Facing little opposition from either Republicans
or Democrats, the U.S. military is almost never
held accountable for killing civilians during
airstrikes.
By Stephen Zunes
November 28,
202:
Information Clearing House
-- "Common
Dreams "As The
New York Times reported on
November 13, 2021, a U.S. attack jet unleashed its
payload on the civilian encampment. “As the smoke
cleared,” the article noted, “a few people stumbled
away in search of cover. Then, a jet tracking them
dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing
most of the survivors.” At least seventy civilians
died.
A Pentagon legal officer
reported internally that this was a possible war
crime, but, “at nearly every step, the military made
moves that concealed the catastrophic strike,”
according to the Times. The death toll was
downplayed, and reports were delayed, sanitized, and
classified.
The U.S-led coalition forces
bulldozed the blast site. The office of the Defense
Department’s independent inspector general launched
an investigation, but the report was effectively
censored. An evaluator in that office lost his job
when he complained about the cover-up.
In response to an inquiry earlier
this month from the Times, the U.S. Central
Command acknowledged the strikes for the first time
and admitted that eighty people were killed.
Nevertheless, it insisted the airstrikes were
justified and that “no formal war crime
notification, criminal investigation, or
disciplinary action was warranted.”
The Baghuz massacre was one the
last of the 35,000
airstrikes the United States launched over a
five-year period in Syria and Iraq that ostensibly
targeted ISIS. According to Pentagon rules, U.S.
forces could call in airstrikes without checking to
see if civilians were threatened, so long as it was
deemed necessary for self-defense.
What constitutes “self-defense”
for the Pentagon, however, is not just when its
forces are under fire. The authorization of deadly
force can also be granted if enemy troops are simply
believed to be displaying “hostile intent,” which
the Pentagon defined so broadly in the case of U.S-backed
ground operations in Syria that it constituted 80
percent of all U.S. airstrikes.
The New York Times article
also noted that
the Pentagon failed to keep track of the numerous
reports of civilian casualties and usually failed to
follow through with investigations. In the rare
cases where an investigation was ordered, it was
later squashed. An email shared with the Senate
Armed Services Committee revealed that the only time
an investigation was allowed to move forward was
when there was “potential for high media attention,
[or] concern with outcry from local
community/government, concern sensitive images may
get out.”
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So far, the Democratic-led
Senate Armed Services Committee has refused to open
an investigation into the Baghuz attack or any other
possible war crimes by U.S. forces in the war
against ISIS.
New technologies have made
bombing far more accurate than in World War II, the
Korean War, or the Vietnam War. During those wars,
the United States regularly engaged in
carpet-bombing of major urban areas—at the cost of
hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. However,
since the launch of “the war on terror,” both major
political parties have gone to some length to
justify the killing of civilians in the name of
counterterrorism.
For example, Congress has
passed a series of resolutions defending Israel’s
attacks on civilian areas in the Gaza
Strip, the West
Bank, and Lebanon,
which have attempted to exonerate the U.S.-backed
Israeli armed forces for thousands of civilian
casualties.
Often, these resolutions have
defended the Israeli attacks on civilians by
claiming Arab militia groups were using “human
shields.” This is despite the fact that, while using
civilians against their will to deter attacks on an
adversary’s troops or military hardware is considered a
war crime, it does not give license to bomb them any
more than a criminal holding hostages gives police
the right to shoot them all.
When investigations by Human
Rights Watch, Amnesty
International, the United
Nations Human Rights Council, the U.S.
Army War College, and others failed to find a
single documented case of any civilian deaths caused
by either Hamas or Hezbollah using human shields
while fighting Israeli forces, Congress decided to
redefine it.
A 2009 resolution, drawn
up by House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and
passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority,
expanded the definition of the use of human shields
to include any members of a designated “terrorist
group” within a civilian population. By this
definition, a Hamas official living in a high-rise
apartment building in Gaza would make the entire
structure a legitimate military target. In other
words, when being in the proximity of a “terrorist”
is enough to classify a civilian as a human shield,
an entire city can become a free-fire zone.
Years earlier, I predicted that
this kind of defense for Israeli war crimes would
likely be used as a rationale for “massive U.S.
airstrikes on Mosul, Raqqa, and other Islamic
State-controlled cities, regardless of civilian
casualties.”
And this is indeed what
happened. There were virtually no expressions of
concern raised in Congress when, in 2017, the United
States launched heavy attacks against Syrian and
Iraqi cities held by ISIS (which really did use
civilians as human shields).
An investigation by Amnesty
International revealed that
1,600 civilians died in the U.S.-led bombing
campaign in Raqqa, largely destroying the Syrian
city. There has been no challenge to the accuracy of
the report, which has been called the “most
comprehensive investigation into civilian deaths in
a modern conflict,” yet it was largely ignored in
the mainstream U.S. media.
There was only a little more
coverage of the U.S.-led bombing of Mosul earlier
that year, when U.S. planes hit thousands of
targets, turning much of that ancient city into
rubble and resulting
in the deaths of at least 3,000 civilians. A
2019 investigation by Human Rights Watch determined that
approximately 7,000 civilians had been killed in the
previous five years in Iraq and Syria in airstrikes
by the U.S. and its allies.
With virtually no negative
reaction in Washington, D.C., or coverage in the
mainstream media, there should be no surprise that
the Pentagon thought they could get away with the
2019 massacre in Baghuz. There appears to be a sense
that, given the horror of ISIS, the killing of large
numbers of civilians may be necessary to ensure
their defeat, so it’s important to keep such
tragedies quiet.
The problem, however, goes well
beyond ISIS. Even when it involves another extremist
militia (and even if a U.S. attack on civilians does
get in the news), the U.S. government has little
reason to worry. For example, after its belated
acknowledgment that a drone missile attack in Kabul
this past August had targeted a car driven by an
Afghan aid worker, killing him and nine others,
including seven children, the Pentagon insisted there
was no misconduct or negligence.
The implication is that there
would, therefore, be no changes in procedures or
personnel, and that the Pentagon would not take
steps to prevent such tragedies from happening
again.
And there appear to be few
political costs. Not only have leading Republicans defended killing
civilians in the name of fighting terrorism, but
many Democratic members of Congress who have
defended Israeli bombings of civilian targets in
Gaza have been repeatedly
endorsed as “bold progressives” and “peace
leaders,” sending the message that the killing of
civilians in the name of “self-defense against
terrorists” is not considered a problem even within
the Democratic left.
Meanwhile, the Biden
Administration continues to provide arms, training,
and maintenance to Saudi and Emirati forces that
have killed tens of thousands of civilians through
airstrikes in Yemen. A bipartisan majority in
Congress has reiterated that the billions of
dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded military aid to
Israel remain “unconditional,”
despite the hundreds of civilians killed during last
spring’s bombardment
of crowded urban neighborhoods in Gaza, again
under the rationale of self-defense against
terrorists.
Maybe it’s finally time to
question what exactly constitutes terrorism.
Stephen Zunes is a
Professor of Politics and International Studies
at the University of San Francisco, where he
serves as coordinator of the program in Middle
Eastern Studies. Recognized as one the country’s
leading scholars of U.S. Middle East policy and
of strategic nonviolent action, Professor Zunes
serves as a senior policy analyst for the
Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute
for Policy Studies, an associate editor of Peace
Review, a contributing editor of Tikkun, and
co-chair of the academic advisory committee for
the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.
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