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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13377 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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A tiny note on the war

In the previous thread, I got some pushback for suggesting that not only did the US strike the Iranian school in Minab, killing 170 children or something like that, but perhaps it did so intentionally (or at least without remorse for the possible consequences of erroneous targeting). I admit that wasn't fully sincere. I realize that, even morals aside, there is no perceived military value in bombing children, at least not for the US (I do think Israelis may target children of IRGC officers out of their usual Bronze Age blood feud sentiment, Oct 7, Gaza and all, seen enough of their remarks to this effect; but then again they don't operate Tomahawks).

Well now the question on it having been an American strike appears settled. As for the intent – it's not so straightforward:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has gutted the Pentagon oversight offices that would have investigated the recent strike on an Iranian girls’ school — a move that has degraded America’s ability to protect civilians amid its largest air campaign in decades.
The Pentagon chief last year slashed offices that didn’t contribute to his goal of “lethality,” including the group that assists in limiting risk to civilians, known as the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. Around 200 employees who worked on the issue, including at that office, have been reduced by about 90 percent, according to two current and former officials and a person familiar with the effort. The team that handles civilian casualties at Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has dropped from 10 to one.
Hegseth can’t close the offices because they are approved by Congress. But he has managed to make them nearly inoperable, according to the people, as the Pentagon investigates its responsibility in what could be the worst U.S.-led killing of civilians since 2003. Iranian state media said the strike killed about 170 children and 14 teachers.
“The fact that our secretary of Defense, that our Central Command commander, cannot actually tell us whether or not they dropped a bomb in this location, that is so unbelievably unacceptable,” said Wes Bryant, the Pentagon’s former chief of civilian harm assessments until last year. “It just points even more to recklessness in this, in the entire planning and execution of this campaign, the fact that they don’t have any idea.”

Does it matter if there was no intent if the United States, as of now, also has a revealed preference to not bother with minimizing such risks, in favor of «lethality» and some zany Judeo-Christian nationalism courtesy the power-tripping macho TV host Pete Hegseth? I believe it does, but marginally; about as much as those girls matter to Lethal Pete. I rest my case.

More to the point. It's remarkable that there's so little discussion of contemporary historical events on here. I won't criticize anyone, be the change you want etc.; but what we are seeing is pretty astonishing from the culture war standpoint. Could someone like Pete be imaginable as the Secretary of War – no, Defense – in 2023? 2019, even? 2016? It looks as if the politically dominant culture of the United States changed overnight. Does everyone just like it too much to find the change worth commenting on?

Let's review some basic facts.

-The children were being educated in a former military building.

-This building was close to a military installation which would be a likely target in an active war.

-Iran was being actively bombed before this horrible catastrophe occurred. There was every reason to believe the military installation could be a target.

-Despite knowing all of this, the Iranian government chose to continue to have those children attend school nearby, in a former military building, risking their lives to a possible mistake such as this. If there is even a one in a million chance of a mistaken bombing, why the fuck would you continue to place children in that building??? Did the Iranian government have THAT much faith in the precision targeting of the US military?

-The Iranian government quite recently demonstrated a willingness to kill thousands of their own citizens, and also blocked the internet access of Iranians so the atrocities could not be fully documented and shared with the world. They demonstrated that they could accept the deaths of thousands of their own citizens, in order to cling to power.

(None of these facts is in serious dispute, as far as I know. Let me know if I am missing any crucial details.)

Unless my understanding of the facts is wrong in some critical fashion, I think everyone should assign at least 92% of the blame to the Iranian government. The best case scenario is that they practiced extreme negligence with the lives of their own children.

When London was being bombed in World War II, they correctly shipped their children out to the countryside where it was a lot safer. If there's any possibility that your children will be harmed, that's the obvious thing to do!

And the worst case scenario is that the Iranian government knowingly placed children in harm's way, expecting that if they put enough children in harm's way, some of them might get harmed. And in this scenario they knew from watching the Gaza war that when children get harmed, it presents a massive propaganda coup for the side associated with the child victims, no matter how negligent that side has been.

And why is it a propaganda coup? Because almost everyone is either ignorant and doesn't bother to investigate the facts, or else they are eager to blame literally anything on the US government (or Israeli government), even when what occurred has absolutely no positive value for the US government or Israeli government and is clearly a mistake. After all, who wants to blame the side which "lost its children in a horrible way? what good person would ever blame them for the deaths of their own children???".

