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No Life Is a Line Item: Gas Prices, Bombs, and Children in Iran
Human life cannot be reduced to barrels of oil, dollars of growth, or inflation points. To do so is to make mass murder manageable, calculable, acceptable.
Mar 25, 2026
When a bomb falls on a school, a hospital, or a home, no euphemism can soften the truth. Babies die in incubators. Teenage girls die in classrooms. Civilians experience violence not as a “military operation” or a “precision strike,” but as death delivered with terrifying immediacy. Yet governments persist in cloaking catastrophe with language that sanitizes it, as if calling mass murder an “operation” could contain its human cost.
In the opening days of the war involving Iran, an airstrike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, a coastal city in southern Iran. Iranian authorities report 165 dead, many of them schoolchildren, and dozens more wounded. Satellite imagery shows the school nestled among civilian and military structures. Neither the United States nor Israel has claimed responsibility; both insist civilians were not intentionally targeted. That absence of attribution is not a minor detail. It is a tool of evasion, allowing states to obscure responsibility while the innocent pay the price.
I’ve watched two images closely since the conflict began.
The first unfolds in the Oval Office, that carefully staged room where power is both exercised and performed. President Donald Trump asks an aide to hand him a model bomber. He turns it over in his hands, smiling, admiring it, and then almost tenderly hugs it.
Have we no shame? We watch children die and count barrels of oil. We hear names read off casualty lists and ask instead whether the gas pump is under $2.00.
“Give me that bomber… let me just hug that little sucker.”
Something in me recoiled, not just at the moment itself, but at how easily it could pass as normal. How quickly the machinery of war can be made small, harmless, even affectionate.
Because I know what that machine is.
The real aircraft—the Northrop B-2 Spirit—was designed to move through the sky without being seen. Built by Northrop Grumman with partners like Boeing, it exists to penetrate defenses, to arrive without warning, to deliver payloads that can level entire structures in seconds. It can carry dozens of precision-guided bombs. It can carry nuclear weapons. It is engineering in the service of disappearance: disappearance of sound, of visibility, of warning.
And maybe most dangerously, disappearance of consequence.
The second scene is one I can’t stop imagining.
A young girl in Tehran is crying for her mother.
I don’t know her name. That is part of what haunts me. I don’t know what her voice sounds like, what her favorite game is, what her mother used to say to calm her down at night. I only know that somewhere beneath broken concrete and dust, her mother is gone, killed in an airstrike, and that whatever the last hug between them was, it has already happened.
When I think about that Oval Office clip, I don’t stay in that room for long. My mind goes somewhere else entirely.
It goes to her.
It goes just as quickly to the families of American service members. Grief doesn’t recognize borders, and loss doesn’t check passports. According to reporting by USA Today, the number of US troops injured in this war has climbed to 200. Ten are seriously wounded. More than 180 have already returned to duty. Thirteen are dead.
I read their names slowly, not as information but as interruption:
Maj. John A. Klinner. Capt. Ariana G. Savino. Tech. Sgt. Ashley B. Pruitt.
Capt. Seth R. Koval. Capt. Curtis J. Angst. Tech. Sgt. Tyler H. Simmons.
Capt. Cody A. Khork. Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens. Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor. Sgt. Declan J. Coady. Maj. Jeffrey O’Brien. Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Marzan. Sgt. Benjamin Pennington.
I think about who spoke their names last. I think about the last time they hugged someone goodbye without knowing it would be the last time.
And I think about the children, who will grow up with that absence shaping everything.
The human toll extends even further. Thousands of American and Israeli air strikes have targeted Iranian leadership, Tehran’s nuclear program, and missile installations. President Donald Trump has said the assault will continue until an “unconditional surrender” by Tehran, though US officials offer conflicting definitions of victory even as they assure the public ground troops won’t be involved. Tehran’s leadership has struck a defiant tone, giving no indication of surrender.
This is not new. The US Constitution vests Congress with the power to declare war. Yet modern conflicts are launched through executive fiat, bypassing debate and public scrutiny. Military actions framed as “operations” rather than wars slip past safeguards designed to enforce accountability. From Vietnam’s “body counts” to Iraq’s “surgical strikes” and Afghanistan’s decades-long campaigns, euphemisms have long softened the moral weight of military action. History shows they do not lessen harm. They only obscure it.
Consider Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Moscow called it a “special military operation.” Russian media were forbidden from using the words “war” or “invasion.” Official messaging emphasized demilitarization and denazification. Language shaped perception. Language concentrated power. Language justified violence. And violence followed.
Words matter because they frame reality. “Operation” implies precision. “Precision strike” implies control. These words belong to surgery and engineering, not human lives ripped apart by bombs. War is never neat. War is never clean. War is messy, chaotic, and irrevocably human. Babies die. Children die. Parents dig through rubble. Words cannot erase that.
The strike in Minab exists within a broader struggle over the Middle East. Analysts see the conflict as part of a long-running effort to reshape regional power. Washington’s strategic conversations often center on limiting Iran’s military capacity, weakening alliances, and consolidating influence. These objectives go beyond battlefields; they aim to construct a political order in which local actors depend on foreign power, a system where autonomy is constrained.
Wars described as “limited operations” rarely end neatly. Targeted strikes can evolve into protracted campaigns. Euphemisms smooth the path for persistence, allowing conflicts to expand without the scrutiny or reckoning that accompanied formal war declarations in earlier eras.
International humanitarian law draws clear lines. Combatants and civilians must be distinguished. Deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime. Disproportionate attacks that fail to discriminate may also violate the laws of war. Yet phrases like “collateral damage” and “precision strike” mute moral alarm, constructing distance between planners of violence and those who endure it. For the victims, no such distance exists.
And yet, the conversation often circles back to the economy. Gas prices. Stock markets. “Is the pump near $2.00 a gallon?” “Is inflation holding?” As if killing children can be measured and balanced against a commodity. As if a girl crushed beneath concrete is only tragic insofar as her death might jolt the price of crude oil.
Shall we start calculating how much gas a child in Iran would consume in their life? Or how much they might contribute to economic production decades from now? That is exactly the kind of grotesque calculus some people apply, and it is morally bankrupt. Human life cannot be reduced to barrels of oil, dollars of growth, or inflation points. To do so is to make mass murder manageable, calculable, acceptable.
When I put all these images together, I can’t keep the usual distance that commentary seems to require. I don’t experience this war as strategy or policy first. I experience it as a series of human ruptures that keep multiplying.
A man in power holding a model of a bomber like something precious.
A child reaching for a mother who will never hold her again.
Families in Ohio, Kentucky, or Florida trying to make sense of a knock on the door that changes everything.
We are told that around 2,000 people have been killed across the region, more than 1,300 in Iran alone. The numbers rise, they are updated, they are absorbed into the rhythm of the news cycle.
But I can’t relate to the numbers.
I relate to the hug.
To the presence of it. To the absence of it.
War depends on a kind of distance I can no longer maintain. Not emotional distance. Not moral distance. Once you really let yourself imagine the moment after impact—the dust, the silence, the voice calling out—it becomes impossible to return to abstraction.
It becomes impossible to look at a bomber, even a small one, and not see what it does.
So I keep coming back to those two scenes, even when I’d rather not.
A president hugging a machine built to erase.
A child calling out into the space where her mother used to be.And somewhere between them, all of us, deciding quietly what we are willing to see and what we are willing to hold.
Have we no shame? We watch children die and count barrels of oil. We hear names read off casualty lists and ask instead whether the gas pump is under $2.00. We hug machines built to erase, and we pretend the consequences are abstract. But the dust, the silence, the absent voices are not abstractions. They are proof that human life cannot be reduced to a commodity, a strategy, or a “precision strike.” And if we cannot summon shame for what we allow to happen in our name, then we are complicit in the erasure, every single day.
