Two years ago, Azmat Khan published a breathtaking report of civilian airstrike casualties in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2018. To anyone actually willing to hear it, I’m sure the conclusion will come as an entirely sarcastic shock: We kill far more civilians than we ever admit — and we do it unapologetically. When Khan published the first half of her report, I put up a series of quotes which basically says everything I ever hope to say on the topic. One of those quotes, you will notice, is not like the others. Instead, it shows how the official (whitewashed) narrative which we are sold (by every single administration) and which we quickly buy (from every single administration) is simply a means of excusing ourselves for murder. (Or, as Günther Anders would have called it, it is “war by tele-murder.”)

Given the horrific recent events in Israel, and what will surely be a horrific response, it’s not surprising I found myself revisiting Khan’s work.

Here are a few quotes from the second half of Khan’s report:

It was a system that seemed to function almost by design to not only mask the true toll of American airstrikes but also legitimize their expanded use. […]

But they also have come to understand that on occasion, and with no warning, a bomb might pierce the sky, inexplicably targeting their homes, killing their families and neighbors in a terrifying instant.

And they knew that if this were to happen, it was unlikely anyone would ever tell them why. […]

This was not an error. According to U.S. rules of engagement, military planners can knowingly kill civilians, including children, if the anticipated casualty rate is not excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage of destroying the strike target. […]

“I am on fire now,” she said, her voice robbed of all its signature warmth. “Why did you kill them? They were innocent. They didn’t do anything.” Now she was weeping. “They were turned into just flesh. […]

“But they didn’t gain any advantage,” she said. “The only thing they did is they killed the children.”

Imagine for a minute that you leave your home on an errand and while you are gone a missile strikes your home, killing your entire family. Picture this happening exactly where you now live. You return from your errand to find that your house is now rubble and your family — your baby, your spouse, your siblings, your parents — are buried and burned inside it. And if that is not bad enough, try to imagine that you are never told who fired that missile or why they did it. You are never even told that anyone is sorry they did it. Maybe, just maybe, you will be told that someone did it because (they believed) your neighbors were involved in terrorist activities. Again, just pause, take a minute, and imagine this happening exactly where you live right now.

There is not one American that I have ever met, not one I have heard of or could dream of, who can even pretend to imagine putting up with that situation. It would be unfathomable. And yet we have systematically inflicted that fate on countless other innocent people around the globe.

And when I say “countless” I mean both in astonishingly high numbers and I also mean it quite literally: we have no idea how many because we are explicitly not counting them. That is the point behind Khan’s investigations. As she put it in her first report, “Not only was there no record of disciplinary action, or full investigations in roughly 9 of every 10 cases, but only a quarter included any further review, recommendations or lessons learned.” She adds, “Of the 1,311 assessments [obtained] from the Pentagon, in only one did investigators visit the site of a strike. In only two did they interview witnesses or survivors.”

Floating around the universe is a perfectly good adage about putting ourselves in other people’s shoes. It might simultaneously be the most needed and the most neglected. And for the absolute simplicity of its message, that neglect carries an immensity of destruction.

If you have not read Khan’s reports, you should do so. This is not one of those things that is “worth your time.” This is something that is, as an American citizen, absolutely morally reprehensible to remain unaware of.

I often think about a challenge from Neil Postman where he tells his reader to “ask yourself a series of questions”:

What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.

Postman was nothing in if not blunt about this subject. Here he is primarily concerned with what advances in communication technology, starting with telegraphy, did to change (and trivialize) the information we receive. This matters for a number of reasons, but one of the most critical is that long ago we reached a point where every single day, for 24 hours a day, we are “sent information which . . . [does] not permit the right of reply.”

Am I permitted the right of reply? That seems like a question we should all start asking ourselves more often. When politicians and pundits and “know-nothings” (to steal a category from Abraham Lincoln) start raving about wiping foreign enemies off the face of the earth, or about leveling entire regions filled with civilians, you can be sure they have not earned the right of reply.

Some have recently advised caution for Israel insofar as they might learn from the mistakes the United States made after 9/11. But I haven’t read any that go far enough with that caution. I’m not capable of categorically answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to everything the U.S. has done in the name of the “war on terror” in the last 20 years. But what I would at least ask of any American is to consider the possibility that, even after 9/11, we still did not have the right of reply that we gave. Did we have the right to defend ourselves? Absolutely. But the right to send troops to the other side of the globe and kill thousands of civilians in the name of that “self-defense”? Like it or not, that is what happened. And it’s what continues to happen, and what continues to be encouraged.

Put differently, it should not be a mental or moral stretch to ask, as Anne Applebaum asked (though for different reasons), “Could it be that the planes that hit New York and Washington did less damage to the nation than the cascade of bad decisions that followed?” I sometimes think that history could practically be defined as the record of people who have refused to learn this lesson, studied by the people who also refuse to learn it — and, of course, the cascade of suffering that follows. (I think often of this wonderful interview with Alice Herz-Sommer. “It goes up and down and up and down and up an down. In the whole, people don’t learn. People don’t learn.”)

