Americans have been rightfully shocked by the death and destruction caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the United States and its allies have waged war in country after country for decades, carving swathes of destruction on a far greater scale than has so far disfigured Ukraine.
As we recently reported, the United States and its allies have dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles, or forty-six per day, on nine countries since 2001. Senior U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency officers told Newsweek that the first twenty-four days of Russia’s bombing of Ukraine was less destructive than the first day of U.S. bombing in Iraq in 2003.
Western corporate media play a key role by showing us corpses in Ukraine and the wails of their loved ones, but shielding us from equally disturbing images of people killed by U.S. or allied forces.
The U.S.-led campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, has bombarded those countries with more than 120,000 bombs and missiles since August 2014, the heaviest bombing anywhere in decades. U.S. military officers told Amnesty International that the U.S. assault on Raqqa in Syria was also the heaviest artillery bombardment since the Vietnam War.
Mosul, Iraq, with a pre-assault population of 1.5 million, was the largest city that the United States and its allies attacked, reducing it to rubble in 2017. About 138,000 houses were damaged or destroyed by bombing and artillery, and an Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report counted at least 40,000 civilians killed.
Raqqa, Syria, which had a population of 300,000, was gutted even more. A United Nations assessment mission reported that 70 to 80 percent of buildings were destroyed or damaged. Syrian and Kurdish forces in Raqqa reported counting 4,118 civilian bodies. Many more deaths remain uncounted in the rubble of Mosul and Raqqa. Without comprehensive mortality surveys, we may never know what fraction of the actual death toll these numbers represent.
Wikimedia Commons
The ruins of the a U.S. bombing in Syria.
The Pentagon promised to review its policies on civilian casualties in the wake of these massacres and commissioned the Rand Corporation to conduct a study, which has now been made public.
Even as the world recoils from the shocking violence in Ukraine, the premise of the Rand Corporation study is that U.S. forces will continue to wage wars that involve devastating bombardments of cities and populated areas. But now, we are told, they must try to do so without killing quite so many civilians.
While more than 100 pages long, the study never comes to grips with the central problem: the devastating and deadly impacts of firing explosive weapons into inhabited urban areas.
The development of “precision weapons” has demonstrably failed to prevent these massacres. The United States unveiled its new “smart bombs” during the first Gulf War in 1991. But these bombs only comprised 7 percent of the 88,000 tons of bombs it dropped on Iraq, reducing “a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society” to “a pre-industrial age nation,” according to a U.N. survey.
Instead of publishing actual data on the accuracy of these weapons, the Pentagon has maintained a sophisticated propaganda campaign to convey the impression that they are 100 percent accurate and can strike a target like a house or apartment building without harming civilians in the surrounding area.
However, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Rob Hewson, the editor of an arms trade journal that reviews the performance of air-launched weapons, estimated that 20 to 25 percent of U.S. “precision” weapons missed their targets.
A strike is considered accurate if it lands within a “circular error probable,” usually ten meters around the object being targeted. So in an urban area, even a strike assessed as “accurate” is very likely to kill and injure civilians.
U.S. officials draw a moral distinction between this “unintentional” killing and the “deliberate” killing of civilians by terrorists. But the late historian Howard Zinn challenged this distinction in a letter to The New York Times in 2007, writing:
“These words are misleading because they assume an action is either ‘deliberate’ or ‘unintentional.’ There is something in between, for which the word is ‘inevitable.’ If you engage in an action, like aerial bombing, in which you cannot possibly distinguish between combatants and civilians (as a former Air Force bombardier, I will attest to that), the deaths of civilians are inevitable, even if not ‘intentional.’ ”
Americans are rightfully horrified when they see civilians killed by Russian bombardment in Ukraine, but they are generally not quite so horrified, and more likely to accept official justifications, when civilians are killed by U.S. or U.S.-armed forces in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, or Gaza. Western corporate media play a key role in this by showing us corpses in Ukraine and the wails of their loved ones, but shielding us from equally disturbing images of people killed by U.S. or allied forces.
While Western leaders are demanding that Russia be held accountable for war crimes, they have raised no such clamor to prosecute U.S. officials for similar acts. Yet during the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, both the International Committee of the Red Cross and the U.N. Assistance Mission to Iraq documented persistent and systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions by U.S. forces, including of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention that protects civilians from the impacts of war and military occupation.
Instead of investigating and prosecuting war crimes, the United States has, in many cases, actively covered them up. A tragic example is the 2019 massacre in the Syrian town of Baghuz, where a special U.S. military operations unit dropped massive bombs on a group of mainly women and children, killing about seventy. The military not only failed to acknowledge the botched attack but even bulldozed the blast site to cover it up. Only after a New York Times exposé years later did the military even admit that the strike took place.
President Joe Biden, ironically, has called for Russian President Vladimir Putin to face a war crimes trial, when the United States covers up its own crimes, fails to hold its own senior officials accountable for war crimes, and still rejects the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In 2020, former President Donald Trump went so far as to impose U.S. sanctions on the most senior ICC prosecutors for investigating U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan.
The ugly truth behind U.S. massacres is that senior U.S. military and civilian officials have enjoyed impunity for past war crimes, encouraging them to believe that they could get away with bombing cities in Iraq and Syria to rubble, inevitably killing tens of thousands of civilians.
They have so far been proven right, but U.S. contempt for international law and the failure of the global community to hold the United States accountable are destroying the very “rules-based order” of international law that U.S. and Western leaders claim to cherish.
As we call urgently for a ceasefire, for peace, and for accountability for Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, we should say “Never Again!” to the bombardment of cities and civilian areas, whether they are in Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Iran, or anywhere else, and whether the aggressor is Russia, the United States, Israel, or Saudi Arabia.
And we should never forget that the supreme war crime is war itself. It is easy to point fingers at others, but we will not stop war until we force our own leaders to live up to the principle spelled out by U.S. Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson:
“If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”