By Jafar Sherdoost
If you want to understand the sickening, sociopathic disconnect between the policymakers in Washington and the reality of the Middle East they are actively burning to the ground, you do not need to read a Pentagon briefing. You only need to look at the blood-stained rubble of a coastal town in southern Iran called Bandar Kuhestak, in Sirik County.
Tuesday evening in Bandar Kuhestak was supposed to be a sanctuary of human joy. It was a traditional wedding celebration, a gathering of music, bright lights, laughter, and families coming together. And then, the sky was violently torn open. In a fraction of a second, the deafening shriek of American precision-guided munitions transformed a celebration of life and love into an apocalyptic landscape of ash, shrapnel, and unfathomable grief.
When the smoke cleared, the grim arithmetic of Washington’s latest “strikes” became devastatingly clear. Four killed, two women and two children. Sixty-eight wounded, and traumatized.
These were not combatants. The Hormozgan Governorate released their names, and they read like an agonizing indictment of an empire that has lost its soul: Mohammad Mallahi, just 16 years old. Kolsoom Mallahi Nezhandnia, 43. Zarkhatoon Taheri, 50. And perhaps most heart-wrenching of all, Amir Ali Karimi. He was four years old.
Think about that for a moment. Feel the weight of it. A multi-million-dollar American weapon, paid for by American taxpayers, incinerated a four-year-old boy and a teenager at a wedding.
And how did the leadership of the “free world” respond to this slaughter?
On Thursday, thousands of miles away from the smell of burning flesh, US Vice President JD Vance stepped up to a podium at the White House. Without a shred of genuine human remorse, Vance looked at the press corps and delivered a masterclass in imperial gaslighting.
“We’re investigating it because obviously we care. We want to know,” Vance said, his face a mask of practiced political concern. He then had the breathtaking audacity to claim the moral high ground: “If we do make mistakes, again, this is a big difference between us and Iran, when our military makes mistakes, they learn from them to try to get better from them. Unlike the IRGC, the US never targets civilians in combat. We never will do that. We never have done that.”
To an Iranian looking at the shattered lives of Sirik, Vance’s words are not merely an insult. They evoke a visceral, burning hatred. They are the words of a apologist in a tailored suit, sanitizing slaughter of the innocent including children.
Let us tear down the sickening euphemism that men like JD Vance use to sleep at night: Collateral damage.
In the twisted lexicon of the Pentagon, “collateral damage” is a bureaucratic spell cast to magically turn the intentional slaughter of civilians into a spreadsheet error. The United States military claims to operate the most hyper-advanced, staggeringly expensive Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) architecture. They saw the bright lights. They saw the wedding crowd. They saw the women and children.
And they pulled the trigger anyway.
They did not do this by mistake. They did it because, in the racist, imperial calculus of Washington, Iranian lives are fundamentally expendable. The term “collateral damage” is nothing but a callous justification for war crimes and state terror, a convenient excuse used to wash Iranian, Arab and non-Western blood off the hands of American politicians.
Furthermore, Vance’s repulsive assertion that the US military “never has” targeted civilians is a falsehood so massive it defies comprehension. Does Vance think Iranians suffer from amnesia? They remember July 1988, when the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in their own airspace, vaporizing 290 innocent civilians, including 66 children. The US government never apologized; instead, they gave the ship’s captain a medal.
But we do not need to look back decades to expose the rot of JD Vance’s fabrications. We only need to look at the slaughter of the past 15 months. Was it a “mistake” when American bombs obliterated a school in Minab, massacring 168 students and teachers? Was it a “learning opportunity” when they bombarded a sports facility in Lamerd, killing 21 civilians including 7 children, and injuring 170? Throughout this recent war, the civilian death toll in Iran has surged into several thousand civilians including mothers, fathers, and children, entirely ignored by the Western press.
This is not an accident of war; this is the definitive, blood-soaked legacy of Donald Trump. He boasts on Truth Social of “crushing” Iran and establishing a “Wall of Steel,” but history will record his true, ignoble achievement: the slaughter of the innocent. War crimes, the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure, and the murder of children are not unintended consequences of Trump’s foreign policy; they are its core, defining features.
Washington always promises an “investigation” because it claims to “care.” We in the Middle East know exactly what an American investigation is. It is a cynical delaying tactic designed to outlast the 24-hour news cycle. Months from now, the Pentagon may quietly release a heavily redacted PDF blaming “faulty intelligence.”
And while the generals bury the truth in paperwork, Donald Trump may take to his phone to vomit his usual, shameless defense, perhaps grotesquely claiming that the carnage was “fake news,” or that the agonizing footage of mourning Iranian mothers was “generated by AI,” just as he has done in the past to deflect from his atrocities. No general will be fired. No politician will face a tribunal. The murder of Amir Ali Karimi will be filed away in a filing cabinet in Virginia.
US politicians who share their stage love to weaponize the phrase “human rights.” They use it as a geopolitical club to sanction and starve their enemies. But when American precision-guided missiles rain down on Iranian toddlers at a wedding, those grand ideals evaporate, revealing the ugly, brutal truth beneath. The US establishment does not care about human rights. They do not care about the lives of the people they seek to subjugate.
Four-year-old Amir Ali Karimi did not die because of a clerical error. He died because men like Trump and Vance view him as disposable collateral in an arrogant, failed crusade to dominate the Middle East. The missiles that struck Bandar Kuhestak did more than destroy a family’s joy; they shattered any remaining illusion of American morality, leaving behind nothing but scorched earth, the wails of grieving mothers, and the boundless, irredeemable hypocrisy of a murderous empire.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Iran Nuances.
