A Tomahawk missile is more than four times the length of an Iranian child. It can carry a 400-kilogram warhead, and fly at the speed of a commercial airliner over 2000 kms, and even fly just 30 to 50 meters above the ground. It knows, very precisely, where it is going, and its target can be changed mid-flight. On February 28, an American Tomahawk struck Shajareh Tayyebeh, a girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran. The missile, which costs at least a million dollars, was probably the most expensive thing ever to enter that school. Some or even many children survived. But then came another Tomahawk, sent precisely to kill survivors and saviours, in a tactic that is nattily called, ‘double-tap’. Then, according to reports, there was a third one. According to Iran more than 175 died, most of them children of the school. In a video of the aftermath, scores of adults are trying to clear the debris of the school, their wails and screams filling the air.

Donald Trump said that Iran may have struck its own school but a preliminary report of the American military strongly suggests that America struck the school, by mistake. It was very close to Iranian military structures that were being struck around the time. The school was once a military building and the Tomahawk had old data. Since the tragedy, the war has continued. America intensified the strikes. Iran has been trying to strike children and others in Israel but has not been successful. American children are too far away for Iran to even try.

The world is not so heartless that it does not care about what happened in the school. Just that in a world that has become more practical than ever, the event does not appear to be pivotal in this war. But even in such a cold rational world, we still need one ideal. If you have mistakenly bombed a school you cannot say ‘oops’ and move on. I think ‘oops’ is the correct word here because America, officially, acknowledges its military mistakes but never apologises. Even in a practical world, killing over a 100 children who were at school should override all the moral rights to continue the war.

Why? It is a question that has answers but we must not answer it. We must not grant rationality so much privilege that we have to answer why the accidental bombing a school should be a pivotal event in a war.

Trump has come to represent a defining character of our age – pragmatism. He does not deny the existence of moral values, but insists that he will create his own, not defer to some council of eggheads. One of his closest advisers, Stephen Miller, recently stated the doctrine plainly: ‘We live in a world governed by strength, by force, by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.’”

Such a view makes sense to a large section of the new global middleclass and the rich. Every guy who considers himself “practical” behaves as though the idea is some great private epiphany and that it somehow makes him modern. But then practicality is, as Miller himself notes, as ancient as us. It is idealism that is new and probably something that an animal could not have thought – the idea that the strong should care for the weak. Idealism is so tough, most of its proponents only achieve its beta version, widely derided as “hypocrisy”, which is still a form of decorum and decency, and a statement of moral purpose.

I do not say that the cold rational people who wage wars are mindless. The Iran war is not mindless. We can follow the rational train of thought of its central players. The United States and Israel felt that the degradation of Iran in a recent war gave them a rare and extraordinary window of opportunity to ensure Iran never becomes a nuclear power, and they acted. If Iran ever managed to make nuclear weapons, they would be a potent deterrent. Precisely why Iran wanted the bomb. If Iran had a nuclear weapon, America and Israel may not attacked it. Iran is in this position because nearly a thousand murderous men whom it funded had invaded Israel in October, 2023, killing over 1200, raping and mutilating their victims, and taking nearly 250 hostage.

So this is not a mindless war, if at all there is such a thing. What has changed is that Israel had had enough trying to win the goodwill of people who don’t live there, for which it had to spare children and let Hamas use children and others human shields. Once it stopped trying, it succeeded in Gaza the way it had never before, and wished to destroy the fountainhead of terror, the Iranian regime. So it is not very hard to see the point of it all. Even so, all I say is that not matter how rational and moral a war is, if an expensive mistake is made, the war has to end. A world where over a 100 school children can be blasted by three missiles and it is only called “collateral damage” is not a world that is worth living in, and this too a cold rational view.

There can be an argument against this emotional stance. You can say that if a war can end because a school has been struck, there would be sick regimes that would hide behind schools. In fact, I don’t think it is an accident at all that a former military structure became a school. Maybe the Iranian regime wanted the school to be less 300 metres from military facilities in case Americans attacked. Also, we know that their proxies Hamas did use children, and other harmless people, as shields. Even so, the whole point of civilization is that human shields should work. The rational should find other ways to win a war.

But for the moment it appears that we live in a world where over a 100 dead schoolgirls cannot end a war, but the surging price of oil might.

(Manu Joseph’s most recent book is, ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’. )