This does not mean that Israel should not defend itself or that it should not attack Hamas. It does mean that they should not be excused for killing civilians, killing children, in the process. And we should not be excused for encouraging it, no matter how unknowingly we do so.

The title of the post I referenced above is “not for me.” The sentiment behind it — don’t kill children for my safety or my benefit — comes from the quote I used from Wendell Berry, in an essay titled “The Failure of War,” the end of which is worth quoting again:

Here is the other question that I have been leading toward, one that the predicament of modern warfare forces upon us: How many deaths of other people’s children by bombing or starvation are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly) at peace? To that question I answer: None. Please, no children. Don’t kill any children for my benefit.

If that is your answer too, then you must know that we have not come to rest, far from it. For surely we must feel ourselves swarmed about with more questions that are urgent, personal, and intimidating. But perhaps also we feel ourselves beginning to be free, facing at last in our own selves the greatest challenge ever laid before us, the most comprehensive vision of human progress, the best advice, and the least obeyed:

“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”

That is a right of reply that everyone has. It may ultimately be the only one we have.

Senator Lindsay Graham:

We’re in a religious war, here. I am with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place.

Not that Senator Graham has any credibility or integrity left to offer, but a statement like this could only be meaningful — meaningful in any way, which is to say nothing about it being ethical — if it was uttered so emphatically from inside Gaza.

As it stands, not only are statements like this entirely meaningless, they are meaninglessly destructive and violent. Graham, who preceded this remark by referring to Nazi Germany, proves himself incapable of thought. He is, along with anyone who echoes the same sentiment, capable only of missing the point. The Nazi Party was not evil because they committed genocide against the Jews, but because they committed genocide. Even more simply, they were evil because they murdered civilian men, women, and children.

That the Holocaust was primarily committed against the Jewish people is certainly, absolutely historically important. But that is not what made it evil. Hatred and mass murder made it evil. Any nation or people group which reflects that kind of hatred, who wages war irrespective of civilian casualties, who regularly kills kids along with their enemies, is guilty of that same evil.

To preach anything other than caution and care for the lives of civilians in Gaza is mindless, death-dealing bullshit.

Anne Applebaum

But like the equally outdated Pax Americana that accompanied the rules-based world order—the expectation that the U.S. plays some role in the resolution of every conflict—we might miss the Geneva Conventions when they are gone. Open brutality has again become celebrated in international conflicts, and a long time may pass before anything else replaces it.

Reading Billy Collins’s “The Trouble With Poetry” and thinking about how, as cliché as it sounds, the world is a realm of infinite possibilities. Not a place where “anything can happen,” but a place where both old and new things never stop happening.

Each one of us has an unnumbered and unnumberable amount of potential experiences — experiences both to have and to offer in the world. And those myriad experiences multiply exponentially with each encounter with another — exponential multiplicities which again and again multiply exponentially with each friendship. (And how much more so if we make those friendships with others who are not like us, who think and act and pray differently?)

This is what happens with one and then with two. And there are 8 billion of us, all bouncing our disparate and duplicate experiences off each other.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything in the world

and there is nothing left to do
but quitely close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

The delightful sarcasm of Collins is always thick in substance and light in expression!

Peggy Noonan:

Yet the whole thing is so . . . below the country. It’s so without heightened meaning. It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.

The killers weren’t serious people, they don’t have a serious purpose, they have no plan or platform. They are led by a great doofus, a cartoon villain with Elvis hair, a political nepo baby whose father was president of the Florida Senate, a guy whose way was paved. Tearing things down is his business model. At least the Marx Brothers made you laugh. […]

They have verve, they raise money, they know how to use social media and tickle the party’s id. But they can’t lead institutions because they don’t respect institutions because they’re not in the least conservative. They’re a bunch of crazy narcissists, and narcissists can’t create and sustain coalitions because that means other people exist.

Seamus Heaney:

[Poetry] does not intervene in the actual but by offering consciousness a chance to recognize its predicaments, foreknow its capacities and rehearse its comebacks in all kinds of venturesome ways, it does constitute a beneficent event, for poet and audience alike. It offers a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit, and yet I can see how such a function would be deemed insufficient by a political activist. For the activist, there is going to be no point in envisaging an order which is comprehensive of events but not in itself productive of new events. Engaged parties are not going to be grateful for a mere image — no matter how inventive or original — of the field of force of which they are a part. They will always want the redress of poetry to be an exercise of leverage on behalf of their point of view; they will require the entire weight of the thing to come down on their side of the scales.

