by Jacob G. Hornberger

March 11, 2026

Who cares about the 175 Iranian girls, who were students at the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in the town of Minab, Iran, when a U.S. Tomahawk missile slammed into them, killing them all?

U.S. national-security state officials? Don’t make me laugh. Despite any public displays of remorse they might express, the truth is that they couldn’t care less about the deaths of those little girls.

After all, let’s not forget the obvious: U.S. officials for decades have been targeting those little girls and the rest of the Iranian people with death by starvation and illness through their enforcement of their brutal, vicious, and evil system of economic sanctions.

The idea behind the sanctions is that if Iranians can be made to suffer enough economic privation or death, they will rise up in a violent revolution, oust their ruling regime, and replace it with a pro-U.S. dictatorship, similar to the one that the CIA installed with its coup in Iran in 1953.

If the ones who are dying first are children, so much the better because parents would then have a greater incentive to rise up against their ruling regime.

We can call it “regime change on the cheap” because in this way, no U.S. soldiers would have to die in a regime-change invasion and no CIA agents would have to die in a coup. All the deaths would be Iranians. As everyone knows, their lives are far less valuable than the lives of U.S. soldiers and CIA operatives.

Coming to the support of President Trump, who incorrectly has suggested that it was Iran, not the Pentagon, that killed those little girls with that U.S. Tomahawk missile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stated, “The only side that targets civilians is Iran.” Hegseth’s assertion was bolstered by Republican U.S. Senator John Kennedy, who actually apologized for the Pentagon’s killing of those little girls while reinforcing Hegseth’s point by stating, “Other countries do that sort of thing intentionally, like Russia. We would never do that intentionally.”

What? Are you kidding me? Have Hegseth and Kennedy never heard of the U.S. attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which intentionally, knowingly, and deliberately targeted little girls, little boys, women, seniors, and others with nuclear annihilation? Have they never heard of the U.S. firebombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities with the specific aim of killing multitudes of innocent people, including little Japanese girls? Have they never heard of the firebombing of Dresden, which specifically targeted innocent people, including little German girls, with death?

What about the long string of My Lai massacres in Vietnam, as detailed in Nick Turse’s book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam? Those massacres involved the knowing, deliberate, and intentional killing of innocent people, including little Vietnamese girls, as well as the subsequent intentional coverups of such massacres.

And what about the U.S. policy of economic sanctions itself? It targets innocent people, including little girls, with extreme economic privation and death by starvation or illness, as a way to achieve regime change or a change in governmental policy of a foreign regime that has been designated as a “rival” or “opponent” of the U.S. Empire? Would it have made any difference if those 175 Iranian little girls who were blown to smithereens by that U.S. Tomahawk missile had instead died of starvation or illness by the U.S. government’s brutal, vicious, and evil system of economic sanctions? Wouldn’t they still be dead?

It was no different, of course, with the official U.S. attitude toward Iraqi children. Who cared about them? Certainly not U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright. When 60 Minutes asked her whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children (including little Iraqi girls) from the sanctions on Iraq were worth the effort to secure regime change in Iraq, she responded that those deaths were, in fact, “worth it.”

I seriously doubt that the death toll among Iraqi children from U.S. sanctions ever actually reached as high as half-a-million, but I do know the following: (1) Albright didn’t challenge the number because for her, the number of deaths of Iraqi children was irrelevant; what mattered was regime change; (2) Her statement expressed the official mindset of other U.S. officials, which was reflected by the fact that not one single U.S. official publicly expressed disagreement with it; (3) While three high UN officials resigned their positions in the UN in protest against what they called the sanctions-produced “genocide” against the Iraqi people, not one high U.S. official ever resigned his position for the same reason; and (4) when a U.S. citizen named Bert Sacks, who I described in 2012 as “A Hero in Our Time,” took medicines and other items into Iran to help the Iranian people, U.S. officials went after him with extreme vengeance and retaliation for having interfered with their beloved system of deadly economic sanctions.

Who cares about those 175 little Iranian girls (and their adult teachers) who just had their lives snuffed out with a U.S. Tomahawk missile? Who cared about them when they were targeted for death by starvation and illness with the U.S. government’s brutal, vicious, and evil system of economic sanctions?