Trump administration's efforts to dodge responsibility will fail

President Donald Trump holds a Cabinet meeting, Wednesday, April 30, 2025, in the Cabinet Room. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)

Pete Hegseth won't have to wait much longer before notching his first officially recognized war atrocity as secretary of defense.
Investigators for the Pentagon's Central Command, in charge of all Mideast operations, have determined that U.S. forces were likely culpable in the lethal air strike on a girls' school in Minab, Iran, that killed 175 Iranian civilians, mostly children under 12, two weeks ago.

While that reported finding is "preliminary," the Tomahawk missile that hit the school is only being deployed in this conflict by the United States -- and the same weapons were fired the same day at an Iranian base close by.

The immediate cause of the tragic incident appears to be faulty targeting based on outdated intelligence data, which may not be directly laid to Hegseth, President Donald Trump and the other reckless planners of the attack on Iran. But the cavalier attitude toward war crimes Hegseth so often expressed before his confirmation -- as well as his glaring lack of fitness, character and competence -- made such an awful disgrace inevitable.

That such an atrocity occurred within the first days of the war only underlines the stark warnings against Hegseth's appointment by Sen. Angus King, the Maine independent, and Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a veteran of the 82nd Airborne.

What makes the school bombing even worse are attempts by both Hegseth and Trump to evade responsibility, which reflects their well-documented contempt for the laws of war and American traditions of honor and humanity.

Trump has repeatedly and falsely suggested that Iran uses Tomahawk missiles and is probably guilty of firing on its own schoolchildren, while Hegseth has said more than once that unlike the United States, Iran purposely kills civilians, with an obvious implication. The salient issue here is not whether the U.S. purposely blew up the school, of course, but whether directives from the Pentagon and White House increased the chance of such horrors.

What cannot be denied is Hegseth's mindless approach to the laws of armed conflict, which he has expressed on countless occasions, in his 2024 book on war, and in the opening days of the Iran war.

"Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly," the man who calls himself the "secretary of war" boasted at a Pentagon briefing on March 4 -- four days after the school bombing. "Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it."

Ignorant as they are arrogant, neither Hegseth nor Trump understands the purpose of the laws of war, nor do they seem aware that the origins of the Geneva Conventions they scorn are wholly American. The first American general to insist that our military treat its enemies with decency was George Washington. And the first president to establish rules governing combat was Abraham Lincoln, with whom Trump has dared to compare himself.

Amid the bloodiest battles ever seen on our soil, Lincoln ordered his generals and a German immigrant lawyer named Francis Lieber to formulate a code of conduct for Union troops. Together they wrote a detailed manual, with more than 150 specific regulations, that became known as the "Lieber Code" and formed the basis for the Geneva Conventions more than 80 years later.

Instead of upholding those principles, Trump selected Hegseth because he is eager to trash them. And Hegseth has fulfilled that expectation by firing career legal officers who had faithfully upheld those laws, while appointing and promoting figures who share his lawless, careless and despicable attitude.

Under this regime, the Minab school bombing as well as the indiscriminate killings of alleged narcotics smugglers at sea were among the most predictable offenses ever committed. It is just as predictable that as this war drags on, we will see more and worse.

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