From The Guardian: 

“The missile hit during the school’s morning session. In Iran, the school week runs from Saturday to Thursday, so when U.S. and Israeli bombs began falling at around 10 a.m. on Saturday, classes were under way. At a point between 10 a.m. and 10.45 a.m., a missile directly hit Shajareh Tayyebeh school, in Minab, southern Iran, demolishing its concrete building and killing dozens of seven to 12-year-old girls.”

War is not an abstraction. It’s living hell . . . or dying hell. When the United States and Israel (Trump and Netanyahu) started bombing Iran, I felt the collective human soul begin to vibrate once again, and I began screaming to myself: This is not who we are!

Even though it is.

Our “interests” are what matter, right? Individual human lives are far less important — just read the news. And the larger the death toll, the more abstract those lives get. What isn’t abstract, apparently — what really matters — are the nation’s interests, whatever the hell those are. And interests grow increasingly simplistic as a war goes on, ultimately amounting to winning . . . not losing.

I must stand up to this lie and its missiles. I must join the millions — billions? — of others around the globe and stare this lie in its face. We are fully human, not half-human or 10% human or whatever, Mr. President. I am connected to all of humanity, all of life. And so are you. When someone is murdered, part of all of us is murdered.

So I refuse to look at this latest war with abstraction or indifference. As I write, the estimated total of Iranian deaths by U.S. and Israeli bombs is over one thousand (and the number may well have gone up since I began this sentence). A total of 153 cities across Iran have been damaged by the bombing, according to NBC News, and at this point there have been over a thousand attacks on the country.

And yes, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the “supreme leader,” has been killed. He was a brutal leader. But his murder does not justify all the others, let alone does it justify the possibility of another U.S. “war without end” and the shattering and slaughter of an entire country.

I return to The Guardian words quoted above, which, as far as I’m concerned, get at the true nature of war. They refer to the U.S.-Israeli bombing of a girls’ school in Minab, a coastal city in southeastern Iran on Saturday morning, just as “Operation Epic Fury” began — and just after school started.

The Guardian story continues: 

“Photographs and verified videos from the site, which the Guardian has not published due to their graphic nature, show children’s bodies lying partly buried under the debris. In one video, a very small child’s severed arm is pulled from the rubble. Colorful backpacks covered with blood and concrete dust sit among the ruins. One girl wears a green dress with gingham patches on her pockets and the collar, her form partly obscured by a black body bag. Screams can be heard in the background.

“One distraught man stands in the ruins of the school, waving textbooks and worksheets as rescuers dig by hand through the debris. ‘These are the schoolbooks of the children who are under these ruins, under this rubble here,’ he shouts. ‘You can see the blood of these children on these books. These are civilians, who are not in the military. This was a school and they came to study.’”

Iranian state media reported that 168 people were killed in the school’s bombing — mostly young girls, but also teachers and staff. And 95 others were injured. And the hellish nature of this story doesn’t necessarily end here. According to research by Al Jazeera, the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school may have been deliberate, not simply an accident, but there’s no definite proof of this. In any case, whether deliberate or “collateral,” the bombing happened. And it was not an abstraction.

When a new war begins, humanity’s cancer continues. As the Cabinet of the Progressive International put it: 

“These strikes did not begin today. They are an extension of a longer project to redraw the map of West Asia by force. From Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya to Syria, Yemen to Iran, each escalation is a stepping stone in a broader project to suffocate regional sovereignty in the service of U.S. and Israeli interests. Each has left behind shattered states, displaced populations, and the wreckage of societies that dared to assert independence.

“Imperialist war does not liberate peoples — it subjugates them.”

Every new war reopens an enormous question: How do we evolve beyond this? There will always be conflict — not to mention fear, greed, the complexity of getting along — but I know   . . . and so do many others . . . that we can scrape and crawl and find our way beyond turning conflict into war. We can and we must. Extinction also looms.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, and his album of recorded poetry and artwork, Soul Fragments.