifference of the “pro-life” advocates. While small graves were being dug in Minab, in the democracies of the North, outrage found its true target: the price of gas. The very same hypocrites who celebrated the war on social media complained, weeks later, that filling up their tanks cost more. The deaths of 120 children to start yet another unnecessary war stirred no emotion in them other than self-justification and self-interest. It is the old colonial logic updated for the consumer age: the pain of others isn’t real because it doesn’t hurt; a few cents more per gallon of gas is a national tragedy.
The history of empires is made up of these systematic errors, of apologies that never come, of medals that reward terror and horror. The captain of the Vincennes was never brought to trial. Nor will the officers who set the coordinates for Minab. To think of any form of greatness for any country in such a moral cesspool is a joke in poor taste, but it works perfectly in the electoral circus.
Jorge Majfud, October 2026
Related Topics
- The Global Intifada
- Thomas Sankara (Documentary)
- 50 years of the Cubana 455 Flight
- Colonizing Uruguay to Improve the Race?
- Urban and Architectural Segregation
- (Smart?) Cities and Their Invisible Walls
- The Gentle Colonization of AI
- The Right to Fire the Boss
- The Spanish American War
- The Mexican American War
Deja una respuesta