The Height of Imperial Arrogance

Ben Burgiss writes:

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. On the fourth day of the attack, Israeli journalist and former Knesset member Uri Avnery, traveling in a private car accompanied only by a photographer, “crossed the border at a lone spot near Metulla and looked for the front, which had already reached the outskirts of Sidon.” As Avnery and his photographer drove into the country, their progress was slow.

We passed a dozen Shiite villages and were received everywhere with great joy. We extracted ourselves only with great difficulty from hundreds of villagers, each one insisting that we have coffee at their home. On the previous days, they had showered the soldiers with rice.

A few months later I joined an army convoy going in the opposite direction, from Sidon to Metulla. The soldiers were now wearing bulletproof vests and helmets, many were on the verge of panic.

Avnery recounted the story in an article titled “Bitter Rice,” published in CounterPunch less than a week after George W. Bush launched his war in Iraq. At the time, many Iraqis, both in Iraq and in the Western diaspora, were celebrating the ouster of Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship. Avnery’s message to Americans was simple: Don’t count on this lasting. Relief at the fall of a hated regime can quickly turn into seething resentment against the foreign attackers who have turned the country into a war zone. Some of the same people who really might be momentarily willing to greet you as liberators may be shooting at you by the end of the year.

When Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, was killed in an air strike on Sunday, plenty of Iranians cheered. It’s not hard to understand why. He led a brutally repressive theocracy deeply opposed by large swathes of the population. At the same time that thousands of Iranians were gathering in the streets to celebrate, though, thousands of others were gathering to mourn. It was a stark reminder that anyone asking us to listen to “the Iranians” or talking about how “the Iranians” are celebrating while arrogant Western leftists are upset is treating a nation of ninety million people as if it were a hive mind.

There are pro-regime Iranians, secular democrats, monarchists, and all sorts of other shades of political opinion. No one really knows what percentage of the population supports any of these factions right now, never mind how sentiment might change as there are more and more incidents like the missile strike that killed over a hundred and fifty people at an Iranian girls’ school on Sunday, or the strike that hit a sports hall and killed dozens of student athletes at volleyball, basketball, and gymnastics practices several hours later.

Right now, Trump’s apologists are busy assuring us that this won’t be a serious or prolonged war — despite the Trump administration’s own professed willingness to put boots on the ground. Anyone who believes the assurances may think Avnery’s warning doesn’t apply in this case. We’ll see.

As hard as it is to believe that the White House was quite this naive, current indications seem to be that the Trump administration may have thought they could go in hard, kill the supreme leader and massacre both quite a bit of the rest of the country’s leadership and hundreds of civilians, and then that whatever was left of the regime would be so desperate for peace that they would be willing to cut a deal that let the United States simply saunter away with little Iranian retaliation. So far, at least, that’s very much not what seems to be happening. Instead, Iran — having been subject to surprise attacks while negotiations with the United States were ongoing twice in less than a year — seems to have decided that further talks are a waste of time, and fighting is spreading to other countries.

The Obscenity of Ventriloquism

On the first day of the war, the same day as the strikes on the girls’ school and the sports hall, a group of families gathered at cafés around Tehran’s Niloofar Square to break their Ramadan fast. There was an explosion, and then another larger one shortly afterward. A witness described the scene to Drop Site News: “There were scalps torn off, hands severed, a few people were laying here all cut up and two people were martyred.” The witness described seeing a severed head fall to the floor of the café.

Is it possible that, despite all of this, a majority of Iranians hate the regime enough to support the intervention right now? It is. It’s also possible that they don’t. No one actually knows. One of the only things we can say with any real certainty is that it’s very likely that, however many Iranians are willing to accept the United States and Israel as clumsy liberators despite everything right now, that number will shrink as the war goes on. And exactly nothing about our history of regime-change wars in the Middle East should make us think this will be the first time one of these wars ends just because a decisive majority of the local population turns against it.

The war will end when US decision-makers lose interest or make a calculation to cut their losses — not before and not after. This is one of many reasons that positive change in any society is not likely to come about through outside intervention.

Iran’s theocracy massacred socialists and communists when it first came to power, has enforced gender apartheid for decades, and, though hard numbers are hard to come by, has doubtless massacred large numbers of protesters. If it were overthrown from below, by a popular revolution, that would be cause for celebration. But the United States and Israel have no possible legitimate role in deciding the country’s fate from above, and Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu certainly had no right to initiate a war of aggression against a country that’s sometimes armed and supported proxies elsewhere (as the United States and Israel both have, in many countries) but which hasn’t initiated any direct war with another nation even once in the modern era.

Anyone presuming to speak for “the Iranians” is elevating some subset of Iranians (usually the ones most aligned with the anti-regime diaspora in cities like Los Angeles) to speak for all ninety million of them. In reality, that ninety million includes people who support the regime and people who oppose it in any one of several political directions but might be very far from pro-American. It also includes all of those who, like their counterparts throughout the world, don’t spend their lives thinking about politics and prefer to spend time with their families, watch soccer, celebrate life milestones, and not see their loved ones killed or mutilated in air strikes.

Political ventriloquism presents itself as humble deference to “the Iranians.” In reality, it’s the height of imperial arrogance. It always boils down to the command: “Listen to the voices that I’ve picked because they agree with me.”

