Children in the ruins of Mosul, June 14, 2017. (EU/ECHO/Peter Biro)
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies
Common Dreams
Americans have been shocked by the death and destruction of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, filling our screens with bombed buildings and dead bodies lying in the streets.
But the United States and its allies have waged war in country after country for decades, carving swathes of destruction through cities, towns and villages on a far greater scale than has so far disfigured Ukraine.
As we recently reported, the U.S. and its allies have dropped over 337,000 bombs and missiles, or 46 per day, on nine countries since 2001 alone. Senior U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency officers told Newsweek that the first 24 days of Russia’s bombing of Ukraine was less destructive than the first day of U.S. bombing in Iraq in 2003.
The U.S.-led campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria bombarded those countries with over 120,000 bombs and missiles, 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 in Iraq was the largest city that the United States and its allies reduced to rubble in that campaign, with a pre-assault population of 1.5 million. 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, which had a population of 300,000, was gutted even more. A U.N. assessment mission reported that 70 percent 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.
Rand Corporation Review
RAND Corporation headquarters in Santa Monica, California, in 2015. (Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
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 titled, “Understanding Civilian Harm in Raqqa and Its Implications For Future Conflicts,” which has now been made public.
Even as the world recoils from the shocking violence in Ukraine, the premise of the Rand Corp study is that U.S. forces will continue to wage wars that involve devastating bombardments of cities and populated areas, and that they must therefore try to understand how they can do so without killing quite so many civilians.
The study runs over 100 pages, but it never comes to grips with the central problem, which is the inevitably devastating and deadly impacts of firing explosive weapons into inhabited urban areas like Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria, Mariupol in Ukraine, Sanaa in Yemen or Gaza in Palestine.
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 they in fact comprised only 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 percent to 25 percent of U.S. “precision” weapons missed their targets.
Much of Raqqa suffered extensive damage during the battle of June–October 2017. (Mahmoud Bali, Voice of America, Wikimedia Commons)
Even when they do hit their target, these weapons do not perform like space weapons in a video game. The most commonly used bombs in the U.S. arsenal are 500-lb. bombs, with an explosive charge of 89 kilos of Tritonal. According to U.N. safety data, the blast alone from that explosive charge is 100 percent lethal up to a radius of 10 meters, and will break every window within 100 meters.
That is just the blast effect. Deaths and horrific injuries are also caused by collapsing buildings and flying shrapnel and debris — concrete, metal, glass, wood etc.
A strike is considered accurate if it lands within a “circular error probable,” usually 10 meters around the object being targeted. So, in an urban area, if you take into account the “circular error probable,” the blast radius, flying debris and collapsing buildings, even a strike assessed as “accurate” is very likely to kill and injure civilians.
Howard Zinn’s Challenge
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. He wrote,
“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.’
Does that difference exonerate you morally? The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent. To say otherwise (as either side might) is to give one moral superiority over the other, and thus serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time.”
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 they hear that civilians are killed by U.S. forces or American weapons in Iraq, Syria, Yemen or Gaza.
Key Media Role
The 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.
A street of Mariupol on March 12, during Russian siege of the city. (Mvs.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
While Western leaders are demanding that Russia be held accountable for war crimes, they have raised no such clamor to prosecute U.S. officials. Yet during the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, both the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the U.N. Assistance Mission to Iraq (UNAMI) 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.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and human rights groups documented systematic abuse and torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, including cases in which U.S. troops tortured prisoners to death.
Although torture was approved by U.S. officials all the way up to the White House, no officer above the rank of major was ever held accountable for a torture death in Afghanistan or Iraq. The harshest punishment handed down for torturing a prisoner to death was a five-month jail sentence, although that is a capital offense under the U.S. War Crimes Act.
Torture photo that emerged from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. (U.S. government)
In a 2007 human rights report that described widespread killing of civilians by U.S. occupation forces, the U.N. Assistance Mission to Iraq wrote,
“Customary international humanitarian law demands that, as much as possible, military objectives must not be located within areas densely populated by civilians. The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian character of an area.”
The report demanded
“that all credible allegations of unlawful killings be thoroughly, promptly and impartially investigated, and appropriate action taken against military personnel found to have used excessive or indiscriminate force.”
Instead of investigating, the U.S. has actively covered up its war crimes. 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 70. 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.
So it is ironic to hear President Joe Biden call for 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 Rand study repeatedly claims that U.S. forces have “a deeply ingrained commitment to the law of war.” But the destruction of Mosul, Raqqa and other cities and the history of U.S. disdain for the U.N. Charter, the Geneva Conventions and international courts tell a very different story.
Screenshot from WikiLeaks “Collateral Murder” video.
[Watch WikiLeaks “Collateral Murder” Video on YouTube.]
