To the editor: In the extraordinary article about the Feb. 28 deaths of at least 156 people in Minab, Iran, we have the most affecting, emotionally harrowing and conscientious piece of writing about America’s ill-begotten wars since Seymour Hersh’s articles about the massacres at My Lai (“Iranians recount desperate attempts to find survivors after school bombing,” May 6). This report by Zohreb Saberi, with Los Angeles Times editor and writer Steve Padilla contributing, should receive the Pulitzer Prize, as Hersh received for his My Lai reporting.
Please, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, don’t say the Minab massacre is under investigation. We know what happened: An American-made Tomahawk missile slammed into the elementary school on the first day of the war with Iran, which no U.S. Congress voted on and a large majority of Americans don’t want. Was the missile shot with bad intelligence? Did it malfunction? Do you think that matters? Not to the father of the child Reza Barazni, who could not be identified “by his face, which had been destroyed, but by sports shorts and socks he had put on that morning.” His mother saw that her dead son’s arms and legs “were in pieces.”
We hear a lot about the rising price of oil and the cost of living damaged by the war, but the real damage is moral. According to Iranian officials, at least 3,400 human beings have lost their lives in Iran since the start of the war; that blood is on our hands and those of the Israelis. Get out. Get out now. This is a complete disaster.
Gregory Orfalea, Santa Barbara
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To the editor: And President Trump stands there, unapologetically, behind his lectern, calling the horrendous death, destruction and chaos he has unleashed in Iran and the world a “skirmish.” It’s just a “skirmish” that killed those schoolchildren and their teachers.
How in the world did we deserve a leader capable of such monstrous words and actions in the White House? He has done more damage to the hope for peace on Earth than almost any other leader in modern history. Who can stand two and a half more years of this?
Heidi Santschi, Los Angeles
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To the editor: Why do we want this to be the model for future conflicts? More than 60,000 children were reportedly killed or maimed in Gaza over two years of conflict, and now more in Lebanon and Iran.
This is wrong and must stop. Killing families should not be the new normal. Our tax dollars can do better.
George Saade, Pico Rivera
