U.S. and Israel Open New War With Iran As Peace Reportedly Makes Progress

TEHRAN / WASHINGTON — The United States and Israel launched a major military attack on Iran on February 28, transforming a nuclear dispute that negotiators were still attempting to resolve two days earlier into another Middle Eastern war.

Explosions struck Tehran and other Iranian cities Saturday morning as U.S. and Israeli forces attacked Iranian leadership, military and nuclear-related targets. Israel described its action as pre-emptive; U.S. President Donald Trump said the operation would eliminate a threat to the United States and give Iranians an opportunity to overthrow their government. The Pentagon named the American campaign Operation Epic Fury, because apparently even the Department of Defense now titles things like a Mountain Dew flavor.

Iran responded with missile and drone attacks against Israel and U.S.-linked targets around the Gulf, rapidly widening what had begun that morning into a regional confrontation. Governments around the world called for de-escalation, while United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres convened before the Security Council and warned of the danger posed by the expanding conflict.

The timing was particularly remarkable because diplomacy had not yet obviously failed.

On February 26, American and Iranian representatives had completed another round of nuclear negotiations in Geneva. Oman, which mediated the talks, said the parties had made significant progress, although no final agreement had been reached. Iran’s foreign minister had said only days earlier that an agreement remained within reach if diplomacy were prioritized.

Forty-eight hours later, the prioritization process had apparently advanced to bombs.

The negotiations centered on Iran’s uranium-enrichment program, its stockpile of enriched material, international inspections and sanctions relief. Western governments have long suspected Iran of seeking the capability to build a nuclear weapon; Tehran has consistently denied that it intends to build one. The February talks remained divided over enrichment rights and the disposition of Iran’s highly enriched uranium, but mediators had planned further technical negotiations.

Those talks will now have to compete on the calendar with a war.

For ordinary Iranians, the strategic theories arrived as explosions. Reuters spoke with residents fleeing Tehran and other cities, collecting children from schools, lining up for gasoline, buying food and generators and attempting to withdraw money. Some Iranians who despised the clerical government nevertheless rejected foreign attack, recalling what regime-change warfare had done to neighboring Iraq.

That distinction should not be difficult, though modern political discourse treats nuance like contraband: a person may oppose an authoritarian government without wanting foreign militaries to bomb the country containing everyone else who lives under it.

Iran itself had only recently carried out a brutal crackdown on nationwide unrest. Reuters reported that thousands had been killed in that repression weeks before the attack. Opposition to Tehran’s government therefore exists for perfectly indigenous reasons without requiring Washington or Jerusalem to manufacture it from an aircraft.

The attack also poses an awkward problem for the political identity Trump sold to American voters.

Trump spent years presenting himself as the president who would avoid new wars and end costly foreign entanglements. Reuters reported during the 2024 campaign on his promises to quickly conclude the Ukraine war and rethink America’s overseas commitments; by June 2026, Trump would explicitly dispute that the Iran conflict contradicted his “no new wars” message.

February 28 nevertheless supplied the rather stubborn factual problem that the United States and Israel started this particular war with their strikes. Subsequent Reuters reporting consistently dates the conflict’s beginning to February 28.

There is nothing inherently pacifist about refusing endless wars only to insist that the next war will be different.

Every unnecessary war is sold as the necessary one.

The administration argues that preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon justified military action. Israel likewise identifies Iran’s nuclear program as an existential security threat. Those concerns are not imaginary: nuclear proliferation in an already militarized Middle East would have enormous consequences.

What remains open to scrutiny is whether bombing a state during active negotiations makes proliferation less likely, whether regime change is actually an undeclared objective, and how many governments may be destabilized before a foreign policy marketed as restraint begins requiring a different noun.

The United Nations response reflected those concerns. Guterres warned the Security Council on the day of the attack that the escalating violence threatened the broader region, while governments ranging from European allies to regional powers urged a return to diplomacy.

Trump, meanwhile, framed the attacks in part as an opportunity for Iranians to topple their rulers.

That would represent a considerably larger objective than nuclear non-proliferation.

America has encountered this distinction before.

Several times.

Usually while insisting that this time is different.