As Mahatma Gandhi observed, “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.” Leaders may rationalize actions in the language of necessity. Alliances may shift. Strategic objectives may evolve. But the destruction left behind by war does not vanish with rhetoric. It endures. It demands recognition. It demands justice.
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The Rubble of Gaza and the Ghosts of Tokyo
The WWII firebombing of Tokyo marked the crossing of a moral Rubicon from which the US has yet to return, setting the precedent for the normalization of the deliberate annihilation of urban centers as an acceptable instrument of modern warfare.
Mar 10, 2026
Amid the so-called “ceasefire,” as imperial grifters and disaster capitalists jockey to remake Gaza in their image and in accordance with their own interests, the genocide has not abated. In its current phase, while the killing continues daily, its defining feature is the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, in whole or in part. From the outset, Israel has pursued this objective through a policy of urbicide: the systematic annihilation of Gaza City, Khan Younis, Rafah, Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya, and Deir al-Balah.
Palestinians remain steadfast in their refusal to be erased. Yet Israel’s assault has rendered Gaza nearly uninhabitable. This devastation cannot be easily dismissed with antiseptic euphemisms such as “collateral damage,” a term long employed to sanitize the mass slaughter of civilians. Intent can be inferred from actions, and policy from sustained patterns of conduct.
Even setting aside the relentless stream of genocidal rhetoric, the campaign bears all the hallmarks of design. That Israel commands one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world further erodes the pretense that those killed were unintended casualties rather than the victims of deliberate targeting, or at least a wanton indifference to civilian life.
Still, denial persists. US Ambassador Mike Huckabee recently suggested that Israel has exercised extraordinary restraint. The record tells a different story. More than 81% of structures in Gaza are damaged or destroyed. Little has been spared: homes, hospitals, markets, and schools. In the first 16 months alone, Israel killed at least 75,000 Palestinians, precipitating a 34.9-year collapse in life expectancy in Gaza. This is a demographic shock rivaling or exceeding those witnessed in Bosnia and Rwanda. The true toll, with countless bodies entombed beneath the rubble, certainly surpasses the official numbers.
The early architects of aerial Armageddon sought not only the obliteration of cities but also the erosion of the longstanding principle of civilian immunity.
We have not seen such systematic urban destruction since World War II. Gaza, a captive enclave with a besieged population that is nearly half children and one of the most densely populated places on Earth, has endured six times the explosive tonnage equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb. This comparison has not been lost on observers, from A-bomb survivors to Holocaust historians.
Yet Hiroshima and Nagasaki then, and Gaza today, would have been largely unimaginable without the firebombing of Tokyo that preceded it 81 years ago. On the night of March 9-10, 1945, American bombers turned a “paper city” into a hellish inferno, incinerating some 100,000 Japanese civilians in the single most destructive air raid in history. The attack did more than raze Tokyo; it marked the crossing of a moral Rubicon from which the US has yet to return, setting the precedent for the normalization of the deliberate annihilation of urban centers as an acceptable instrument of modern warfare.
The End of the Peace and the Emergence of Air Power
The road to Tokyo began in the trenches. At the turn of the 20th century, war was largely conceived of as a conflict between conventional armies. Consequently, civilians comprised only 5% of the dead. The First World War marked a dramatic escalation, raising that figure to more than 15% of violent deaths. By World War II, civilians constituted roughly 65%. In Gaza today, more than 80% of those killed are civilians.
The initial leap in destructiveness, as the mechanized mass killing of World War I left vast swaths of the globe strewn with mutilated bodies of a lost generation, produced contradictory responses. For many, the senseless slaughter made clear that armed conflict could no longer be seen as politics by other means. Whatever rationales states historically invoked to sanctify organized violence collapsed, as war waged with modern technology revealed itself to all parties as little more than industrialized murder-suicide.
In the aftermath of this carnage arose a wave of internationalist political utopianism. The nascent League of Nations promised a forum in which states could resolve conflicts through diplomacy. The 1925 Geneva Protocol sought to ban the worst excesses of the recent war, prohibiting chemical and biological weapons. The 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact went further, renouncing war altogether. To many, it seemed conceivable that it truly had been the war to end all wars.
Collective punishment against civilians succeeds only in making war more horrific and criminal while failing to render it significantly shorter.
Yet such sentiments soon yielded to geopolitical realities and to a mounting conviction that future wars could not be prevented, only won. For a new generation of military strategists, the stalemate of the trenches was less a cautionary tale than a technical problem to be solved. As Italian General Giulio Douhet insisted, the answer was air power. Bombers could fly over the front lines, shatter societies from above, and deliver decisive victory.
The early architects of aerial Armageddon sought not only the obliteration of cities but also the erosion of the longstanding principle of civilian immunity. If noncombatants could not be targeted outright, then the definition of “civilian” had to be stretched to the point of incoherence. Military planners justified this shift with a perverse claim that targeting civilians was the humanitarian path, since swift, concentrated destruction would supposedly end wars more quickly.
As US Army Air Forces General Curtis LeMay later put it, in war “you’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.” Others insisted that in a total war there were in effect no civilians. If workers contributed to the war effort, willingly or not, directly or indirectly, they could legitimately be struck in their factories or “dehoused” in their homes.
In less crude terms, with the veneer of scientific theory to legitimize the practice, a cadre of defense intellectuals advanced the idea that “morale,” or the collective will to fight, could itself be treated as a target. Yet as historian Ran Zwigenberg makes plain, morale was an imprecise and nebulous concept, and merely served as “another abstraction that allowed for the indiscriminate killing of civilians.” The “psychological science” behind it, the claim that societies possess a breaking point, rested on little empirical evidence.
This conclusion was not borne out in Britain, where Nazi bombing during the Blitz failed to break resistance. Its validity was further undermined after the war by the findings of the US Strategic Bombing Survey. Ultimately, as Robert Pape concluded in Bombing to Win, bombing civilians has rarely, if ever, proved decisive in compelling governments to concede or collapse and, if anything it stiffens resolve. In short, collective punishment against civilians succeeds only in making war more horrific and criminal while failing to render it significantly shorter.
The Shattering of the Bombing Taboo
Washington was slow to embrace this descent into unrestrained aerial warfare. This was a practice that in the 1920s and 1930s, became increasingly commonplace: Britain in Iraq, Italy in Abyssinia and Spain alongside Nazi Germany, and Japan in China. Such campaigns were widely condemned for what they were, a fundamental breach of the laws of war.
Some prescient observers recognized where this trajectory would inevitably lead. Leo Szilard, who would soon serve as a central catalyst in the development of the atomic bomb, warned even before such a weapon was feasible that the logic of aerial bombardment pointed toward catastrophe. “The discoveries of scientists,” he cautioned, “have given weapons to mankind which may destroy our present civilization if we do not succeed in avoiding future wars.”
It was in Japan that the US would most fully embrace its identity as a “bombing country” (having bombed more than 30 countries since 1945).
But the clearest expression of American opposition came from President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself. On the first day of World War II, he called on the warring parties to renounce the “inhuman barbarism” that was “the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities.” Even months into the fighting, he doubled down, emphasizing that the United States has long “pursued a policy of wholeheartedly condemning the unprovoked bombing and machine gunning of civilian populations from the air.”
Yet with the US entry into the war, Washington quickly disregarded this prior prohibition, joining the British in bombing German industrial cities. The campaign, justified as retaliation for the Blitz, during which the Nazis killed 43,000 civilians, would inflict more than 10 times the fatalities. As John Gordon of the Sunday Express wrote approvingly, “Germany, the originator of war by air terror, is now finding that terror recoiling on herself with an intensity that even Hitler in his most sadistic dreams never thought possible.”
