Comment by timcobb
12 hours ago
What's the twist? I'm curious why this event was chosen, if for any reason. Personally I am frustrated by people building a school next to a military installation. It feels extremely negligent. I find that to be pretty unsettling and wish people wouldn't do that, because military installations are legitimate and predictable military tagets.
I fully agree, and think the international community is making a big mistake by not (re)formalizing international law and the rules of war, we should force all nations (including those not in conflict -yet-) to store school locations etc. as machine readable maps... we will never be able to roll back the clock and find out if Iran would have properly declared the presence of the school or not, ... but we can PREVENT SIMILAR SITUATIONS in the future, or at the very least have a mechanism which makes it crystal clear when one or more parties are playing very dirty games.
Wouldn't it be much nicer to live in a first world with more clarity, where it is immediately obvious which nation either knowingly bombed a kids school, or what other nation knowingly uses some poor children as human shieds...
But thats not the world we live in: apparently we live in the world where the event also happened, but where the rules weren't set up to provide such clarity a priori. And this second world is IMHO darker than the also dark first world.
> I fully agree, and think the international community is making a big mistake by not (re)formalizing international law and the rules of war, we should force all nations (including those not in conflict -yet-) to store school locations etc. as machine readable maps... we will never be able to roll back the clock and find out if Iran would have properly declared the presence of the school or not, ... but we can PREVENT SIMILAR SITUATIONS in the future, or at the very least have a mechanism which makes it crystal clear when one or more parties are playing very dirty games.
The problem with that idea isn't that a country like Iran would fail to properly declare all of its schools, it's that it would improperly declare military targets as being schools. No one could trust the maps.
If you really wanted to do something like that, the maps would have to be compiled by some neutral 3rd party with on-the-ground verification.
What would be the punishment on nations that used the map to decide where to bomb first?
Did you know nearly every middle to larger sized US military base has base housing and even schools?
That’s the twist.
Downvote it all you want; I’m right.