JASON LEWIS: Truth Still The First Casualty

In 1946, Irgun terrorists dynamited the King David Hotel in pre-state British Palestine. The horrific carnage that claimed nearly 100 lives would one day be described this way:

“In that split second after 12:37, 13 of those who had been alive at 12:36 disappeared without a trace. The clothes, bracelets, cufflinks, and wallets which might have identified them exploded into dust and smoke. Others were turned to charcoal, melted into chairs and desks or exploded into countless fragments. The face of a Jewish typist was ripped from her skull, blown out of a window, and smeared onto the pavement below. Miraculously it was recognizable, a two-foot-long distorted death mask topped with tufts of hair.”

The fact that it would take some time for such a gruesome account to be widely disseminated is no accident. Amidst conflict and war, the full picture arrives later—by design.

And so it is today where once again, the Mideast is on fire.

But I’m afraidFox News viewers are in no mood for the gory details, especially if they’re a result of what now appears to be an inadvertent strike on a girls school in Iran due to “target misidentification” by U.S. forces.

Of course, this is different from the tactics of the other combatants in the region where civilian casualties are deliberate and reaching unprecedented levels.The policy of the United States is not to target innocents.

Which is why the War Department should be candid about its mistakes and stop equivocating about the strike(s) killing 175 people—including the school children ofIranian Revolutionary Guard Corps— by suggesting it was self-sabotage by Tehran.

Instead, remind the world that this was a tragic mistake and we long ago moved on from a ‘victor’s justice’ approach to the rules of war. One that once prompted a blunt but brutally honest Curtis Lemay to opine, “if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”