Given the wartime mobilization and the existential stakes, it is perhaps unsurprising that there was little opposition to these Allied tactics. But it was not nonexistent. A small transatlantic coalition of pacifists and religious leaders under the banner of the Bombing Restriction Committee, issued a series of pamphlets condemning the immorality and strategic shortsightedness of the campaign. They warned if the Allies resorted to the tactics of the Nazis, they risked replicating in victory the very methods they claimed to be fighting to defeat.
Among those who called attention to the perilous precedent being set was the American theologian, John Ford. Responding to the claim that virtually everyone in an industrial society constituted a legitimate military target, Ford pointed out that in an average city such as Boston at most a quarter of the population could plausibly be said to work in war industry. The vast majority were therefore incontrovertibly protected under international law. “Even in the most totally war-minded country in the world,” he insisted, “certainly innocent civilians far outnumber those whose status could be considered doubtful.” Phrases such as “military necessity,” he warned, had consequently become little more than “a mere catchword, and a cloak for every sort of excess.”
Yet the drumbeat of war drowned out dissent over the means in pursuit of the end of the war. From generals and government officials to Walt Disney and the Looney Tunes, air power was celebrated across American political and cultural life. Yet the most destructive phase was to come. It was in Japan that the US would most fully embrace its identity as a “bombing country” (having bombed more than 30 countries since 1945).
The Long Shadow of Tokyo
In January 1945, Curtis LeMay assumed command of the strategic air campaign against Japan. For the next eight months, he would preside over the firebombing of 67 Japanese cities. The campaign began in force on March 9-10, 1945, with Operation Meetinghouse. That night, 334 B-29 bombers circled the skies over Tokyo, unleashing 1,665 tons of napalm on densely populated neighborhoods below. Tokyo was a tinderbox. Within hours, the city was transformed into a sea of flame and, by morning, reduced to a landscape of ash.
The napalm, a gelatinous petroleum-based weapon developed at Harvard in 1942, burned to death up to 200,000 people, by some more recent estimates. The raid charred at least 15 square miles of the city and left more than a million homeless. In the aftermath, the New York Times suggested that 1 to 2 million people were killed. While a clear exaggeration, such sensationalist reports revealed something valuable to military planners: The public had an appetite for merciless violence against the “enemy.” This perception helped give a green light not only for the continued months of bombing but also for the atomic bombings that followed.
But despite relying on the language of military necessity, the Tokyo bombing scarcely maintained the pretense of striking military targets. With the military deployed to the front lines, it was women and children, the sick and injured, and the elderly who remained behind. The aerial campaign thus amounted to a policy of collective punishment: mass killing carried out in the hope that it would produce favorable political outcomes. In other words, it was a policy of terrorism.
The mass killing of civilian populations from the air was not repudiated but quietly institutionalized.
This logic was evident in the planning itself. In 1944, the United States began constructing model Japanese homes to test these new tactics. As a short film produced by the First Motion Picture Unit explained, Tokyo was devastated by an earlier earthquake. The city center was rebuilt in a sturdier architectural style that stood in stark contrast to the “sprawling, flimsy wooden paper slums” that housed “millions of Japanese workers.” The “man-made earthquakes” that were to be unleashed by the bombers, as the narrator promised, were never tested against replica government buildings or industrial sites. They were only designed to set ablaze the homes of civilians.
The planners of the raid understood the implications. As LeMay himself reportedly remarked, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” Yet at both the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, where Nazi and Japanese high officials were prosecuted for their crimes, aerial bombardment of cities was conspicuously absent from the indictments.
Despite the hundreds of thousands killed from the air, the clear illegality of the practice was never seriously scrutinized. Telford Taylor, the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, acknowledged the contradiction in his final report to the War Department. Even “if the first badly bombed cities… were suffered at the hands of the Germans,” he wrote, the subsequent bombings “were the results not of reprisal but of deliberate policy, and bore eloquent witness that aerial bombardment of cities and factories has become a recognized part of modern warfare as carried on by all nations.”
To prosecute others for methods the Allies themselves had refined would have exposed the trials to even stronger charges of victor’s justice and might have placed limits on the use of such tactics in the future. Instead, the precedent was left undisturbed. In this way, a fundamental hypocrisy was embedded in the emerging postwar legal order. The mass killing of civilian populations from the air was not repudiated but quietly institutionalized.
The consequences have reverberated ever since. The laying waste to German and Japanese cities was followed by the millions killed in Korea and Vietnam. In recent decades, aerial campaigns have claimed tens of thousands of lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, and beyond. The rubble of Gaza today serves as the latest horrific reminder that the central lesson of this history remains unlearned: that might does not make right; that bombing can unleash endless horrors in war but cannot bring peace.
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Israel's Air-Power Colonialism
Like the British empire before it, Israel is attempting to dominate the Middle East from the skies.
Oct 14, 2025
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nomination of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his hands already crimson with the blood of innocent Iraqis, to run post-war Gaza, brings to mind a distant era when London sent its politicians out to be viceroys in its global colonial domains. Consider Blair’s proposed appointment, made (of course!) without consulting any Palestinians, a clear signal that the Middle East has entered a second era of Western imperialism. Other than Palestine, which has already been subjected to classic settler colonialism, our current neo-imperial moment is characterized by the American use of Israel as its base in the Middle East and by the employment of air power to subdue any challengers.
Swarming
The odd assortment of grifters, oil men, financiers, mercenaries, white nationalists, and Christian and Jewish Zionists now presiding in Washington, led by that great orange-hued hotelier-in-chief, has (with the help of Germany, Great Britain, and France) built up Israel into a huge airbase with a small country attached to it. From that airbase, a constant stream of missiles, rockets, drones, and fighter jets routinely swarm out to hit regional neighbors.
Gaza was pounded into rubble almost hourly for the last two years, only the first month of which could plausibly have been justified as “self-defense” in the wake of the horrific Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Even the Palestinian West Bank, already under Israeli military rule, has been struck repeatedly from above. Lebanon has been subject to numerous bombings despite a supposed ceasefire, as has Syria (no matter that its leader claims he wants good relations with his neighbor). Yemen, which has indeed fired missiles at Israel to protest the genocide in Gaza, has now been hit endlessly by the Israelis, who also struck Iranian nuclear enrichment sites and other targets last June.
Some of the Israeli bombing raids or missile and drone strikes were indeed tit-for-tat replies to attacks by that country’s enemies. Others were only made necessary because of Israeli provocations, including its seemingly never-ending atrocities in Gaza, to which regional actors have felt compelled to reply. Many Israeli strikes, however, have had little, if anything, to do with self-defense, often being aimed at civilian targets or at places like Syria that pose no immediate threat. On September 9, Israel even bombed Qatar, the country its leaders had asked to help negotiate with Hamas for the return of Israeli hostages taken on October 7.
Tel Aviv is now shaping governments of the Middle East simply by wiping their officials off the face of the Earth or credibly threatening to do so.
In short, what we’re now seeing is Israel’s version of air-power colonialism.
Typically, its fighter jets bombed the Yemeni capital of Sanaa on August 28, assassinating northern Yemen’s prime minister, Ahmed al-Rahwi, along with several senior members of the region’s Houthi government and numerous journalists. (Israeli officials had previously boasted that they could have killed the top leadership of Iran in their 12-day war on that country in June.)
