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.