We agree with the Rand report’s conclusion that, “DoD’s weak institutional learning for civilian harm issues meant that past lessons went unheeded, increasing the risks to civilians in Raqqa.”
However, we take issue with the study’s failure to recognize that many of the glaring contradictions it documents are consequences of the fundamentally criminal nature of this entire operation, under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the existing laws of war.
Rejecting the Premise
We reject the whole premise of this study, that U.S. forces should continue to conduct urban bombardments that inevitably kill thousands of civilians, and must therefore learn from this experience so that they will kill and maim fewer civilians the next time they destroy a city like Raqqa or Mosul.
The ugly truth behind these U.S. massacres is that the impunity senior U.S. military and civilian officials have enjoyed for past war crimes encouraged them to believe 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 to account 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 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, the crime of aggression, because, as the judges declared at Nuremberg, it “contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
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 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.”
Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace and the author of numerous books including Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection and Inside Iran: the Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
This article is from Common Dreams.
The views expressed are solely those of the authors and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
The article goes into a Rand Corp study commissioned to them by the Pentagon on how the US can confront the policies on civilian casualties. Which through the narration of the writers, before, during, and after, especially in regards to Medea Benjamin, my conjecture of recent history of her of possibly having been tamed by some entity/s, seemingly nothing came to mind that falsely creating wars might be the best antidote to stopping civilian deaths. Every one of them within the 20th century onwards can be arguably generated and manufactured for beneficial reasons within ill-gotten means.
thank you Medea Benjamin for once again speaking truth to those in power. You are a voice, among a tiny minority, who are advocating for peace, while “telling it like it is.” Our U.S. government at present, and in the past, continues to ignore (and suppress) any mention of our war crimes. As Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents: (pardon my paraphrasing him). . . those who project evil on to others, outside themselves, have the (temporary) satisfaction that their enlightened ways are superior . . . Eros (love/life) / Thanatos (aggression/death within one’s psyche (super-ego) and in society (super-ego pressure to conform)…I am grateful, again and again, to Medea Benjamin. Thanks ConsortiumNews offering her a chance to speak out, when the present media outlets will not allow even discussion about this present conflict. The U.S. having left Afghanistan (starvation happening now) went on to yet another war! “All we are asking is give peace a chance”
While both of you are excellent journalists often revealing American self-righteousness
and the “blood on its hands;” you made a serious moral error when you equate
“the Russian invasion of Ukraine” (not calling it what it is the U.S./NATO proxy war
in Ukraine), and state with moral probity that, “Americans are rightfully horrified at
civilian deaths from Russian bombardments.”
There would be no civilian deaths, no incursion into Ukraine and no Russian need
to secure the Crimea and Donbass regions if the American war machine wasn’t busy
provoking the Russian nation-state, to expand its own American imperial hegemony.
You both missed the moral issue: that there is a right and wrong in this conflict, and
the United States and NATO are in the wrong, and Russia is in the right. And this is not
like you two.
I have been thinking this for weeks! I noted that our MSM goes on and on about each bombing and each dead person in a way that they never have for any of our own killing sprees, and I wondered if any reporter or op-ed notable would ever make a comment about that. I’m not surprised that Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies were the ones. I’m just surprised that it took so long. In any event – Thank you! for finally pointing out the extremely obvious – that the US (my country – and yours) has been responsible for much MUCH more needless death and destruction than Russia, and that in every case we were lied to over and over; and now we are being lied to about this war. Much of what is being reported as Russian acts, is actually acts by Ukraine’s Nazis, but since our MSM doesn’t want us to know that there are a lot of very nasty Nazis in charge of things in Ukraine, they don’t mention it at all.
I’m grateful that there is at least one web site where truth can be found – and I hope that more people will find it!
Once again, another excellent ‘contextual’ article on CN. What’s especially helpful and truthful about articles like this is that it exposes the massive disproportionately of the MSM coverage, where they cover the casualties of this-week’s ‘enemies’ actions with headline “breaking-news’ near-hysteria style, with repeated coverage, while coverage of casualties from US-backed actions (including Ukraine) is MUCH rarer, more muted with neutral or apologetic terminology, in-spite of the fact that they’re often MUCH WORSE, by huge orders of magnitude, and the never-mentioned fact that in a putative democratic republic we live-in, WE have some measure of responsibility and could greatly reduce or eliminate virtually all of the US-related carnage by NOT voting for domestic war-mongers. But of-course in a profit-driven environment, pandering is essential and ‘truth’ is only an occasional tactic, not an overall strategy/principle.
Lord Biden wants the culpable punished for the civilian dead in Ukraine? In that case, I suggest that he turn himself in to the International Court of Justice. After all, none of the recent fighting would have happened if not for the instigation of the Maidan coup by the administration he shared with Obama, later by the unending attacks on the Russian population in the Donbas by the Azov Battalion and other Ukrainian Nazi groups during the Trump years, and most assuredly by the complete rejection of Russia’s quite detailed diplomatic attempt to achieve security assurances for every country in Europe, especially those chronically threatened by Nato aggression during his majesty’s own administration with Kamala Harris.