And yet, the only way to get the Iranian government, and other governments, to stop negligently or deliberately jeopardizing their children, is to harshly punish them every time they risk the lives of their own children.

(And should the US government be more careful? If it's at all practicable, then yes. Not just to protect innocent children (even if the government of the children refuses to protect them), but also partly because most people are either morons that don't bother to assess basic facts, or else to avoid giving the anti-American propagandists- including the ones inside our country- any fresh material.)

-Iran was being actively bombed before this horrible catastrophe occurred

when? What was bombed? 8 months ago, two remote nuclear sites with precision bunker busters from B-2s?

Children are educated on military bases throughout the world. Iran was not living in a condition of war before you perfidiously started bombing them. They submitted a pretty good deal to Kushner and Witkoff, who refused, by all accounts because they're at once illiterate and bloodthirsty, as befits the upper caste of the Trumpian society.

This is all pointless mimicry of being a person, going through the motions of an argument. I don't even think you're being disingenuous. That's require more self-awareness.

Children are educated on military bases throughout the world. Iran was not living in a condition of war before you perfidiously started bombing them.

How long after the recent bombing campaign started did this school incident take place? I honestly don't know.

They submitted a pretty good deal to Kushner and Witkoff, who refused, by all accounts because they're at once illiterate and bloodthirsty,

I'm also interested in the substance and timing of these negotiations as well. What proposal was submitted and when? How did the US respond, if at all? How long afterwards did the hostilities begin?

Keith Woods has a pretty good article on some of the absurdity with linked sources:

On the question of the apparent nuclear threat, we have learned that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who led the U.S. negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, conducted the talks without nuclear technical experts and based their concerns on a research reactor, unaware that such a reactor is incapable of enriching uranium. When the Iranians made a good-faith offer to hand over their highly enriched uranium but keep the Tehran Research Reactor built for them by Eisenhower. Witkoff and Kushner, due to their ignorance of the subject, apparently interpreted this as a demand to become a nuclear power:

Elena Sokova, the executive director of the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, called the administration’s assessments of the Tehran Research Reactor “confusing and misleading” and riddled with “technical errors.”“It mixes up different elements of the nuclear program and their potential proliferation capabilities,” Sokova said. “Research reactors are not capable of doing enrichment of uranium, whether for civil or military purposes.”

Witkoff defended the decision to bring no nuclear experts by saying he had “read quite a bit about it.”

Aside from having no technical knowledge and bringing no advisors or nuclear experts, Witkoff was apparently ignorant of previous agreements and negotiations with Iran, did not bring a diplomat who was knowledgeable of these things, did not take notes, and did not understand Iranian proposals.

Trump relayed to the press that Witkoff told him Iran’s message was "essentially, in a real nutshell: We want to continue to build nuclear weapons." None of the mediators present reported this. The Omani foreign minister who mediated the talks travelled to Washington and told J.D. Vance and U.S. media outlets that the negotiations had made “substantial, momentous, and unprecedented progress.”

Think about how insane this is — either the war was sparked by America’s representatives being totally ignorant of nuclear enrichment while negotiating a nuclear deal, and no one along the way picking up their error, or alternatively, they actively misled Trump to lead to war with Iran on Israel’s behalf. So that’s either gross negligence and incompetence or high treason.

Who would have thought that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner representing America's interest could have led to this result?

The Witkoff/Kushner subversion is the "Iraqi WMDs" 2.0.

Research reactors are not capable of doing enrichment of uranium,

I make no analysis about the broader situation, but this seems incredibly confused, game-of-telephoned, or taken out of any useful context.

Famously, nuclear reactors were never historically involved in previous weapons projects (yes, not for "enrichment", but for producing plutonium).

Whether or not this specific reactor is well-suited for that purpose is unclear from the context and the quote. IIRC the standard US research reactors were designed to be difficult to use this way. I'd trust the nonproliferation folks to know how all the physics works, but somewhere between them and the journalists the context was lost, possibly deliberately.

Would it surprise you that non technical people could make such a mistake (that a reactor does not actually do the enriching)?

