Counting the cost

Dear Editor,

One of the truths about war in every age is that it involves the willingness to sacrifice children for the sake of a cause. The sophistication of US and Israeli weapons systems, combined with our widespread faith in technology, has led more and more people to believe war can be conducted cleanly and with "precision." The Feb. 28 strike that hit the Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in the small city of Minab during an Iranian Saturday schoolday puts the lie to this belief and presses upon us the old question, "Is it worth it?"

Those raised on the stories of the firebombing of Dresden or the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki will perhaps find the scale of this tragedy too small to wring our hands about. I don't love everything about a world with cameras everywhere, but isn't it a kind of progress that now we see within days the social media footage of the fathers digging through the rubble to find their children? Doesn't it force the question we should always be asking to see the satellite pictures of the 100 freshly dug graves for the mass funeral of the students and their teachers?

We will also hear attempts to shift blame to the other side for decommissioning part of a Revolutionary Guards' naval base for use as a girls' school, as appears to have been done about ten years ago. I would argue that we remain accountable to our own code of ethics and should not expect the most cynical and misogynistic regimes on earth to conform to it.

The lesson of this atrocity is not to rectify "target misidentification" or the use of outdated maps in the future. Mistakes like that will always be made. Rather, we must look squarely at the cause for which we think we are waging war and weigh it against the sacrifice, namely the sacrifice of other people's children.

 Any nation with a shred of connection to a Christian inheritance seeks to legitimate war—if it is able to do so at all—as a means of last resort with a just cause (e.g. an imminent threat to one's own nation or allies, the "responsibility to protect"), ultimately driven somehow by the love of neighbor.

With our current administration, however, I fear it is Machiavelli all the way down.

And the schoolgirls, teachers, and families of Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary just paid the price.

Rev. Mark Williamson

Dodgeville, WI