And recalling the bombing of  James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman three times to make sure that they were dead,  MEE correspondent in Tehran writes:

The girls’ school in Iran, where 165 people were killed by an apparent US-Israeli attack, was hit with two strikes, with the second missile killing sheltering survivors, two first responders and the parent of a slain child have told Middle East Eye.

“When the first bomb hit the school, one of the teachers and the principal moved a group of students to the prayer hall to protect them,” one of the Red Crescent medics said, citing conversations he had at the time with survivors. “The principal called the parents and told them to come and pick up their children. But the second bomb hit that area as well. Only a small number of those who had taken shelter survived.”

Almost all the 165 people killed in the attack were girls aged between seven and 12, according to local officials. There were around 170 girls at the school in southern Iran’s Minab at the time. Previous reports have suggested that parents were asked to collect their children from the school when US-Israeli strikes began on Saturday morning.

However, Rohollah, the father of a girl killed in the second attack, told MEE that he was contacted by the school after it had already been attacked. MEE is not disclosing the identity of any of its sources in Minab for security reasons, and all names given are false. “They told us the school had been attacked,” the father said. “They asked us to come as quickly as possible and take our daughter home.”

According to Rohollah, his daughter survived the first strike and was moved to the prayer hall. The second strike hit before he could reach her. “My little girl was completely burned,” he said. “There was nothing left of her. We could only identify her from her school bag, which she was still holding. She was completely burned.”

Rohollah recalls how his daughter wanted to become a doctor. “She used to tell me, ‘I promise I will become a doctor so you won’t have to pay medical bills anymore.’ I would hold her and say, ‘You are already my little doctor’,” he said. “When I saw her smile after coming home from work, all my pain disappeared. Now I don’t know what to do with this pain. I don’t know how to live with this.”

Repeated tactic

Two strikes on the same target are often characterised as “double-tap” strikes, particularly if there is a brief pause between them and medics and other civilians arriving at the scene are killed in the follow-up attack. Since the US and Israel launched a war on Iran on Saturday, some Iranians have reported attacks that resembled double-tap strikes.

A video circulating on social media shows one woman in central Tehran in distress saying: “They dropped one bomb, people went inside, then they bombed again. They killed people.” Another shows two men on a motorcycle, with one of them describing a near-death experience. “We went to drag out people from under the rubble, and then the jet returned twice and pounded the same location four more times. We would have been dead if we weren’t still under the rubble,” he says.

“Double-tap strike” is an informal term for a tactic that is a war crime. It appears to have been previously used by Israel in Gaza and the US in the Caribbean as recently as last year. The US and Israeli militaries have not replied to Middle East Eye’s request for comment. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said his country’s forces “would not ​deliberately target ⁠a school”. Israel and the US have both said they are investigating the incident at the school, which is called Shajareh Tayyebeh, or “the good tree” in Persian.

Video footage of the aftermath of the attacks shows people massing outside the school in shock and horror. Black plumes of smoke can be seen billowing from windows on its northeastern side, with massive destruction on the opposite end of the building, where the roof has collapsed. Smoke can also be seen rising from the two buildings MEE and others have identified as IRGC sites, which satellite imagery shows are around 200 metres from the school.

At least two IRGC sites in Minab were struck around the same time. A satellite image of the site taken on Wednesday shows damage sustained by several buildings in the IRGC compound near the school. While some buildings, like the school, appear to have been struck so forcefully that they collapsed, others appear to have a single hole in the roof. It is highly unlikely that the attacks on the IRGC sites could have resulted in the injury or death of girls within the school. Both Red Crescent medics who arrived on the scene told MEE they are certain that more girls were killed in the first strike on the school.

Identifying remains

A mass funeral for the children was held in Minab on Tuesday. Images show large crowds filling the streets to honour the victims and rows of small graves dug in a cemetery around 8km from the school. According to an education ministry spokesperson, the destruction was so severe that 69 schoolgirls are yet to be identified and their remains are currently undergoing DNA testing. One of the Red Crescent medics described the scene as “unbelievable”. “We saw bodies without heads, without hands, without legs,” he said.

The medic described dozens of severed limbs scattered around the school grounds. Some children were so badly burned that identifying them was extremely difficult. “Some parents recognised their children only because of the gold bracelets they were wearing,” he says. The medic said he and his colleagues tried to collect the remains before the parents arrived, hoping to spare them from the worst scenes. But some parents arrived too early.

Noor, the mother of an 11-year-old pupil at the school, was one of them. She told MEE her daughter dreamed of becoming a television presenter and would sit in front of the TV and listen carefully to the news. “She would then sit at her small desk and try to speak like a news anchor,” Noor said. When Noor arrived at the school, she only found traces of her daughter. “There was nothing left of my child,” Noor said. “She was completely burned. How can I continue living with this grief? She was my only hope in life. She was all my love, my today and my tomorrow.”

According to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, at least 1,097 civilians have been killed across Iran since the US-Israeli bombing campaign began on Saturday. Though strikes have targeted senior officials and military and nuclear infrastructure, hospitals, homes and businesses have also been hit. A UN panel of experts has called the attack on the school “deeply disturbing” and demanded an investigation. Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, has written to UN human rights chief Volker Turk, calling the attack “unjustifiable” and “criminal”.