In reality, Tel Aviv is now shaping governments of the Middle East simply by wiping their officials off the face of the Earth or credibly threatening to do so. Israel has also had an eerie hand in shaping outside perceptions of developments in the region by regularly assassinating journalists, not only in Palestine but also in Lebanon and as far abroad as Yemen. However, by failing to come close to subduing the region entirely, what Tel Aviv has created is a negative version of hegemony rather than grasping any kind of positive leadership role.
Negative Imperialism
The massive June bombardment of Iran by Israel and the United States, destroying civilian nuclear enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow, came amid ongoing diplomatic negotiations in Oman. As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has the right to enrich uranium for civilian uses and no credible evidence was presented that Tehran had decided to militarize its program. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) condemned both sets of strikes as severe violations of the United Nations charter and of its own statutes. They also posed public health concerns, mainly because of the release of potentially toxic chemicals and radiological contaminants.
Those attacks, in short, were aimed at denying Iran the sort of economic and scientific enterprises that are a routine part of life in Israel and the United States, as well as Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Several of those countries (like Israel) do, of course, also have nuclear weapons, while Iran does not. In the end, Tehran saw no benefit in the 2015 nuclear deal its leaders had agreed to that required it to mothball 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program. Indeed, President Trump functionally punished the Iranian leadership for complying with it when he imposed maximum-pressure sanctions in May 2018—sanctions largely maintained by the Biden administration and in place to this day.
Those dangerous and illegal air strikes on Iran should bring to mind 19th-century British and Russian resistance to the building of a railroad by Iran’s Qajar dynasty, a form of what I’ve come to think of as “negative imperialism.” In other words, contrary to classic theories of imperialism that focused on the domination of markets and the extraction of resources, some imperial strategies have always been aimed at preventing the operation of markets in order to keep a victim nation weak.
After all, Iran has few navigable waterways and its economy has long suffered from transportation difficulties. The obvious solution once upon a time was to build a railroad, something both the British and the Russians came to oppose out of a desire to keep that country a weak buffer zone between their empires. Iran didn’t, in fact, get such a railroad until 1938.
In a similar fashion, 21st-century imperialism-from-the-air is denying it the ability to produce fuel for its nuclear power plant at Bushehr. The United States, Europe, and Israel are treating Iran differently from so many other countries in this regard because of its government’s rejection of a Western-imposed imperial order in the region.
Popular movements and revolts brought the long decades of British and French colonial dominance of the Middle East to an end after World War II. The demise of colonialism and the rise of independent nation-states was, however, never truly accepted by right-wing politicians in either Europe or the United States who had no interest in confronting the horrors of the colonial age. Instead, they preferred to ignore history, including the slave trade, economic looting, the displacement or massacre of Indigenous populations, the mismanagement of famines, and forms of racist apartheid. Worse yet, the desire for a sanitized history of the colonial era was often coupled with a determination to run the entire deadly experiment all over again.
The framers of the ill-omened Global War on Terror’s nightmares in Afghanistan and Iraq during the administration of President George W. Bush would openly celebrate what was functionally the return of Western colonialism. They attempted to use America’s moment as a hyperpower (unconstrained by great power competition after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991) to attempt to recolonize the Greater Middle East.
Predictably, they failed miserably. Unlike their 19th-century ancestors, people in the Global South are now largely urban and literate, connected by newspapers and the internet, organized by political parties and nongovernmental outfits, and in possession of capital, resources, and sophisticated weaponry. Direct colonization could now only be achieved through truly genocidal acts, as Israeli actions in Gaza suggest—and, even then, would be unlikely to succeed.
“We Destroyed the Villages by Air Patrols”
No wonder imperial powers have once again turned to indirect dominance through aerial bombardment. The use of air power to try to subdue or at least curb Middle Easterners is, in fact, more than a century old. That tactic was inaugurated by the government of Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti during his country’s invasion and occupation of Ottoman Libya in 1911. Aerial surveillance pilot Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti fitted detonators to two-pound grenades, dropping them on enemy camps. Though he caused no injuries, his act, then seen as sneaky and ungentlemanly, provoked outrage.
The ruthless British subjugation of Palestine, aimed at—this should sound eerily familiar today—displacing the Indigenous population and establishing a European “Jewish Ulster” there to bolster British rule in the Middle East, also deployed air power. As Irish parliamentarian Chris Hazzard observed, “Herbert Samuel, hated in Ireland for sanctioning Roger Casement’s execution and the internment of thousands following the Easter Rising in 1916—would, as Britain’s first High Commissioner in Palestine, order the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of Palestinian protestors in 1921 (the first bombs dropped from the sky on Palestinian civilians).”
The most extensive use of aerial bombardment for imperial control, however, would be pursued by the British in Mesopotamia, which they derogatorily called “Mespot.” The fragile British occupation of what is now Iraq from 1917 to 1932 ended long before imperialists like then-Secretary of State for War, Air, and the Colonies Winston Churchill thought it should, largely because the armed local population mounted a vigorous resistance to it. A war-weary British public proved unwilling to bear the costs of a large occupation army there in the 1920s, so Churchill decided to use the Royal Air Force to keep control.
Unlike genuine international leadership, the Frankenstein monster of negative hegemony in the Middle East stirs only opposition and resistance.
Arthur “Bomber” Harris, a settler in colonial Rhodesia, who joined the British Air Force during the first World War, was then sent to Iraq. As he wrote, “We were equipped with Vickers Venon and subsequently Victoria aircraft… By sawing a sighting hole in the nose of our troop carriers and making our own bomb racks we converted them into what were nearly the first post-war long-range heavy bombers.” He did not attempt to gild the lily about his tactics: “[I]f the rebellion continued, we destroyed the villages and by air patrols kept the insurgents away from their homes for as long as necessary.” That, as he explained, was far less expensive than using troops and, of course, produced no high infantry casualty counts of the sort that had scarred Europe’s conscience during World War I.
Colonial officials obscured the fact that such measures were being taken against a civilian population in peacetime, rather than enemy soldiers during a war. In short, the denial that there are any civilians in Palestine, or in the Middle East more generally, has a long colonial heritage. It should be noted, however, that, in the end, Great Britain’s aerial dominance of Iraq failed, and it finally had to grant that country what at least passed for independence in 1932. In 1958, an enraged public would finally violently overthrow the government the British had installed there, after which Iraq became a nationalist challenger to Western dominance in the region for decades to come.
Of course, Harris’ air power strategy, whetted in Mesopotamia, came to haunt Europe itself during the Second World War, when he emerged as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command and rose to the rank of air chief marshal. He would then pioneer the tactic of massively bombarding civilian cities, beginning with the “thousand bomber” raid on Cologne in May 1942. His “total war” air campaign would, of course, culminate in the notorious 1945 firebombing of Dresden, which devastated eight square miles of the “Florence of Germany,” wiping out at least 25,000 victims, most of them noncombatants.
Terror from the Skies
In the end, the way Bomber Harris’ deadly skies came home to Europe should be an object lesson to our own neo-imperialists. At this very moment, in fact, Europe faces menacing drones no less than does the Middle East. Moreover, unlike genuine international leadership, the Frankenstein monster of negative hegemony in the Middle East stirs only opposition and resistance. Despite Israel’s technological superiority, it has hardly achieved invulnerability. Poverty-stricken and war-ridden Yemen has, for instance, managed to all but close the vital Red Sea to international shipping to protest the genocide in Gaza and has hit Israel with hypersonic missiles, closing the port of Eilat. Nor, during their 12-day war, did Iran prove entirely helpless either. It took out Israel’s major oil refinery and struck key military and research facilities. Instead of shaking the Iranian government, Israel appears to have pushed Iranians to rally around the flag. Nor is it even clear that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium was affected.