No, more that it's seems kinda confused for a technical person to make such a claim as if it means something. If by 'enriching' we mean just the whole centrifuge deal, obviously reactors don't do that directly (modulo some liquid sodium-fuel mix stuff not relevant here or anywhere not currently on fire). If we say specifically 'enriching uranium' in the sense of getting weapons-grade uranium from the output, than obviously not, because they burn a fissile fuel from one starting isotope to another, so by definition and by the nature of the uranium fuel cycle a uranium-fueled research reactor doesn't output higher-density U-235 (uh, technically, for times less than 20k years).

But reactors naturally change the isotopic makeup of whatever fuel (and everything else!) that's stuffed into them, that's what 'react' is talking about. The normal fuel cycle doesn't enrich uranium, because they essential convert the majority from U-235... but converting into Pu-239 is one of the main immediate steps. That's the normal next step in the uranium fuel cycle, and it's nuclear bomb material.

Not all plutonium is useful for making bombs, and indeed that's a good part of what makes modern power reactors nonviable for producing weapons: the very rapid cycling and burn rate of fuel that's required to get a high proportion of Pu-239 is intrinsically opposed to running a nuclear power plant, in ways that can be observed from space.

However, research reactors work by cycling input material through a high-intensity bath of neutrons at a controlled rate. Some of those processes are slow, both in time and in neutrons, but others are not. There's some efforts to make it hard to turn a research reactor into a ghetto breeder reactor, and more ways of making it really obvious, but even before considering the age of the reactor here, none of these are impossible or insurmountable tasks.

I'm not a technical expert or professional for this specific field, so I may well be missing some information. Hell, there could be some information I'm not even allowed to know about the statement here. But at least from the publicly available info, this is a definition of 'doesn't enrich uranium' that would exclude a breeder reactor. It's arguably whether it's even technically correct, and it's really hard to believe it's meaningful in the sense it was phrased here.

Do you have answers to my questions? I'm not demanding them, of course. But it seems that your quotes do not answer them.

The Witkoff/Kushner subversion is the "Iraqi WMDs" 2.0.

It seems pretty clear to me that Iran has been trying to develop nuclear weapon capability. I guess you dispute this?

Do you have answers to my questions?

I did answer your question- Iran offered to turn over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and maintain enough enrichment for its civilian nuclear facility. It's a rational offer, not one that should have been reacted to with war.

It seems pretty clear to me that Iran has been trying to develop nuclear weapon capability. I guess you dispute this?

You can read the article I linked, there is in fact no evidence of that and none of the experts cited agreed with that conclusion. Iran offered to hand over all of its enriched material.

The major "ignorance" if it can be called that is Trump seemed to be under the impression that the Iranians negotiating 20% enriched material for their civilian reactor was equivalent to an assertion to be a nuclear power. But the fuel for that civilian reactor was already part of the Obama-era deal and no experts cited believed that fuel for this reactor would have remotely constituted the Iranian demands characterized by Witkoff/Trump:

Just 36 hours before the United States opened its military assault, Iran’s nuclear negotiators, along with Oman’s foreign minister as mediator, presented the U.S. with a seven-page proposal for a potential nuclear deal, according to U.S. negotiator Steve Witkoff. But the American negotiators, Witkoff and Jared Kushner — who, according to a senior Middle East diplomat with knowledge of the talks, chose not to include nuclear technical experts in the negotiations — balked at Iran’s request to continue using 20%-enriched uranium at the reactor, a facility for civilian nuclear development that the U.S. first built and provided to Iran in 1967.

“The claim that they were using a research reactor to do good for the Iranian people was a complete and false pretense to hide the fact that they were stockpiling there,” a senior Trump administration official told reporters during a briefing on Tuesday, three days after the attacks began.

But the Trump administration has yet to provide evidence or intelligence — to the public or to Congress — demonstrating that Iran intended to use the uranium at the Tehran Research Reactor for weapon development or that the facility was being covertly used for stockpiling purposes. In two classified briefings provided to lawmakers since the attacks, administration officials made no assertion that the reactor was being used for stockpiling purposes for a potential weapon, according to two people familiar with their comments.

...The reactor requires 20%-enriched fuel and a relatively minimally enriched amount compared with the material required for the production of a nuclear weapon. Under the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, known as the JCPOA, the reactor would have access to no more than 5 kilograms of 20%-enriched uranium at a time, supplied from outside the country and monitored by inspectors.

The reactor has not come under IAEA scrutiny for suspected nuclear development in more than 25 years, according to Katariina Simonen, a board member of Pugwash Conferences of Science and World Affairs and an adjunct professor at the Finnish National Defence University.

