The Pedagogy of Impunity
By The Sherbro Islander
Let us begin with a classroom. Not as metaphor, but as fact.
On the morning of 28 February 2026, in the southern Iranian town of Minab, children sat at their desks in the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school, a building painted with pink flowers and green leaves, as though its architects understood, by instinct, that beauty is itself a declaration: that those within deserve to inhabit a world of colour, safety, and the unhurried, accumulating dignity of learning. Between 170 and 264 students were present when the first missile arrived. Most were girls between the ages of seven and twelve. The roof collapsed upon them. When the arithmetic of death was complete, 156 civilians lay dead, among them 120 children.
But the missile was precise. Let that be recorded.
It was a precision-guided weapon, a Tomahawk cruise missile, and it found its mark with the exactitude for which American military engineering has long been celebrated, marketed, and sold as the instrument of a more discriminating form of war. The mark, on this occasion, was a room full of girls. After the first strike, the school's principal gathered the surviving children into a prayer room and telephoned their parents. Before a single parent could arrive, the second missile came. Then a third. Three strikes on the same location. One must ask, and the question is not rhetorical but forensic, at what point in the targeting chain a human being pauses, looks at what has already been struck, and decides to strike again? That question is the moral centre of this atrocity, and it will not be answered by any investigation Washington appoints to investigate itself.
We have been here before. We know the structure of this.
Across the span of its imperial century, the United States has developed a systematic pedagogy: a way of teaching the world that certain lives belong within the ledger of acceptable loss and that certain populations may be expended in the service of interests they will never be consulted about. It has taught this lesson not through argument, for argument requires an interlocutor one acknowledges as equal, but through ordinance. Guatemala. Nicaragua. Cuba. Haiti. Libya. Iraq. Afghanistan. And when the lesson is complete, when the rubble has been surveyed and the bodies counted and the official language of regret deployed with the weary efficiency of long institutional practice, the empire moves on, confident that history, in its telling, does not accumulate. It resets.
When confronted with geolocated footage, munitions analysis, satellite imagery, and the convergent testimony of independent experts identifying the weapon as an American Tomahawk, President Trump suggested that Iran, or somebody else, had fired it and described American Tomahawk missiles as very generic. This was not a failure of knowledge. It was the performance of ignorance by a power that has never been compelled to account for itself and has therefore never acquired the reflex of accountability. To be answerable, one must first recognise the existence of a court before which one stands. Washington does not recognise that court. It does not intend to.
A preliminary Pentagon investigation conceded that the strike was likely the result of outdated intelligence, that the school had once formed part of an adjacent Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base, and that somewhere in the vast, AI-assisted machinery of targeting, no one verified that children had been learning in that building for more than a decade. Amnesty International confirmed the weapon. The New York Times confirmed the weapon. Bellingcat geolocated the footage. BBC Verify concurred. A satellite data-link antenna recovered from the site bore the name of its Colorado manufacturer. The contract under which the missile was produced has been identified. The evidence is not ambiguous. The official response, however, remains the same: outdated data.
Outdated data. The epitaph of 120 children, composed by the government that killed them, written, as such epitaphs are, in the passive voice.
Pete Hegseth celebrated the operation as the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history. He congratulated his forces on proceeding with no stupid rules of engagement. No inconvenient obligation to distinguish between a missile facility and a primary school, between a legitimate military target and a prayer room in which a principal had gathered children who had already survived one strike and were waiting for their parents to arrive. This is what liberation has always sounded like in the vocabulary of those who conduct it on behalf of people they do not consult.
Consider now Gaza, where the same vocabulary has been applied over a longer period and with even greater thoroughness.
As of April 2026, at least 75,498 people have been reported killed since October 2023, among them journalists, academics, and hundreds of humanitarian workers, including employees of UNRWA. Internal Israeli assessments, reported in the press, have suggested that a substantial majority of those killed are civilians, undermining repeated assurances of precision and proportionality.
The United States has committed tens of billions of dollars in military aid and regional operations since October 2023. Washington does not merely endorse what occurs in Gaza. It funds it, supplies it, and, when the United Nations Security Council gathers to demand that it cease, vetoes the resolution. Administrations change. The veto remains.
Amnesty International has documented airstrikes representative of a wider pattern: attacks on civilian homes, a church, and a public market, with no clear military objectives present. Many of these strikes occurred at night or in the early hours, when the likelihood of mass civilian casualties is highest. This is not an aberration. It is a method.
And yet Iran has carried, for four consecutive decades, the designation of an existential threat to world peace. It is a designation most forcefully advanced by the United States, the only country in living memory to have used atomic weapons in war, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and killing vast numbers of civilians in a demonstration of industrialised destruction that has never been repeated but has never been forgotten.
Iran, which has not invaded a neighbouring country in living memory. Iran, which watched the United States orchestrate the removal of its democratically elected prime minister in 1953, station its military in every sea that borders it, and now strike its schoolchildren with precision weapons fired from naval vessels whose commanders celebrate the campaign as history's most exact.
Alongside it stands Israel, its principal regional ally and beneficiary of sustained American military support, a state now facing grave and sustained accusations of genocide in Gaza, including proceedings before the International Court of Justice and findings by human rights organisations and United Nations experts that there are grounds requiring urgent and serious examination under international law.
The designation of threat has never required proof. It requires repetition, control of the means of narration, and a media class sufficiently aligned with the interests of the narrators to mistake persistence for truth.
Those who refuse alignment are de-platformed, demonetised, and subjected to the institutional machinery of discrediting with a consistency that mirrors, in its own register, the consistency of the ordnance elsewhere. Truth, in this arrangement, is not refuted. It is made professionally inconvenient.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and multiple Special Rapporteurs have called for an independent international investigation into the Minab school strike. Washington has offered its own internal inquiry. The accused will examine themselves. The world is invited to wait.
We know how long that patience is meant to last. We have been invited to it before, in other ruins, above other bodies, beneath other careful official expressions of concern and commitment to accountability.
What has changed is not the conduct but its presentation. The mask was not torn away by its opponents. It was set aside by those who wore it, who appear to have concluded that the cost of maintaining appearances now exceeds its strategic value. The language of human rights, of international order, of the rules-based system, stands exposed: a ceremonial garment worn when convenient and discarded when it conflicts with the imperatives of interest. International courts speak. Nations register their positions. The empire continues, in the settled confidence of a power that has never, across the full span of its dominance, been compelled to stop.
History, however, is not kept on a Washington timeline. It does not maintain its ledger in the passive voice. It does not accept the designation of children as outdated data. On that ledger, the blood of the children of Minab and of Gaza, children who threatened no interest, invaded no territory, and were engaged, until the moment the precision weapons found them, in the ancient and irreplaceable act of learning what the world is, does not evaporate with the news cycle.
It accumulates.
It waits.