Under every phase of this conflict since the Maidan, Washington has been incessantly insisting that this war be fought. They might as well have released a pop record and titled it, “All we are saying is just give war a chance.” Truly, they would allow nothing else with every posture they took traveling down this road. And since Congress facilitated all of this violence every step of the way (by sins of both commission–the insane contribution of arms and military training to Ukraine–and omission–evading its responsibility as the sole entity empowered by the constitution to officially create a war via declaration), I submit that all the major leaders and most of the rank and file of both political parties also turn themselves in to the system of international justice for trial and punishment. Except for Tulsi Gabbard, they ALL facilitated this outrage. None ever lifted a finger to try to stop it. Moreover, if the German people held collective guilt for the war crimes committed on their own turf and ordered by their own leaders during WWII, think how much more guilty the American people must be for allowing an equivalent travesty to be perpetrated in its name half-way around the planet, ravaging multiple societies, cultures and nations. War never “comes” to America. America always actively seeks it out and will go to the ends of the earth to create it! Mass murder is psychopathy, NOT legitimate national foreign policy!
And not a single sanction…not a one.
Not a single sanction, and no chastisement (let alone demonization) of the principal players. HW Bush lay in state
after a long retirement (during which he flitted around the world with his buddy Bill Clinton). Dubya Bush enjoys
life on his ranch while painting portraits of Iraq War veterans (but never of the Iraq victims). And lots of the perps
(Victoria Nuland in particular) are still in power and quietly steering world events behind the scenes . . .
The military/industrial complex of the US is not amenable to either reason or constitutional law. To suggest otherwise will bring down upon you the combined wrath of five-star generals and corporate warlords and the shareholders they serve. I call it “gold-plated Puritanism.” It is the official state religion. Instead of acting in fear of an angry God and serving His purposes to no active end, it is itself an angry god whose purposes will be served without question by all. There’s a reason why the Caesars of America are called “POTUS.” They give their citizens stale bread and spectacle while busily building shrines to themselves in the acquired mansions that prove their worth to the state religion. This god’s pointed finger strikes with lightning anywhere on earth it chooses, and makes money for the priests who serve it by doing so. Like all religions, it’s really quite simple: either worship or else remain nonexistent for all eternity.
If people aren’t blind, they could see in Mariupol that the buildings are all intact. That means that they hadn’t been any aerial bombardment by the Russian forces. To understand that, it’s enough to compare the pictures of Raqqa and Mariupol. Furthermore, the residents of Mariupol say it were the Ukrainian forces that fired at them, which, naturally, isn’t reported by the mainstream media. Surprisingly, the American public has never been “horrified” by the violence perpetrated in Donbass for 8 years by the Ukrainian forces. Such selective sensibility is no doubt commendable.
Very well said.
The US refusal to accept jurisdiction of the ICC proves its intent to commit and deny war crimes.
The US refusal to engage in diplomacy to avoid terrorism and its use of human shields proves its malicious intent.
The US attacks upon socialist democracies and obstacles to zionist imperialism prove that it is not a democracy.
The US government is a gang operation run by bribes through political parties, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Its unregulated economy elevates its lowest scammers as tribal tyrants of its fake political system.
Excellent overview. It’s sickening to see the rank hypocrisy on display in the Congress and in the Media over alleged war crimes in Ukraine (never by the Ukrainian army or police). Instead, endless virtue-signaling.
There’s really no point in comparing US (and Israel and Saudi Arabia) atrocities to Russia’s, this is simply war propaganda (even though we officially NOT at war). Biden, as VP is at least as guilty as Putin for war crimes during the Obama administration (Manning’s release of the Granai Massacre evidence jumps to mind). Also weapons dealers fueling conflicts are war criminals of the worst kind.
As Scott Ritter and Colonel Douglas MacGregor have noted, Russia’s approach (so far) has been much more humane than the typical “shock and awe” American approach where all bridges, water and electrical supply stations are immediately destroyed. The Russians have accepted higher casualties to spare civilians (many ethnic Russian Ukrainians, who they claim to be protecting and their hope for a future buffer from NATO armies on their borders, in particular are spared), even allowing civilian corridors to flee surrounded cities (it is risible to even imagine Americans doing that). They also have spared most infrastructure (there are even rumors that both Ukrainians and Russians collaborated to guard nuclear facilities). Conversely, the Ukrainians have proudly made a point of supplying their civilians with small arms and Molotov cocktails, which converts them from civilians to combatants– acceptable war targets.