Most damning of all, Israel’s ability to inflict atrocities on the Palestinians of Gaza (often with US-supplied weaponry) has produced widespread revulsion. It is now increasingly isolated, its prime minister unable even to fly over France and Spain due to a fear of an International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest. The publics of the Middle East are boiling with anger, as are many Europeans. In early October, Italy’s major labor unions called a general strike, essentially closing the country down to protest Israel’s interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla, a group of ships attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. As with Bomber Harris’ ill-starred domination of Iraq, terror from the skies in Gaza and beyond is all too likely to fail as a long-term Grand Strategy.
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From Guernica to Gaza, Air War Is a Horror That Lets Its Perpetrators off the Hook
An idea has emerged among US leaders that it’s not really a war if Americans are above it all and aren’t dying. But what is it to the civilians below?
Aug 29, 2025
Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground can’t match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”
Nine decades have passed since aerial technology first began notably assisting warmakers. Midway through the 1930s, when Benito Mussolini sent Italy’s air force into action during the invasion of Ethiopia, hospitals were among its main targets. Soon afterward, in April 1937, the fascist militaries of Germany and Italy dropped bombs on a Spanish town with a name that quickly became a synonym for the slaughter of civilians: Guernica.
Within weeks, Pablo Picasso’s painting “Guernica” was on public display, boosting global revulsion at such barbarism. When World War II began in September 1939, the default assumption was that bombing population centers—terrorizing and killing civilians—was beyond the pale. But during the next several years, such bombing became standard operating procedure.
Dispensed from the air, systematic cruelty only escalated with time. The blitz by Germany’s Luftwaffe took more than 43,500 civilian lives in Britain. As the Allies gained the upper hand, the names of certain cities went into history for their bomb-generated firestorms and then radioactive infernos. In Germany: Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden. In Japan: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
“Between 300,000-600,000 German civilians and over 200,000 Japanese civilians were killed by allied bombing during the Second World War, most as a result of raids intentionally targeted against civilians themselves,” according to the documentation of scholar Alex J. Bellamy. Contrary to traditional narratives, “the British and American governments were clearly intent on targeting civilians,” but “they refused to admit that this was their purpose and devised elaborate arguments to claim that they were not targeting civilians.”
Past Atrocities Excusing New Ones
As the New York Times reported in October 2023, three weeks into the war in Gaza, “It became evident to US officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II—including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—to try to defeat those countries.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told then-US President Joe Biden much the same thing, while shrugging off concerns about Israel’s merciless killing of civilians in Gaza. “Well,” Biden recalled him saying, “you carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died.”
Routine reverence for America’s high-tech arsenal of air power has remained in sync with the assumption that, in the hands of Uncle Sam, the world’s greatest aerospace technologies would be used for the greatest good.
Apologists for Israel’s genocide in Gaza have continued to invoke just such a rationale. Weeks ago, for instance, Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, responded derisively to a statement by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that “the Israeli government’s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong.” Citing the US-British air onslaught on Dresden in February 1945 that set off a huge firestorm, Huckabee tweeted: “Ever heard of Dresden, PM Starmer?”
Appearing on Fox & Friends, Huckabee said: “You have got the Brits out there complaining about humanitarian aid and the fact that they don’t like the way Israel is prosecuting the war. I would remind the British to go back and look at their own history. At the end of World War II they weren’t dropping food into Germany, they were dropping massive bombs. Just remember Dresden—over 25,000 civilians were killed in that bombing alone.”
The United Nations has reported that women and children account for nearly 70% of the verified deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. The capacity to keep massacring civilians there mainly depends on the Israeli Air Force (well supplied with planes and weaponry by the United States), which proudly declares that “it is often due to the IAF’s aerial superiority and advancement that its squadrons are able to conduct a large portion” of the Israeli military’s “operational activities.”
The “Grace and Panache” of the “Indispensable Nation”
The benefactor making possible Israel’s military prowess, the US government, has compiled a gruesome record of its own in this century. An ominous undertone, foreshadowing the unchecked slaughter to come, could be heard on October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas attack on Israel resulted in close to 1,200 deaths. “This is Israel’s 9-11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations said outside the chambers of the Security Council, while the country’s ambassador to the United States told PBS viewers that “this is, as someone said, our 9-11.”
Loyal to the “war on terror” brand, the American media establishment gave remarkably short shrift to concerns about civilian deaths and suffering. The official pretense was that (of course!) the very latest weaponry meshed with high moral purpose. When the US launched its “shock and awe” air assault on Baghdad to begin the Iraq War in March 2003, “it was a breathtaking display of firepower,” anchor Tom Brokaw told NBC viewers with unintended irony. Another network correspondent reported “a tremendous light show here, just a tremendous light show.”
As the US occupation of Iraq took hold later that year, New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins (who now covers military matters for The New Yorker) was laudatory on the newspaper’s front page as he reported on the Black Hawk and Apache helicopter gunships flying over Baghdad “with such grace and panache.” Routine reverence for America’s high-tech arsenal of air power has remained in sync with the assumption that, in the hands of Uncle Sam, the world’s greatest aerospace technologies would be used for the greatest good.
In a 2014 commencement speech at West Point, then-US President Barack Obama proclaimed: “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.”
After launching two major invasions and occupations in this century, the United States was hardly on high moral ground when it condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and frequent bombing of that country’s major cities. Seven months after the invasion began, Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to justify his reckless nuclear threats by alarmingly insisting that the atomic bombings of Japan had established a “precedent.”
Whoever Doesn’t Count Goes Uncounted
Journalist Anand Gopal, author of the brilliant book No Good Men Among the Living, spent years in Afghanistan after the US invasion of that country, often venturing into remote rural areas unvisited by Western reporters. While US media outlets were transfixed with debating the wisdom of finally withdrawing troops from that country in August 2021 and the flaws in the execution of the departure, Gopal was rendering a verdict that few in power showed the slightest interest in hearing: The US war effort in Afghanistan had involved the large-scale killing of civilians from the air, and civilian deaths had been “grossly undercounted.”
In Helmand Province (“really the epicenter of the violence for the last two decades”), Gopal investigated what had happened to the family of a housewife named Shakira, who lived in the small village of Pan Killay. As he explained during a DemocracyNow! interview, she had lost 16 members of her family. “What was remarkable or astonishing about this was that this wasn’t in one airstrike or in one mass casualty incident,” he pointed out. “This was in 14 or 15 different incidents over 20 years.” He added:
So, people were living—reliving tragedy again and again. And it wasn’t just Shakira, because I was interested, after interviewing her, to see how representative this was. So, I managed to talk to over a dozen families. I got the names of the people who were killed. I tried to triangulate that information with death certificates and other eyewitnesses. And so, the level of human loss is really extraordinary. And most of these deaths were never recorded. It’s usually the big airstrikes that make the media, because in these areas there’s not a lot of internet penetration, there’s not—there’s no media there. And so, a lot of the smaller deaths of ones and twos don’t get recorded. And so, I think we’ve grossly undercounted the number of civilians who died in this war.
Citing a UN study of casualties during the first half of 2019, the BBC summed up the findings this way: “Some 717 civilians were killed by Afghan and US forces, compared to 531 by militants… Air strikes, mostly carried out by American warplanes, killed 363 people, including 89 children, in the first six months of the year.”
During my brief trip to Afghanistan 10 years earlier, I had visited the Helmand Refugee Camp District 5 on the outskirts of Kabul, where I met a 7-year-old girl named Guljumma. She told me about what had happened one morning the previous year when she was sleeping at her home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. At about 5:00 am local time, the US Air Force dropped bombs. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.