UPDATE — August 19, 2026

The School the Targeting System Forgot Was a School

Subsequent investigation into the opening day of the Iran war has supplied a particularly hideous postscript to the administration’s claims of precision.

On February 28, the same day the United States and Israel opened the conflict, the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ primary school in Minab, southern Iran, was destroyed during a strike on an adjoining Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound. Iranian authorities initially reported roughly 150 to 175 students and other victims killed; later independent reconstruction by the Associated Press documented at least 157 deaths, including 123 children. An early internal U.S. military investigation concluded that American forces were likely responsible.

The emerging explanation is somehow both less fantastical and more damning than a killer robot spontaneously deciding it disliked elementary education.

Investigators found that American targeting personnel may have relied on outdated intelligence that continued identifying the building as part of a military site, even though it had been separated from the neighboring base and operating visibly as a school for years. Reuters subsequently found that the school had maintained a public website full of photographs of students and activities, appeared in local business listings, displayed playground markings visible from satellite imagery and had recognizable school murals visible from space as early as 2018. In December 2025—only months before the attack—satellite imagery even appeared to show people gathered in its schoolyard.

So this was not a secret classroom hidden underneath a missile silo.

It was a school with a website.

The Pentagon’s broader Iran campaign was simultaneously making extensive use of accelerated, algorithm-assisted intelligence and targeting systems, including the Maven Smart System, to digest enormous quantities of surveillance and target data. Reporting on the Minab disaster has raised serious questions about whether this accelerated kill chain amplified stale information and reduced meaningful opportunities for humans to catch the error. What remains unproven is that an artificial-intelligence model itself specifically selected Shajareh Tayyebeh for destruction; the publicly available evidence instead points toward outdated intelligence entering a technologically accelerated targeting process whose human safeguards failed catastrophically.

That distinction matters, but it does not rescue the system.

Cornelius Edward Snider has previously condemned precisely this model of military automation: not as if a computer suddenly becomes Skynet and develops bloodlust, but because humans can build a probabilistic machine around bad source data, incomplete context and automation bias, then congratulate themselves that a person remains “in the loop” while that person becomes little more than a rubber stamp with a pulse. An algorithm has no moral judgment, legal responsibility, battlefield intuition or childhood to remember when the coordinates on its screen happen to contain children.

If the database says MILITARY TARGET, the computer can process that bad premise extraordinarily efficiently.

Progress?

The Minab strike therefore represents something considerably more frightening than “AI made a mistake.” Computers have made mistakes since somebody first divided by zero. The danger is an institution designing warfare around speed, scale and automated confidence, feeding that system information nobody adequately checked, and then scattering responsibility among analysts, databases, contractors, commanders and software until no individual human being seems to have actually bombed anybody.

Yet somebody did.

A precision weapon appears to have hit precisely where it was told to go. Reuters’ analysis found evidence consistent with an American Tomahawk cruise missile among a series of tightly concentrated strikes on the school and adjacent military buildings. The apparent failure was not primarily one of missile accuracy. It was a failure to accurately determine what human beings were living at the coordinates before deciding those coordinates should explode.

That is what makes the euphemism “targeting error” so antiseptic.

A typo is an error. Putting the wrong attachment on an email is an error.

When stale data survives years of surveillance, passes through layers of military intelligence, enters an increasingly automated targeting architecture and ends with more than a hundred children dead, the proper question is no longer simply whether the machine malfunctioned. The question is why the United States constructed a process capable of killing people faster than it could verify who those people were.

The administration’s response has not exactly restored confidence. Trump initially blamed Iran without producing evidence, later retreated from that assertion, and by June said that Americans might never know who was responsible, despite the preliminary U.S. investigation pointing toward American forces and evidence suggesting outdated American targeting data played a role.

By July, senators were publicly demanding that the Pentagon release the investigation’s findings. The administration still had not publicly provided the completed accounting lawmakers were seeking.

Thus, months after a girls’ school was destroyed on the first morning of a war America elected to begin, the world has received an impressive demonstration of twenty-first-century military efficiency:

The United States can assemble surveillance satellites, artificial intelligence, global intelligence databases, naval platforms and precision-guided cruise missiles into a system capable of putting an explosive through a particular building from hundreds of miles away.

It apparently still needed somebody to Google the address.