“TRR is not ideal for any other activity than what it is designed for — i.e., civilian use (isotopes, research, training),” Simonen told MS NOW. “It is a small, light-water reactor supplied by the U.S. under the Atoms for Peace program.”

Nobody has presented any evidence that Iran was trying to develop a nuclear weapon. None of the international agencies attest to that.

What is absolutely stunning is that 20% enriched material needed for Tehran Research Reactor was already resolved by the Obama-era deal that Trump ripped up. So Trump literally ended the deal that solved the exact controversy Witkoff cited as imminent threat and cause for war. It's really uneblievable.

Nobody has presented any evidence that Iran was trying to develop a nuclear weapon

What other reason would they have for 60% enrichment? As far as I know, there were zero indications they were pursuing naval propulsion, for instance.

Mostly bargaining chip, deterrence, and option to try to create a nuclear weapon in the future. That is not the same as "they are trying to develop a nuclear weapon now" which would constitute "imminent threat." The notion of "imminent threat" that could justifiably bring the world to the brink like it has now is important. There has been no evidence presented to anyone for "imminent threat", which is why the story is so inconsistent and has waffled between "they were going to attack the US" (no evidence) and "they are an imminent nuclear threat" (no evidence).

The Iranians also enriched that material after Trump reneged on the previous Iran deal. So is this responding to an imminent threat, or is this pretext for war on top of a planned controversy over this issue? Who was it again that lobbied most heavily for Trump to exit the Iranian nuclear deal in his first term?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday claimed to have evidence that Iran has lied about its nuclear program and urged President Donald Trump to “do the right thing” next month by pulling out of a 2015 deal designed to curb Iran’s atomic ambitions...

Netanyahu spoke less than two weeks before a May 12 deadline that Trump has cited as a decision point he may use to withdraw from the multinational agreement negotiated by the Obama administration...

One former Obama administration foreign policy official said that Netanyahu’s speech likely had “an audience of one": Donald Trump.

“That is just not an acceptable situation,” Trump said at the White House on Monday in response to a question about the Israeli leader’s remarks.

Trump also warned that Iran was not merely “sitting back idly,” but he declined to say whether he will terminate the agreement next month. “We’ll see what happens,” the president said. “I’m not telling you what I’m doing, but a lot of people think they know.”

Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, fired back on Twitter on Monday, calling the Israeli leader’s speech “a rehash of old allegations already dealt with by the [International Atomic Energy Agency] to ‘nix’ the deal. How convenient. Coordinated timing of alleged intelligence revelations ... just days before May 12.”

Also skeptical was J Street, a Washington-based liberal Israel policy group critical of Netanyahu’s foreign policy.

“While Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump have long been determined to undermine this agreement, their own security establishments continue to confirm that the deal is working and that Iran is compliant with all of its commitments. Nothing we were shown today contradicts or disproves that expert assessment,” said Dylan Williams, the group‘s vice president of government affairs.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the GOP chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, seemed to agree, telling Bloomberg TV in an interview that Netanyahu’s speech brought “nothing new” to the contentious debate surrounding the agreement.

In his remarks, Netanyahu argued that the seized Iranian intelligence proves the nuclear deal was negotiated in poor faith.

“The Iran deal, the nuclear deal, is based on lies. It’s based on Iranian lies and Iranian deception,” he said. “This is a terrible deal. It should never have been concluded. And in a few days, President Trump will make his decision on what to do with the nuclear deal. I’m sure he will do the right thing.”

So Trump breaks the deal, Iran starts enriching again, and then Witkoff and Kushner declare "imminent threat" on the mere existence of enriched material that Iran has proposed to hand over to the US as part of an agreement.

The Iranian offer to handover the highly-enriched material threw a wrench into the works, most likely, hence why the 20% enrichment for the Tehran Research Reactor is the "best" Wiktoff/Kushner could come up with to convince Trump of some "imminent threat" to justify another war for Israel.

Keith Woods has a pretty good thread

For people who do not have a Twitter account, see the word "thread", and immediately manually rewrite the URL from "x.com" (where a thread cannot be read by a non-logged-in person) to "xcancel.com" (where it can), I feel obligated to point out that your link leads, not to a thread, but to an "article" (apparently a new feature), which can be read on x.com by a non-logged-in person but cannot be read at all on xcancel.com (yet).

Also, a non-Twitter version of the same content is available on Substack.

Thanks fixed.

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