As Guljumma spoke, several hundred people were living under makeshift tents in the refugee camp. Basics like food arrived only sporadically. Her father, Wakil Tawos Khan, told me that the sparse incoming donations were from Afghan businessmen, while little help came from the government of Afghanistan. And the United States was offering no help whatsoever. The last time Guljumma and her father had meaningful contact with the US government was when its air force bombed them.
Normal and Lethal
When Shakira and Guljumma lost relatives to bombs that arrived courtesy of the US taxpayer, their loved ones were not even numbers to the Pentagon. Instead, meticulous estimates have come from the Costs of War project at Brown University, which puts “the number of people killed directly in the violence of the post-9-11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere” at upwards of 905,000—with 45% of them civilians. “Several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars—because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease.”
The increasing American reliance on air power rather than combat troops has shifted the concept of what it means to be “at war.” After three months of leading NATO’s bombing of Libya in 2011, for instance, the US government had already spent $1 billion on the effort, with far more to come. But the Obama administration insisted that congressional approval was unnecessary since the United States wasn’t actually engaged in military “hostilities”—because no Americans were dying in the process.
The daily horrors in Gaza still echo the day when bombs fell on Guernica.
The State Department’s legal adviser, former Yale Law School dean Harold H. Koh, testified at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the nation’s actions targeting Libya involved “no US ground presence or, to this point, US casualties.” Nor was there “a threat of significant US casualties.” The idea was that it’s not really a war if Americans are above it all and aren’t dying. In support of Koh, a former colleague at the Yale Law School, Akhil Reed Amar, claimed that the United States truly wasn’t engaged in “hostilities” in Libya because “there are no body bags” of American soldiers.
Ten years later, in a September 2021 speech at the United Nations soon after the last American troops had left Afghanistan, President Biden said: “I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war.” In other words, American troops weren’t dying in noticeable numbers. Costs of War project codirector Catherine Lutz pointed out in the same month that US engagement in military actions “continues in over 80 countries.”
Seeking to reassure Americans that the Afghanistan withdrawal was a matter of repositioning rather than a retreat from the use of military might, Biden touted an “over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.” During the four years since then, the Biden and Trump administrations have directly sent bombers and missiles over quite a few horizons, including in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Iran.
Less directly, but with horrific ongoing consequences, stepped-up US military aid to Israel has enabled its air power to systematically kill Palestinian children, women, and men with the kind of industrial efficiency that fascist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s might have admired. The daily horrors in Gaza still echo the day when bombs fell on Guernica. But the scale of the carnage is much bigger and unrelenting in Gaza, where atrocities continue without letup, while the world looks on.
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Israeli Bombing of Gaza Ranks Among 'Most Devastating' in History
"Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history," said a U.S. military historian as Israel's use of arms including 2,000-pound "bunker-buster" bombs pushed the Palestinian death toll over 20,000.
Dec 23, 2023
As the Palestinian death toll from Israel's 10-week annihilation of the Gaza Strip passed 20,000, warfare experts said this weekend that the retaliatory campaign ranks among the deadliest and most destructive in modern history.
Gaza health officials said Friday that 390 Palestinians were killed and 734 others wounded in the besieged strip over the previous 48 hours, driving the death toll from 77 days of near-relentless Israeli attacks to 20,057, with another 53,320 people injured. More than 6,000 women and over 8,000 children have been killed—approximately 70% of all fatalities.
That's more than twice the number of civilians—and over 14 times as many children—as Russian forces have
killed in Ukraine since February 2022.
Thousands more Palestinians are missing and feared buried beneath the rubble of the hundreds of thousands of buildings destroyed or damaged by Israeli bombardment.
"The scale of Palestinian civilian deaths in such a short period of time appears to be the highest such civilian casualty rate in the 21st century," Michael Lynk, who served as the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories from 2016 to 2022, told The Washington Post on Saturday.
Robert Pape, a U.S. military historian and University of Chicago professor, told The Associated Press that "Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history."
"It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever," he added.
By comparison, the 2017 U.S.-led coalition battle for Mosul, Iraq during the war against the so-called Islamic State—widely viewed as among the most intense urban assaults in recent decades—killed approximately 10,000 civilians, around a third of them from aerial bombardment.
Pape said that by some measures, Israel's bombing of Gaza is surpassing the Allied "terror bombing" of German cities during World War II.
He noted that U.S. and U.K. airstrikes obliterated about 40-50% of the urban areas of the 51 German cities bombed between 1942-45, and that around 10% of all buildings in Germany were destroyed. In Gaza, approximately 1 in 3 buildings have been destroyed. In northern Gaza, over two-thirds of all buildings have been leveled.
"Gaza is now a different color from space. It's a different texture," Corey Scher, who studies natural disasters and wars using satellite remote sensing at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, told the AP.
Experts point to the types of munitions being used by Israeli forces as a major reason why so many Gazans are being killed and injured. These include U.S.-supplied 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound guided "bunker-buster" bombs, which Israel says are necessary to target Hamas' underground tunnels.
These massive bombs turn "earth to liquid," Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon defense official and war crimes investigator for the United Nations, told the AP. "It pancakes entire buildings."
Garlasco said that 2,000-pound bombs mean "instant death" for anyone within about 100 feet of the blast, with shrapnel posing a deadly danger for people up to 1,200 feet away.
In a separate interview with CNN, Gerlasco said that the intensity of Israel's bombardment of Gaza has "not been seen since Vietnam," when U.S. airstrikes killed up to hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians. The U.S. dropped more bombs on tiny, non-belligerent Laos than all sides combined unleashed during World War II.
"You'd have to go back to the Vietnam War to make a comparison," Garlasco added. "Even in both Iraq wars, it was never that dense."
The use of such heavy ordnance in close proximity to critical civilian infrastructure like hospitals has alarmed observers.
"What we have been witnessing is a campaign that was planned, it was a plan, definitely, to close down all the hospitals in the north," Léo Cans, head of mission for Palestine with Doctors Without Borders, told the Post.
Aided by AI-based target selection systems, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commanders are approving bombings they know will cause large numbers of civilian casualties. In a bid to assassinate a single Hamas commander, the IDF dropped at least two 2,000-pound bombs on the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp on October 31, killing more than 120 civilians.
Although the United States—which has killed more foreign civilians this century than any other armed force in the world—provides Israel with thousands of 1,000 and 2,000-pound bombs, its own military avoids using such massive ordnance in civilian areas due to the devastation they cause.
"It certainly appears that [Israel's] tolerance for civilian harm compared to expected operational benefits is significantly different than what we would accept as the U.S.," Larry Lewis, research director at the Center for Naval Analyses and a former U.S. State Department senior adviser on civilian harm, told CNN.
That includes the risk of killing Israel's own citizens and others held hostage by Hamas in Gaza.
Lewis added that the Jabalia strike was "something we would never see the U.S. doing."
That isn't entirely true; during the 1991 Gulf War the U.S.
dropped a pair of 2,000-pound Raytheon GBU-27 Paveway III laser-guided bombs on the Amiriyah air raid shelter in Baghdad, killing at least 408 Iraqi civilians in one of the deadliest single airstrikes in modern history. U.S. officials claimed they thought the shelter, which was used during the Iraq-Iran war, was no longer a civilian facility.
"The use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area as densely populated as Gaza means it will take decades for communities to recover," John Chappell, advocacy and legal fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Center for Civilians in Conflict, told CNN.
Even more concerning for some experts is Israel's use of unguided, or "dumb" bombs, against civilian targets in Gaza.
While IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said that "we choose the right munition for each target so it doesn't cause unnecessary damage," the death and destruction in Gaza—and Israeli officials' own words—tell an entirely different story.
