Don't Forget the Victims of Our Wars

We have an obligation to hold our government accountable when it wreaks havoc in other parts of the world.

Rozina Ali reports on some of the civilian casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes in Yemen:

Hassan’s brothers were already there, digging through the rubble, searching for the remains of a family. “They were scattered and torn into pieces,” he said. Rescuers recovered mangled bodies. Among them were two faces Hassan recognized well: the five-year-old boy, Hamad, and a three-year-old girl, Dareen, who was rushed to a hospital in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital. Hamad was dead.

He “was roasted,” Hassan recalled, adding quietly that it was a “horrifying” sight. He later sent me photos of Dareen that were circulating on social media; she was attached to a breathing tube, her body covered in gauze and her face marbled with burn marks. In the debris, locals found remnants of Tomahawk missiles, which Airwars, a British nonprofit organization that tracks civilian harm in conflict zones, confirmed were the munitions used in the strike.

The U.S. is illegally bombing Yemen because it will not rein in the Israeli government’s war and genocide in Gaza. Our military is blowing up and incinerating Yemeni civilians, including children, when it could demand and insist on a ceasefire in Gaza instead. The U.S. is likely committing war crimes in a campaign that has never been debated or voted on in Congress. Our government is resorting to military action that will almost certainly cause more evils than it prevents. This is shameful and indefensible. Americans should demand an immediate end to the bombing.

A ceasefire in Gaza would have much greater success in ending attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. We know this because it has already happened for a short period of time. During the brief ceasefire at the start of the year, there were no more attacks on commercial shipping. It was only after the U.S. resumed bombing Yemen and Israel resumed bombing Gaza that the attacks started up again. The administration already had the result it claims to want, and the president threw it away so that he could look “tougher” than Biden.

According to Ali’s report, these are some of the results of that reckless decision:

Eventually, Hassan told me, rescuers who dug through the rubble counted fifteen dead, all women and children. Among them were Risala, age thirteen; Saleh, age nine; Abdullah, age six; Nazam, age six; Abdulkader, age five; Hadi, age three; and Motlak, a newborn baby. The baby’s mother was also killed.

There are many innocent Yemenis that are dead today when they should be alive, but the president made an arbitrary and illegal decision that killed them. This should be front and center in the coverage and discussion of the bombing campaign, but it has received relatively little attention. Senators have been outraged about the hypothetical danger that U.S. pilots might have been in because of the administration’s security lapses, but they seem to be unaware of the actual deaths of the innocents that those pilots killed.

Americans often never hear about the civilian casualties that our government kills in foreign wars, and when we do hear about them many tend to ignore the reports. When these deaths are acknowledged at all, it is almost always in passing. Our policymakers always find someone else to blame for their deaths. It is somehow never really our fault when the bombs that our forces drop on homes and streets predictably kill innocent people on the other side of the world. It is simply treated as the cost of empire and written off as such.

We know from the Signal group chat that the president’s national security team couldn’t care less about the harm done to civilians in this war. Charli Carpenter comments on this in a new column at World Politics Review:

The infamous cheering of the civilian deaths by senior defense officials with a series of emojis and patriotic slogans certainly suggested the opposite: Either they were demonstrations of what political scientist Bruce Cronin refers to as a reckless indifference to the likely presence of civilians in the building targeted; or worse, they reflected a willful intent to harm them as part of the campaign.

Consider that upon learning that the bombs had hit the building of the target’s girlfriend and that the building “had now collapsed,” Vance responded, “Excellent,” and the CIA director wrote, “A good start.” National security adviser Michael Waltz infamously cheered the killings with emojis of a fist, a U.S. flag and a flame. Little respect or concern was shown for the civilians who were at that moment burning alive, dying of shrapnel wounds from U.S. explosive devices, or crushed and suffocating under the rubble of the collapsed building.

Trump’s national security team is horrible, but they are able to get away with things like this because our political culture tolerates and even rewards this sort of behavior. As a nation, we have become so accustomed to our government’s practice of visiting death and destruction on other countries that these crimes barely register when they are reported. That has to stop. These attacks on other countries are carried out in our name, and the victims are killed with weapons paid for with our tax dollars. We have an obligation to hold our government accountable when it wreaks havoc in other parts of the world, and we have a duty to halt the senseless wars that our leaders wage without our consent.