Donald Trump, on the Topic of 170 Dead Iranian Kids: “Mistakes Are Made. War Is Nasty.”
Trump previously claimed to reporters that it was Iran that bombed the all-girls elementary school.
Photo via Unsplash, Jade Koroliuk SplinterTrump Administration Iran War
We’ve known at this point since early March, with reasonable certainty, that the United States was responsible for the deaths of 170 or more Iranian civilians, most of them children, in not just one but multiple strikes made on the first day of the Iran War against an all-girls elementary school in the town of Minab. The Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school had the misfortune of being located adjacent to buildings being used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Navy, which is almost certainly why video analysis determined that U.S.-fired Tomahawk missiles struck the site–the buildings in question had once been part of the military compound, albeit a decade earlier. The entire tragedy, then, was more likely than not the result of targeting that was based on outdated information. The question, of course, is why U.S. Central Command operating in the Persian Gulf was using decade-old information to decide the calculus of who lives and who dies, and that’s the kind of question one would hope to see answered in the Pentagon’s now apparently complete investigation into the attack on the school.
Members of Congress are anxiously awaiting that report, while Donald Trump, the man who capriciously took the United States to war in tandem with Israel, in a conflict we can now unequivocally say that the United States lost, seems to have changed his messaging just a tad on the subject. Glibly responding to questions from reporters on Wednesday at the G7 summit in France about that particular strike–which again, killed 170 innocents, mostly teachers and children–Trump said it was “strange” to be asked about it, said that no one would be held accountable, and gave the following shrug of an answer: “Mistakes are made. War is nasty. Nobody did that on purpose.”
NYT: Can you now say whether you will hold anyone in your administration accountable for the strike on a school that killed more than 100 children?
TRUMP: No. It’s such a strange question to be asked. It’s a long time ago. Mistakes are made. I would ask Pete Hegseth that question.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 12:57 PM · Jun 17, 2026
Ah yes, mistakes. Well, they certainly do get made, don’t they? In much the same way, I suppose it was probably a “mistake” when, back on March 11, roughly two weeks after the children were killed, Donald Trump claimed to reporters in no uncertain terms that it was Iran that bombed the school, not the United States. As Trump said at the time: “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran. They’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.” Trump would go on to claim that Iran also had access to the U.S.’s own Tomahawk missiles, even though there’s been no evidence of this of any kind during the entire Iran War.
Q: A new report says that a military investigation has found that the US struck the school in Iran. As commander in chief, do you take responsibility?
TRUMP: For what?
Q: A strike on the school in Iran
TRUMP: I don’t know about it
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 12:42 PM · Mar 11, 2026
Now that President Trump is so contrite and full of sorrow for the poor Iranian civilians he had executed, though, surely he’ll want complete transparency on the subject, and will be in favor of the completed Pentagon report on the incident to be shared with the public, so the American people can reckon with both the awesome destructive power and evil negligence of our military. Except wait, wait … I’m hearing that Trump instead passed the buck to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth when asked if the public would get to see the results of the Pentagon report. And the Pentagon hasn’t said one way or the other whether the report, theoretically due to be released any time now, will be public or classified in order to hide it. For the record, previous U.S. airstrikes that resulted in large numbers of civilian deaths during the first Trump administration did indeed receive public reports from the Pentagon, but that was obviously before Trump had hollowed out every corner of the federal government and filled it with nothing but sycophants, succeeding in destroying any expectation of accountability in the process.
Democratic members of Congress, meanwhile, are absolutely anticipating the Pentagon to simply classify the material and claim that there are indefinable reasons of national security, etc., for why the public can’t know more details about the United States killing 170 schoolgirls and teachers, despite the fact that CENTCOM commander Admiral Bradley Cooper has already promised that he is “fully committed to transparency” with the investigation. Senator Mark Kelly (AZ) summed up the Democratic tone, saying “Of course they are going to try to classify the report.”
At issue within the report will be questions pertaining to how the strike was decided, and why more recent intelligence wasn’t available that could have noticed, say, that the building had been painted bright blue and pink as a school in the decade since it had been part of a military installation. Democratic members of Congress have been demanding evidence on this front for months, questioning how targets in the Iran War were chosen, and if AI systems such as Palantir’s Maven Smart System (MSS), developed for the Pentagon, could have been involved in selecting deadly strikes without human guidance and overview. The MSS system reportedly “ingests data from satellites and drones to drastically compress decision-making cycles from hours to seconds.” Yeah, that sounds like the sort of thing that could lead to you shooting up a building without doing the legwork to figure out that it’s an elementary school!
Frustrated senators threatened to withhold Defense Secretary Hegseth’s travel budget unless the Pentagon provides answers about an apparent U.S. strike on a girls’ school in Iran and the military’s attacks on alleged drug smuggling boats in Latin America.
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost.com) 8:30 PM · Jun 17, 2026
As 120 Democratic members of Congress asked Hegseth in a March letter: “If artificial intelligence is used, is it subject to human review and at what point? Was artificial intelligence, including the use of Maven Smart System, used to identify the Shajareh Tayyebeh school as a target? If so, did a human verify the accuracy of this target?”
What would be the worse answer to such a question: To find that delusional AI is choosing targets for deadly strikes without human verification, or to find that humans are verifying bad AI data anyway, or choosing to blow up schools the good old fashioned way, using their own flesh and blood hunches? I’m not sure that either option paints our military leaders in the best light–best classify everything so Americans aren’t inconvenienced by the truth.
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