Good for Senator John Kennedy.
After the news broke that a U.S. strike likely hit a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran, Kennedy did something exceedingly rare in Washington today - he apologized. He said it was important to acknowledge the tragedy and the loss of innocent life. And that matters.
Speaking to journalist Sahil Kapur, Kennedy had this to say about the incident: "It was terrible. We made a mistake… other countries do that sort of thing intentionally, like Russia. We would never do that intentionally. I think the department is investigating it now, and I'm sorry. I'm just so sorry it happened. It was a mistake."
I saw a headline about this and actually guessed it was Kennedy before I could read the whole story. Kennedy is of course known for his folksy sayings on TV and in interviews. Sometimes they are a little silly for my taste, but in almost all cases they do paint a vivid picture of the topic at hand, whether that’s border security or inflation or something else. There is no question that he is a skilled communicator.
Kennedy’s direct talk also played a role in the ousting of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, pressing her during her disastrous Senate hearings last week into testifying that President Trump approved a $200 million ad campaign starring herself, which the President then called Kennedy to deny - just a few days later, she was fired.
Back to the missile strike on the school - war is ugly and chaotic and mistakes do happen. But what defines a country - and what defines a leader - is whether or not you have the moral clarity to say something as simple as “something terrible happened, and we’re sorry.”
Because what happened to that school was terrible. More than 160 people were killed, most of the victims were children, girls between seven and twelve years old, sitting in their classrooms.
The story manages to get even darker; investigations and witness accounts say the school wasn’t just hit once but multiple times - possibly three separate strikes - what investigators sometimes call a “double-tap,” when a second strike hits the same location after the first explosion.
Think about that image for a second. Little girls at their desks, then an explosion. Screams, smoke, blood, your ears ringing. Teachers pulling themselves together, providing aid, calling for help… and then another blast.
We don’t do that in America. Except for the drug boats. OK, well, we do do that, but we’re not supposed to do that. Nobody is supposed to, it’s almost certainly a war crime. Just another way the Trump administration has disoriented our moral compass.
To be clear, the Pentagon is still investigating what happened. The strike was aimed at a nearby Iranian Revolutionary Guard facility, and the school sat close to that complex.
But none of that changes the call for moral clarity: if American weapons killed children in a school, then America owes the world the truth, and we owes those families accountability.
And that’s why Kennedy’s response matters. Too many politicians right now are doing the opposite. They’re denying, spinning, pointing fingers.
Kennedy said something simpler: this is tragic, and if we did it, we should say so. It doesn’t mean we stop fighting the war, it doesn’t mean we don’t get to be cops of the world, it doesn’t mean we aren’t the shining city on the hill. It just means we’re sorry it happened, and mean it.
That is not weakness, that’s how a serious country conducts itself.
If we’re going to claim the mantle of moral leadership in the world, then the bare minimum we can do is look at a tragedy of our making and say three words that seem to have gone out of style in Washington: “We are sorry.”