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The evidence is mainly lack of any reason to think to the contrary and Trump's bizarre whataboutist reaction to the question.
I find that likely, though a little surprising (I doubted the intentionality just yesterday, but it being a double tap and the new actions on Tehran…). Tomahawks are very good and precise missiles (CEP like 10 meters) and the US has demonstrated immense competence in target selection.
Regarding the school, all signs point to it being a (massive and easily avoidable) fuckup by US intelligence. The school building was, until sometime about 10 years ago, part of the IRGC base which was targeted. It is now fenced off from the base (because it is a school) but from the air appears to be part of the same complex (because a decade ago, it was). A clinic which also was once part of the base was destroyed as well. By all appearances the government rushed into this war without adequate planning or preparation. It is highly likely that a commander pulled up this base from a target list which had been drawn up before that building was converted to a school, and which had never been updated. Certainly that’s more likely than the same commander sitting down and deciding “in addition to this military base, I also want to bomb the school next door.”
You can refer to the photos in this article: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/04/nx-s1-5735801/satellite-imagery-shows-strike-that-destroyed-iranian-school-was-more-extensive-than-first-reported. NPR is an American source, of course, but not one with any interest in making Trump’s moronic war of choice look good.
I must note that this “stupidity defense” is indeed not a very strong defense, morally speaking. We are still directly responsible for the deaths of over 100 innocent civilians, mostly children. But there’s no reason to think the US intentionally bombed a school. Occam’s razor. What would there be to gain by doing so? The effect of the bombing is only to strengthen Iranians’ will to fight, weaken American support for the war, and reduce the chances of neutral countries choosing our side.
In that case, wouldn't a large portion of the blame lie with the IRGC for placing a school and hospital so close to a military base so as to be virtually indistinguishable from the air? That sounds an awful lot like fortifying your military position with innocent bodies to me.
There are plenty of overseas US bases that have medical facilities and schools for families of soldiers. And plenty of US military facilities that are directly in the middle of urban areas: San Diego, San Antonio, Norfolk, Alameda, Annapolis, and so on.
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Unfortunately screwups are common enough in large war as to be unavoidable. The lesson I take from these sorts of things is "if it's not worth killing a bunch of schoolkids, don't go to war."
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Re: #1, the link you had includes something like a denial by Trump. I would not be surprised if the desalination plants were hit, but the neighboring states seem like more likely culprits than the United States to me. Iran claiming such a strike falsely, or using it on themselves, and then using it as a justification to strike said states desalination plants also seems quite conceivable. The targets I would expect the US to hit first if they were settling in for a longer phase of the war would be related to power generation.
Re: #2, it is possible the building was struck intentionally due to being misclassified as a target, or that the coordinates for the target strike were entered incorrectly (the school was near an IRGC facility, IIRC). Even a tenth of a percent of error makes a mistake likely over the course of thousands of target sets. That seems much more likely to me than a coordinated decision to strike a children's school.
Enough of this nonsense, please. Ukrainians don't bomb their own schools, Russians don't bomb their own pipelines, neither do Iranians or Israelis strike themselves, false flag is the standard excuse. I'll give you that local Arabs may have been involved but I don't see why they'd escalate in this specific manner (inviting symmetrical retaliation that's way way worse for them because they demand more on desalinated water, it can get literally existential). And on the other hand, the US-Israeli axis is clearly enjoying the carnage, have you listened to Hegseth recently? Why should I give him any benefit of the doubt? This guy is a fanatic, a drunkard and a low IQ butcher, he belongs in an asylum. Presumably the chain of command is similar.
Children's school or training grounds for IRGC Khameneijugend? But yes, maybe they thought it's something else. Probably they decided to err on the side of caution (ie not allowing IRGC adjacent facilities to survive).
They probably do garrison troops there. (IIRC, Amnesty International caught them dispersing vehicles in civilian areas).
I don't really think you can rule false flags out, they are a pretty obvious part of a covert services toolkit with a long known history (and presumably every so often they work so well they are never detected).
I do think it's stupid to blame every single thing on a false flag - there has to be a rationale for it. As you point out below, Iran stands to asymmetrically gain from attacking desalination plants. Has there been any satellite confirmation such an attack even occurred? Because the Iranians might also just be lying or mistaken.
Right, so...why would the US do this? Presumably this would alienate its regional allies!
My understanding is that the building was initially part of (within the walls of) the IRGC compound. It seems likely to me that the US used an old target set list. Probably what happened is something like this:
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