Early in the war, Hagari declared that "Gaza will never return to what it was," clarifying that "the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy."
Meanwhile, numerous Israeli officials advocated the complete destruction of Gaza, with more than a few government figures—including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Cabinet members—making statements supporting genocide against the Palestinian people.
U.S. President Joe Biden—who has affirmed his "unwavering" support for Israel and is seeking $14.3 billion in additional military aid for the country, which already gets almost $4 billion annually from Washington—has implored Israeli leaders to stop the "indiscriminate" bombing of Gaza, even as his administration thwarts international cease-fire efforts and restocks the IDF's arsenal.
Chappell stressed that "the devastation that we've seen for communities in Gaza is, unfortunately, co-signed by the United States."
"Too much of it is carried out by bombs that were made in the United States," he added.
Ahmed Abofoul—a Gaza-born, Netherlands-based attorney with the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq who has lost 60 of his relatives to Israeli bombing— said in Friday interview with Democracy Now! that "the American government is complicit in this genocide."
"There is blood of Palestinian children on their hands," he added. [Biden] said Israel is engaged in indiscriminate bombing. This is a war crime. So, the question is: Why do you then send weapons to Israel? The position of the U.S. is quite hypocritical."
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In Yemen, a Humanitarian Pause is Urgently Needed
Mar 01, 2016
As war continues to rage uninterrupted in Yemen, a humanitarian pause is badly needed as the country spirals down to chaos, leaving the majority of the population in urgent need of medical care. Restrictions on access to medical supplies and care are key impediments to improving the situation of people in need. A five-day humanitarian pause would allow supplies and care to reach those people and relieve their dire health situation.
At the same time, attacks on health facilities continue. Last October, the World Health Organization (WHO) condemned the bombing of a Medecins Sans Frontieres' (MSF) supported hospital in Saada province in northern Yemen. MSF believes that, as a consequence, 200,000 people were left without medical care. That attack, which violated International Humanitarian Law, was the second one on an MSF-run facility in a month.
Since the beginning of Saudi Arabia's attacks on Yemen, conducted with U.S. support, more than 5,700 have died (almost half of them civilians) -including hundreds of women and children- and 28,753 injuries have been reported. Several health workers have also been killed, and 47 health facilities in 11 governorates have been damaged or closed as a result of the continuous violence.
Healthcare services in all public hospitals have been reduced, especially operating theaters and intensive care units. At the same time, disrupted immunization activities have increased the risks for measles and poliomyelitis, even though Yemen is presently free of polio. The breakdown of the water supply and sanitation systems has facilitated the spread of diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, as well as acute diarrheal diseases, particularly affecting children. Also, the early warning alert system for diseases has been seriously affected because of limited communication possibilities.
The country has one of the highest rates of chronic malnutrition in the world. According to UNICEF, 1.3 million Yemeni children younger than five years now suffer from acute malnutrition, compared to 850.000 before the war started. 320.000 are severely malnourished, twice the amount before the crisis. The little cash people have is to pay for food and gas -at greatly increased prices- leaving no money to afford health care.
The Lancet reports that approximately a quarter of the country's healthcare facilities are no longer functional. To make matters worse, Ronald Kremer from MSF says, "People do not dare to go to hospitals because they are afraid that they are targeted, and even if they want to go,, they may not have the means—even where public transport does exist, it is very expensive because of the fuel problems."
Fuel problems have increased the difficulty of obtaining clean water. The lack of a proper water supply and dire sanitation and hygiene have led to outbreaks of dengue and malaria. Many Yemenis store water in open containers, which becomes an ideal breeding ground for disease-transmitting mosquitoes.
So far, there are more than 2.5 million people who have become internally displaced persons (IDPs). To compound an already difficult situation, disrupted immunization campaigns have led to an increasing number of children affected with measles and rubella, particularly among IDPs living in overcrowded conditions. As a result of the conflict, many hospitals, laboratories, health warehouses, and administrative offices have closed. Primary care facilities have minimum access to medicines, supplies, and equipment. The fuel shortage has affected the proper operations of ambulances.
In this situation, a humanitarian pause is urgently needed. As proposed by the World Health Organization, a five-day pause would allow humanitarian organizations to respond to some of the most life-threatening needs of the people, particularly women and children caught in the middle of the conflict. An MSF doctor taking care of a badly hurt child in Syria realized that the child was desperately trying to tell him something. When he asked his translator what the child was saying, the translator responded, "Don't they realize that we are children?" A similar question could be asked in Yemen today.
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Failed US Policy in the Middle East
Feb 29, 2016
The United States has been involved in the Middle East for almost one hundred years because of the vast oil reserves there, and the US has been militarily involved since 1967, when the US began supplying Israel with weapons with which to defend itself. However, the US has only been involved in the "quagmire" of Middle East wars since 2001.
The failed US policy in the Middle East began with the US's bombing, sanctioning and then invasion of Iraq, which was based on false information about Iraq's development of nuclear weapons. The forged information was most probably given by a neo-conservative with ties to Italian and Israeli intelligence, Michael Ladeen, to Italian intelligence, who gave it to US intelligence, causing the US to invade without justification another sovereign country. George H. Bush merely bombed Iraq and imposed sanctions that killed a million people, half of them children. Osama Bin Laden's 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center that killed 2,996 people was retaliation for those killings and for the US's supplying Israel with F 15's, F 16's and other weapons that were used to attack Palestinian refugee camps. Thus, the Israeli-motivated attack on Iraq and the US's funding of Israeli aggression against Palestinians resulted in great harm to US citizens in the US.
George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq resulted in the US's subsequent holding of elections there that put a Shia government in power and dismantled the former Sunni Baath Party and caused the persecution of the overthrown Baath Party military men, who were not allowed to obtain other jobs. The new Shia government of Iraq immediately allied itself with Shia Iran, the former enemy of Iraq. Iran thus gained regional power and challenged the hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the strongest Sunni Arab countries. Moreover, the infrastructure of Iraq has never recovered from the US bombing: electricity still is not universally available, nor are jobs, housing, education, and health care, as they were under the former Sunni government of Saddam Hussein. Farmers in southern Iraq also lost their farms and livelihood because of drought and the many Turkish and Syrian dams on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers cutting the water supply to Basra and the surrounding areas. Moreover, the human rights abuses by the Iraqi government are seldom mentioned by the western media, though those by the opposition Islamic State are highlighted. Yet, according to Hameedt Sooden of the Christian Peacemaker Team formerly in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Iraqi security forces, including under the current Prime Minister al-Abadi, engage in similar practices. The Iraqi forces have practiced summary executions of civilians, including women and children, torture, hostage-taking, beheading, lynching, burning captives to death, and desecrating corpses. And they have celebrated the atrocities in photographs and videos posted online. The Iraqi forces also have engaged in looting and wanton destruction of property, as well as shelling and bombing residential areas and hospitals. Moreover, Iraqi and Kurdish authorities sometimes have prevented families fleeing the fighting from reaching safer parts of the country. Iraqi forces also have established "death zones" around Baghdad.
Furthermore, these abuses by Iraqi forces are often preceded by coalition airstrikes. Not only are the airstrikes effectively providing cover for what appears to be ethnic cleansing in areas re-captured from ISIS, but they are also directly causing civilian deaths that may amount to war crimes. According to the Red Cross, the airstrikes are compounding the humanitarian consequences of the conflict. The war against Iraq caused the deaths of 4,474 US military men and women and 2,300 military contractors, a total of 6,774. The war against Iraq from 2003 until 2008 was also harmful to US taxpayers: it cost the US $757.8 billion and brought no benefits to the US economy--except to the US war profiteers made the weapons and who allegedly rebuilt Iraq but in reality squandered billions.