So, if you are an English poet at the Front during World War I, the pressure will be on you to contribute to the war effort, preferably by dehumanizing the face of the enemy. If you are an Irish poet in the wake of the 1916 executions, the pressure will be to revile the tyranny of the executing power. If you are an American poet at the height of the Vietnam War, the official expectation will be for you to wave the flag rhetorically. In these cases, to see the German soldier as a friend and secret sharer, to see the British government as a body who might keep faith, to see the South-East Asian expedition as an imperial betrayal, to do any of these things is to add a complication where the general desire is for a simplification.

[…]

And in the activity of poetry too, there is a tendency to place a counter-reality in the scales — a reality which may be only imagined but which nevertheless has weight because it is imagined within the gravitational pull of the actual and can therefore hold its own and balance out against the historical situation. The redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.

Two quotes about MLK , from Vincent Lloyd:

While King famously proclaimed, in his final speech, that God had allowed him to go to the mountaintop and glimpse the promised land, Eig shows that in reality it was his wife Coretta who enabled and guided the great orator’s moral ascent. She was an activist before he was; she was outspoken on Vietnam before he was; she was forever giving him confidence when his spirits wavered. Plus, she was birthing and caring for four children and an extraordinarily busy household on a tight budget. (King donated all of his speaking fees to civil-rights work.) At the civil-rights movement’s height, Coretta traveled frequently to sing at rallies, always checking in to make sure her children made it to their extracurriculars. When King was called away from the founding meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Coretta filled in for him.

And:

We are tempted to imagine King as a moral saint, exceedingly earnest with a single-minded focus on improving the world. That is not who King was. Nor does it describe Christian saints. It is only from a secularist perspective that saintliness is measured by maximizing good actions at each moment in time. In the hagiographical tradition, Christian saints have good days and bad days. They curse God and they repent. Their virtues battle their vices. Their saintliness comes about because of their commitment to bringing the shape of their life into conformity with the life of Christ, not moment-by-moment but as a whole. And saints necessarily fail at this: a saint imitates Christ, but a saint is not Christ. Nonetheless, a saint provides inspiration for those who, similarly, wish to model their lives on perfect goodness.

Freddie deBoer:

Defined by our lists of oppressive -isms, given to endless complaints about everything that’s wrong with the world, we are far less able to define a positive vision of what exactly we’re fighting for and why the world we want is better than the alternative. Surely the right’s anti-politics is worse, but as we busily undermine faith, national identity, and all other ways human beings create meaning, we risk standing for nothing and thus losing everything.

I’ve been reading Jon Meacham’s Lincoln biography, And There Was Light, mostly in the evenings. Much of it has me asking, “Has the heart of any argument changed in this country, changed at all in the last two hundred years, at least?” Whether it’s the 1850s, the 1950s, or today — it all sounds so much the same.

Take this quote from Lincoln, in a letter to Joshua Speed in 1855:

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Or this summary from Meacham, of the buildup to war in the late 1850s:

In frustration and fear, the slave-owning interest caricatured their foes, affirmed their own virtue, and preached their own gospel. “The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders—they are atheists, socialists, communists . . . on the one side, and friends of order and regulated freedom on the other,” the Presbyterian clergyman James Henley Thornwell, a defender of slavery from South Carolina, said in a representative sermon, “The Rights and Duties of Masters,” in 1850. “In one word, the world is the battleground—Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake.” To Thornwell, slave owners were true Christians and adherents to the “ordinance of God.” To defend slavery, then, was to defend Christianity itself. When the issue was framed so starkly, compromise was impossible, for to compromise was to sin. Reason did not enter into it. Minds could not be changed, nor hearts altered.

Perhaps more than anything else, Lincoln spent his career arguing against a kind of destructive control — the kind of force that Simone Weil said can only crush or intoxicate. As Meacham summarizes it,

To blindly and repeatedly assert one’s own position, one’s own righteousness, and one’s own rectitude in the face of widely held opinion to the contrary was not democracy. It was an attempt at autocracy—a bid, as Lincoln said, to “rule or ruin in all events.”

That was Lincoln’s argument, seeking the 1860 Republican nomination, addressing a “learned, influential, and exacting” crowd in Manhattan, at the Great Hall of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? . . . This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly—done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with them.

No extremity in either political party, if even in the bases of each, has yet learned this lesson. “Rule or ruin in all events” could be an apt banner over much of today’s politics still.

It seems clear that great degrees of liberty and justice have, against all odds, won out over time. “Right makes might,” as Lincoln said at the end of that speech in Manhattan. That is, however, less a statement of inevitability than it is a call to faithfulness and to much patience. In any case, I don’t think that tolerance, by any serious definition, has ever been celebrated in this country. Not that I can say with any certainty where it has been truly celebrated. As Lincoln pointed out in the first quote above, it’s the pretense of it that so often flourishes.