Mariupol, a majority ethnic Russian port city was “captured” and made the regional HQ of the Azov Battalion immediately after the Maidan Coup in 2014. It was one of the most important targets of de-NAZIfication by the Russians, an important FACT ignored by Western State-controlled Media. While Russia’s military efforts are centered on East and South Ukraine (so far), there is a good chance that Western Ukraine (including Galicia, a “NAZI” stronghold, and possibly even Kiev, as symbolic Ukrainian Political Power Center), will receive a brief “shock and awe”-style attack for demonstration purposes, after the ethnic Russian part of Ukraine is captured.
The US’s contrived “rules based order” is the very antithesis of “international law,” a bizzaro version of international law which should, but notably does not, uphold “due process” and “all equal before the law.” In the US’s “rules based order,” America makes the rules and gives the orders while immunizing itself from any criminal consequences. More accurately, this should be known as the “‘hypocrisy is us’ rules based order.” The fact that other Western nations knowingly go along with charade makes them especially despicable. Together with the US, they are fatally undermining the public’s confidence in democracy in order to serve short-term, selfish interests.
Americans have been shocked by the death and destruction of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, filling our screens with bombed buildings and dead bodies lying in the streets.
No, I don’t they have been shocked…most of them don’t even know where Ukraine is. The American way…brute force.
Whilst this is indeed an indictment of the US government’s long-standing abuses of the so-called rules of war, we must be aware that war itself is an innately criminal act against the working class. There is no way to conduct war without killing, without destroying bodies, without creating havoc in a society. It is not only the manner in which the USA, Russia, the UK, Saudi Arabia et al carry out their capitalist-imperialist wars but the fact that they have the impunity and arrogance to go to war in the first place. We need to work to end war, not just to make them slightly nicer.
Where is antiwar left in this country or in Europe? It disappeared from MSM it was smeared as Putin stooges and censored by warmongering corporate social media committing supreme war crime of promoting, advocating, encouraging and supporting war while stifling peace efforts in UNSC and elsewhere ? Where are they Medea?
May be they are ashamed previously supporting a “honorable”Nobel Peace Prize winner who ordered killings of US citizen, started several wars and ended none while moved world closer to nuclear Armageddon while torpedoing Minsk agreements and arming Ukrainian Nazis via proxies of Germany, Canada and UK. Where are they ?
May be they foolishly bought Russia Gate nonsense, believed that Assad, Putin or Maduro are monsters and hence suspended reasoning faculties desperate to get rid of some dangerous clown with orange toupee only to admire and support another dangerous clown in Kiev who want to destroy his nation. Where are they?
May be they suddenly forgot evil for Nazism, evil of ethnic cleansing by means of genocide that was a foundation of Nazi ideology now tolerated even supported by supposedly enlightened west (and sadly also supported by too many on the left the only political force that historically opposed and actively fought against evil of fascism) implying that in fighting greater evil, whatever it is, visible or invisible, one must forget history of Nuremberg laws and Holocaust , Nuremberg trials, Nuremberg code as supposedly inapplicable to extraordinary circumstances and look away from blatant violations of Geneva conventions of enemy of our enemy.
May be all those things no longer matter for hopelessly divided, conflicted, self emasculated political left as it was politically corrupted and defanged, depolitized and effectively removed from political spectrum in last decades, in period of rampant globalization and capital concentration, when it was needed most.
Now ironically the only populist choice, in their genuine anti corporatism stand inherently peace loving working people have, is still tolerated right wing nationalism even fascism that always is corporate funded and always leads to war.
Where are those peace loving people who understand that global war of capital against people is being waged domestically and internationally. This is war or rather quarrel between immortal oligarchic demigods of globalization for which we all ordinary people are being forced to pay by enslavement, division and self annihilation via means of war based on induced hatred of other human beings.
As we hear today from delusional commander-in chief via Orwellian MSM news reports we have been just bombarded by evil Putin with his new weapons NATO code names: HEE 5D12 (hugely expensive eggs $5 per dozen) as well as hypersonic SGP 8DPG (Skyrocketing gas prices $8 per Gallon)
However it sounds ridiculous it is real, this is the real war all of us must be fighting against global monopolistic corporate demigods of war, of pauperization, community, family destructing social de cohesion of socioeconomic warfare against people we are subjected to. It is the only war for equality, equity and egalitarianism in self governed self sustained society of caring and sharing that may bring true social peace. Other wars.. we can only lose.
That’s correct. And the deaths do not stop there. Surely, the very high number of American servicemen/women who were asked to unleash that amount of weaponry on an innocent population that are committing suicide is a tell tale sign of the anguish and despair they can’t escape from those atrocities.
Here’s looking at you Madcow. You get $40,000 an hour to talk about American politics. The military is your left ball. And you can’t get ANY of this on the air to your thousands of adoring fans. For shame. All of us have a lot to answer for, but you Rachel Geobbels have more than most.
Yes, MSNBC buys a lot of co-opting for the ~ $9,000,000 /year they pay Maddow…