George W. Bush continued the onslaught against Sunnis. He attacked Afghanistan to retaliate for Osama Bin Laden's 9/11 attack on the US World Trade Center and Pentagon. When George W. Bush demanded that Afghanistan turn Osama Bin Laden over to the US, Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban government, refused since Bin Laden was a benefactor of Afghanistan. But Mullah Omar did offer to turn Bin Laden over to a third neutral country for a trial by an Islamic court, an offer that conforms to international law, which states that "everyone shall be entitled to a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal established by law." (UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Art. 14.1) In spite of that offer, George W. Bush declared falsely that the Taliban were "harboring terrorists" and attacked Afghanistan, beginning the longest war the US has fought. When the Taliban were the government, they stopped the rape of women, the rape of boys by pedophiles, and the growing of opium poppies. Currently, under the US supported government, Afghanistan is the leading grower of opium poppies in the world, the rape of women is rampant, and the US Marines are instructed to ignore the pedophile warlords' rape of boys and are court-marshaled or forced out of the Marines if they disobey and try to help the boy-victims. Not surprisingly, the Taliban, of the majority Pashtun tribe, still enjoy strong support in Afghanistan and US troops are occasionally killed by "friendly" Afghan soldiers. Isn't it time to give Afghanistan back to the Taliban and let them clean up the mess the US has created? 1457 US military men and women have died in the war, and the US taxpayers have spent $2.5 trillion attacking the Taliban since 2001. With this great expenditure of money and life, the US has created unconscionable chaos in Afghanistan and no benefit to the US.
In Pakistan, also, the US has attacked the Taliban and has given the Pakistani government $20.7 billion since 2001 to convince it to attack the Taliban, even though Pakistan was the Taliban's earliest supporter. The US now conducts drone strikes in Waziristan to kill Taliban, and also kills many civilians, thus assuring the Taliban of ever-new supporters. Isn't it time to leave the Taliban in Pakistan alone and use the money to improve conditions in the US?
In Egypt, the situation is also non-viable. Although the US did support the people's revolution to overthrow Mubarak, their dictator of thirty some years; and told the military, which the US financed, not to intervene to support Mubarak. Moreover, the US accepted Mohammed Morsi, the first elected president of Egypt, and a Muslim Brotherhood member. However, when Gen. Al Sisi joined the people on the left to overthrow Morsi, the US did not object to the military coup, although US law prohibits funding a military coup, nor has it influenced Sisi to stop persecuting, arresting and killing the Muslim Brotherhood people in Egypt. In fact, the US taxpayers give Egypt $1.5 billion a year, and have given significant amounts since 1979 after Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. Radical Islamists who oppose the military coup are taking power in the northern Sinai and elsewhere, and they have allied themselves with the Islamic State.
In Libya, the US supported the rebels seeking to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi because he did not fund their area adequately. The US however did not work with the groups to form a stable government, and now Libya is designated as almost a failed state because of the continued fighting there among various groups. The US spent $896 million to create the failed state.
In Syria, in which the large majority of Sunnis have been governed by the Assad family from a minority Shia group, the Alawites, the Sunnis revolted against Assad when he massacred 4500 Sunni farmers who demonstrated against the government's taking water from their farms to give to industry. Sunni soldiers in the army began defecting and shooting back at the army as it attacked the Sunni demonstrators. Thus began Syria's civil war, which has claimed 250,000 lives and displaced 12 million people from their homes. The civil war pits the Sunnis against the small minorities of Shias, Kurds, and Christians. Although the US formally supported the Sunni rebels, spending about $500 million training them, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon have supported Assad and kept him in power. The subsequent flood of Syrian refugees is destabilizing the EU countries.
Moreover, in Syria itself the Islamic State (ISIS or Daash) has seized many areas in the largely Sunni Muslim country. The Islamic State is made up of the persecuted secular and socialist Iraqi Baath Party military men who joined with fundamentalist Islamic Salafists to form the Islamic State that has seized many Sunni cities and villages from the Shia governments in Iraq and Syria. The US has spent $4.59 billion attacking the Islamic State, which is seeking to gain self-determination for the persecuted Sunni Muslims in Iraq and Syria. Although a few US and NATO backed Sunnis have fought with the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, only the Islamic State has made major gains against the Shia governments. Originally the Islamic State fought only against Assad and his supporters in Syria--the Alawites, the Kurds, including the Yazidis, and the Orthodox Christians. However, when other nations attacked the Islamic State, sometimes supporting the Yazidi Kurds, for example, then the Islamic State attacked citizens of those countries in retaliation for its people being killed: it attacked citizens of the US, France, and Russia, and it attacked the Kurds in Turkey. Turkey, however, remains fairly neutral about the Sunni Islamic State, and allegedly a number of Sunni Arab countries or their citizens support the it. Sunni fighters from around the world have traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight with the Islamic State to help the Sunnis gain self- determination and freedom from harsh Shia rule. US and NATO, however, are fighting the Islamic State because it retaliated when they first attacked it without good reason. Thus the US and NATO may join Russia, Iran and Hezbollah in fighting the Sunni Islamic State, which represents Sunni self-determination.
Thus in the Middle East, the US is fighting the Sunni Islamic State and illogically is trying to get other Sunni Arab countries to take the lead in fighting it. One might say that aggressive US policy in the Middle East has caused chaos in the region. Is that what the US desired to accomplish? No, but it certainly accords with Israeli policy of breaking up strong Arab countries and encouraging Muslim to fight Muslim, and US policy in the Middle East is largely but not entirely determined by Israel. However, the US is supporting its oil-supplying ally Saudi Arabia against the Shia rebels in Yemen. The rebels want the former president instead of the current Saudi-allied Sunni president. Saudi Arabia, however, has been committing war crimes against the Shia population, and the US is therefore implicated since it is militarily supporting Saudi Arabia.
The major cause of the current chaos in the Middle East, which is also affecting the EU because of the great number of Syrian refugees seeking asylum in Europe, is Israel's continuing harsh and illegal occupation of Palestine, for Israel and the US supporters of Israel are pleased that Muslims fight Muslims in the Middle East and that the US fights Muslims there, for when there is chaos, the Muslim nations do not think of attacking Israel nor of demanding an end of the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is very ironic that Israel is now governed by extremists similar in political views to those of Igdal Amir, the settler who assassinated Rabin. It is as though Amir's act guided Israel into its current path--the path of racism and violent oppression of a subject Palestinian population. And the US government continues to fund the occupation, for money is fungible and money given to a nation or organization for one purpose frees money that can be used for other purposes. Thus the US aid to Israel funds at $3.2-4.2 billion a year the illegal occupation that the US officially opposes and that contributes to the chaos in the Middle East. In fact, since 2001, the US has given Israel $49.5 billion.
Isn't it time for the US to cease to fund a brutal and illegal occupation and instead follow US law and cut aid to Israel because of Israel's extra-judicial killing of Palestinians? Isn't it time for justice to prevail and bring peace to the Middle East as well as relief to US taxpayers, who have spent $3,450,896,000,000 (over $3 trillion) on the Middle East since 2001 and who now have more national debt than has existed previously in world history? Don't those taxpayers need to invest billions not in war but to repair the crumbling US infrastructure, to improve the declining US educational system, and to provide health care, parental leave, food and housing for the poor, and cost of living increases in Social Security for the seniors, as well as to restore the disappearing middle class. Why should the US taxpayers suffer in order for the neo-cons to fight endless wars in the Middle East? Isn't it time for the US to convince Israel to make peace with Palestine and thus lead the way to peace throughout the Middle East?
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