It happened on the first morning of the war.
Not deep into a prolonged campaign when targeting errors accumulate and fog of war becomes at least a conceivable defense... Not after months of combat when intelligence degrades and mistakes happen... Day one. The opening barrage. The first Tomahawk salvos had barely finished their arc when the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, was struck...
Once. Then again — the second strike hitting the prayer room where survivors of the first strike had taken shelter. Then a third time...
One hundred and seventy-five people killed. Most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve. Parents who had received calls that their daughters survived the first strike arrived to find them dead in the rubble of the third...
That is what happened on day one of Operation Epic Fury. Before the victory statements. Before the press conferences. Before Trump boarded Air Force One to tell reporters that Iran — a country that has never possessed a single Tomahawk missile — had somehow obtained one and used it to bomb its own school...
Remember that claim. We will return to it.
What the evidence showed:
The New York Times. Reuters. The Wall Street Journal. CBS News. All of them, independently, reaching the same conclusion in the weeks that followed — US investigators believe it is “likely” that a US-fired missile struck the school. The Al Jazeera Digital Investigations Unit went further, concluding the strike pattern indicated either catastrophically outdated intelligence constituting grave negligence, or deliberate targeting for what they called “maximum societal shock.” UNICEF confirmed 181 children killed in Iran total. Jeremy Konyndyk, former head of USAID’s crisis response, said it belongs in the same category as My Lai...
Then on March 8th and 9th the photographs were published. Missile fragments recovered from the school rubble. Stamped with the names of Tomahawk component manufacturers. A Department of Defense contract number. And the words “Made in USA”...
The lie was no longer sustainable. Not even internally. Pete Hegseth wouldn’t back Trump’s claim. Mike Waltz wouldn’t back it. Chuck Schumer stood on the Senate floor on March 10th and said what needed saying: “Iran doesn’t have Tomahawk missiles, Donald Trump. The claim is beyond asinine. He says whatever pops into his head no matter what the truth is. And we all know he lies — but on something as formidable as this, it’s appalling”...
The country was being forced, finally, to confront the question that should have been asked from day one... Did we massacre 175 children on the first morning of a war that a completed diplomatic agreement could have prevented — and then lie about it?
Then, on March 11th, the drone alert dropped.
The FBI had warned California police departments — quietly, at the end of February — that Iran “allegedly aspired” to conduct a surprise attack using drones launched from an unidentified vessel off the US coast. One unverified tip. No target. No timing. No perpetrators named. Acquired in early February, before the war even started, held for weeks... and released into the national media on March 11th, the day after Schumer’s floor speech, as the Minab accountability story reached its most politically dangerous moment for the administration...
Wall to wall coverage followed. California’s governor activated the state emergency operations center. Mayors issued statements. Security was heightened at the Oscars. The nation’s attention pivoted from the fragments stamped “Made in USA” to the question of Iranian drones approaching the West Coast...
The substitution was complete.
This is not coincidence. This is sequence.
And the sequence is precise enough to demand examination... The FBI acquired the tip in early February. They held it. They distributed it quietly to local law enforcement at the end of February as the war began. It sat there for two more weeks while the Minab evidence accumulated and Trump’s lie unraveled. And it went public the day the political damage became irreversible...
I am not claiming the threat was fabricated. Let me be clear about that... Iran is a nation under devastating assault. Its supreme leader was assassinated on day one alongside his family. Its oil infrastructure is burning. Its naval vessels are being sunk. It has installed a new Ayatollah — hard-line, Revolutionary Guard-connected, with nothing to lose. Iran has every conceivable motive for asymmetric retaliation and ship-launched drones are a physically plausible delivery mechanism...
But plausible is not the same as planned. And unverified is not the same as credible. And the political use of this alert — whatever its underlying reality — served the administration’s needs with a precision that cannot be separated from its timing...
This is the oldest mechanism in the manufacture of consent for unpopular wars... The Gulf of Tonkin gave Johnson his blank check for Vietnam. It didn’t happen the way he said it did. The anthrax attacks arrived right behind 9/11, still officially unsolved, and made the PATRIOT Act politically unstoppable overnight. Operation Northwoods — the actual 1962 Joint Chiefs proposal, signed and forwarded up the chain, to stage attacks on American citizens and blame Cuba — reached Kennedy’s desk before he rejected it... These are not conspiracy theories. They are declassified documents. They are history. They are what states do when they need wars their populations don’t want and when the lies that launched those wars are coming apart at the seams...
A 59% majority of Americans opposed these strikes before they started. That number does not hold once Americans believe Iranian drones are circling off the California coast. Fear of attack on home soil transforms an offensive imperial operation — built on suppressed diplomacy, the massacre of schoolgirls, and demonstrable presidential lies — into defensive necessity... Suddenly the country is not asking why we bombed a girls’ school on the first morning of the war. It is asking how we protect ourselves from the country we bombed...
That is the transformation the alert was designed to produce.
Whether or not a single Iranian drone ever approaches American waters, the alert has already done its work... The story of 175 girls killed on day one, and the government that lied about it, has been pushed from the center of the national conversation to its margins. The “Made in USA” fragments are already fading. The Schumer speech is already yesterday’s news...
Eighty-one years of watching this... The technology changes. The missiles get more precise. The lies get more sophisticated. The schoolgirls are just as dead.
There is one truth that does not change across any of it... The first battlefield of every imperial war is not in the country being bombed. It is here. In the mind of the citizen at home. In the carefully managed fear of what might be coming for us — deployed precisely when what we actually did can no longer be denied...
They are not afraid of your anger. They are counting on your fear.
Don’t give it to them.
~ John Fridinger
Nearly Spring, 2026
Talent, OR