America’s Wars on Civilians: Examples that Keep on Killing

As the number of dead civilians in Gaza approaches 20,000, 16 or so times the number of Israelis killed by Hamas’s brutal initial attack, even the Biden administration is growing uncomfortable with the carnage. President Joe Biden recently criticized Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing,” which his aides unconvincingly tried to walk back.Yet the president’s unexpected discovery of a conscience had no effect, least of all on the Israelis. Having long enjoyed essentially unconditional U.S. support irrespective of the human cost, they responded, Et tu! Reported the New York Times: “In public statements and private diplomatic conversations, [Israeli] officials have cited past Western military actions in urban areas dating from World War II to the post‑9/​11 wars against terrorism.”To which the administration had no good response. The president’s words look little more than a calculated sop to angry progressives. Explained the Times, “President Biden and his aides have been careful not to even hint in public that Israel could be violating any laws of war. And the State Department continues to approve sales of weapons to Israel while refraining from making any assessments of the legality of Israel’s actions.”In practice, Biden and those around him care little about other peoples’ lives. Washington has long been full of officials convinced that they stand taller and saw further into the future than others, are entitled to use America’s fine military to promote their hubristic ends, and needn’t concern themselves about the price paid by others. Some policymakers don’t even try to hide their feelings, such as Arkansas’s Sen. Tom Cotton, who grotesquely justified the destruction in Gaza by endorsing America’s World War II firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo. Most officials cry crocodile tears when politically advantageous—over, say, Russia’s depredations in Ukraine—while ignoring human slaughter when inconvenient, which is often.Indeed, over the last two decades, American administrations routinely postured as guardians of life and liberty abroad while waging murderous wars and promoting those by allied states. For instance, Washington spread death across rural Afghanistan, home to 70 percent of that nation’s population, for two decades. The U.S. underwrote civil wars in Libya and Syria, despite the lack of any threat posed by those countries to America. The mendacious Iraq invasion drowned the Middle East in blood. Equally outrageous has been Washington’s craven embrace of the authoritarian Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, helping the royal regime kill tens or hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians.Despite this odious record, members of the infamous blob, as America’s foreign policy elite is called, worry that untoward concern for civilians might constrain future military actions. For instance, Samantha Power, an outspoken advocate of “humanitarian” war‐​making, complained that Iraq made Americans too hesitant to intervene militarily: “I think there is too much of, ‘Oh, look, this is what intervention has wrought’…one has to be careful about overdrawing lessons.” Similarly, the American Enterprise Institute’s Hal Brands fears “the ‘no more Iraqs’ mindset,” since “a stubborn resistance to Middle Eastern wars” might lead to “delayed intervention.” The journalist Natalia Antonova goes even further, denouncing the “defeatism in the words and actions” resulting from the Iraq war that caused Americans to oppose new foreign crusades. Why let a few hundred thousand needless deaths halt plans for another wonderful war?Obviously, calculating the cost of the post‑9/​11 wars is difficult. And many contributed to the tsunami of financial waste and human horror. However, Washington cannot escape responsibility. After retaliating against al‐​Qaeda and its host, Afghanistan’s Taliban, for the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration refused to negotiate the group’s surrender. Three successive administrations then waged war to bring centralized Western‐​style democracy to villages and valleys across that tragic land.Afghan civilians suffered terribly. The interpreter Baktash Ahadi explained, “U.S. forces turned villages into battlegrounds, pulverizing mud homes and destroying livelihoods. One could almost hear the Taliban laughing as any sympathy for the West evaporated in bursts of gunfire.” The human cost was devastating. Journalist Anand Gopal reported on the experience of an Afghan woman named Shakira: “Entire branches of Shakira’s family, from the uncles who used to tell her stories to the cousins who played with her in the caves, vanished. In all, she lost sixteen family members. … [Other families] lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War.” After two decades of U.S. military effort, the Afghan government was unable to survive more than a couple weeks on its own.A hawkish clique imagined reordering the Middle East by installing in Iraq a puppet regime headed by a paid CIA operative who had no domestic constituency and turned to the Iranians. The U.S. invasion left internal chaos and triggered a bloody sectarian conflict that ravaged minority religious communities and spawned a second act with the rise of the Islamic State. American forces are still stationed in Iraq, where they are the frequent target of Iranian‐​backed militias too powerful for the government to disband.In Libya, the Obama administration misled other U.N. Security Council members to win approval for a regime‐​change operation disguised as humanitarian intervention. Muammar Gaddafi, though a dictator, fell short of the worst excesses ascribed to him. He had engaged in no civilian massacres and, contra allied claims, had promised to protect, not harm, civilians in Benghazi. The consequences of allied intervention were deadly and continue today. Two competing governments emerged, as conflict drew in multiple outside actors, ebbing and flowing for years.