Buildings destroyed, civilians killed, millions made refugees: mission accomplished
In Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, so-called collateral damage (a terrifying euphemism) isn’t a regrettable cost of destroying Hamas. It’s the very strategy and goal of Israel’s response.
Israel* has already killed five thousand Palestinian children, but that’s spun as the regrettable price of destroying Hamas. More than 11,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed already, and I’ve seen reports of 46 journalists and 190 doctors and nurses among the dead. Babies are dying in hospitals due to Israeli attacks on the same and disruptions in power and medical supplies.
International law doesn’t seem to matter. What matters to Israel is expelling the Palestinians; to paraphrase what Tacitus once said of the Romans, Israel is creating a wasteland of rubble in Gaza and calling it “peace.”
They create a wasteland of rubble and call it “peace”
Israel’s goal is simple: the creation of new facts on the ground. Gaza is being rendered uninhabitable for Palestinians even as Hamas is being hunted down and decimated.
Israel recognizes Hamas is both an idea and the people who represent that idea; far easier it is to kill people than the idea, but if you can’t kill the idea, at least kill Hamas members and push Palestinians out of Gaza, mainly by bombing, blockade, and further invasion.
The end game is a land grab. Israel wants to annex Gaza after it’s made Palestinian-free. Palestinians will be pushed into the Sinai Peninsula or elsewhere. Collateral damage doesn’t matter because it’s inseparable from the strategy. In some sense, it is the strategy.
Since the US government has defined no “red lines” for Israel while promising a $14 billion gift in deadly arms, I’m not surprised Israel’s government assumes it can do whatever it wants. After all, President Biden has pledged his total and unconditional support to the right-wing rulers of Israel.
6000 bombs in six days. That was the initial sign that Israel had far more ambitious goals in sight than neutralizing Hamas. Gaza may yet cease to exist, its territory absorbed into Israel, the Palestinians forced out into tent cities or worse. With unconditional US support, Israel may well prevail in this ethnic cleansing, but at immense cost not only to Palestinians but to Jews as well.
*I realize many brave Israelis have resisted and condemned the actions of their right-wing government. I wish to acknowledge their clarity of purpose and moral courage.
As a retired Air Force officer and military historian, I’m familiar with all kinds of euphemisms about killing, e.g. “precision bombing” and “collateral damage.” Just as it’s easier to kill at a distance, it’s easier to kill when we use words that provide distance from the act. Words that facilitate detachment. Words that befuddle and confuse our minds.
When writing honestly about war, it’s best to use bullet-hits-the-bone words: atrocity, murder, war crime, slaughter. Rape, pillage, burn are “old” words associated with war, and these words often most fittingly describe war and its likely effects and outcomes.
Powerful, blunt, and accurate words should remind us that war is inherently horrible and also profoundly anti-democratic. War is consistent with authoritarianism and lack of freedom, yet Americans nowadays seem to think war (and words about war) is conducive to democracy and freedom, e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine.
We used to know better. Military people are fond of the saying, “freedom isn’t free,” but neither is war. Indeed, war and its various manifestations are costing this nation more than a trillion dollars a year while weakening democracy and our constitutional freedoms. And that is a very high price to pay to keep the factories of the merchants of death humming and the generals and admirals happy.
Grisly images like this one (of a dead Iraqi soldier) were censored in America. Language is censored as well.
Fortunately, there’s a new guide and website available that alerts us to the importance of language and war. The website is wordsaboutwar.org, from which you can read and download suggestions on how best to use words to convey the horrors and costs of war to people everywhere. I urge you to visit the site and peruse the guide. (Full disclosure: I was an advisor to this effort, which was ably led by David Vine.)
Here’s a sample of a few comments I made in passing to the group:
A war on terror is truly a war of terror because war itself is terrible.
Friendly fire is being killed by one’s own, often due to the chaos of war, the sheer waste of it all, exacerbated by incompetence. “Fire” is always unfriendly.
Very few troops are “heroes,” and indeed most aren’t, because heroes are rare in all walks of life.
The word “casualty” is too benign. I much prefer killed and wounded: the victims of war.
What are “enemy noncombatants”? They are usually innocent civilians.
With respect to the “War on Terror” that the U.S. has prosecuted for 22 years and counting, I noted that:
We (the U.S.) manifested a Manichean world view; as George W. Bush said soon after 9/11, you’re either for America (and all its violence) or you’re for the terrorists (with their violence). If you wanted a non-violent approach, you were dismissed as naive or “for them.” It was good versus evil, thus the infamous “axis of evil” the U.S. allegedly faced.
This is, of course, a problem with all discourse related to war. Subtlety and nuance are thrown out the window. Language is greatly simplified. The U.S. is “doubleplusgood” and the enemy must be the opposite while simultaneously being dehumanized. We kill “cowardly” enemy troops or terrorists (by drone they’re “bugsplat”) yet our “heroic” troops “fall” in battle and are revered as “the fallen.” Violent combat is disguised as “kinetic action” in U.S. military communiques.
In my view, the dishonesty of this language captures the dishonesty of America’s wars.
General William T. Sherman (U.S. Civil War) famously said that “War is all hell.” Sherman knew the hellish and harsh realities of war; he knew, as he wrote, that “war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Too many people today are using and manipulating words to refine war. They’re camouflaging war’s harshest realities. Writers should write plainly and honestly, as General Sherman did, to capture war’s hellish nature. By choosing honest words, we also help to create a better future in which the threat of war recedes precisely because we recognize more clearly its horrific nature and terrifying costs.
Other high-ranking military officers, like General Smedley Butler, for example, also wrote plainly about war. As Butler famously said, war is a racket, and he described himself as a gangster for capitalism. Now that was plain speaking about war!
The chief intent of speaking and writing plainly about war is to discourage war and save lives. Some might see it as patriotic—saving the lives of U.S. troops by helping to prevent bloody awful wars—but more broadly the goal is humanistic—to save the lives of all those on the receiving end of bullets and bombs.
Interestingly, U.S. troops at lower levels are generally blunt about what war is about. Talk to sergeants at the front and you’ll hear visceral truths, probably enhanced by choice expletives. I’ve heard U.S. Marines shout “Kill!” at graduation ceremonies. Killing, after all, is what war enables. Mass killing leads to atrocities like My Lai in Vietnam. This fact should never be sugarcoated.
Few people, however, truly want to confront war’s horrors. Gazing upon the face of war is profoundly disturbing, which is why we’re encouraged to look away. And so the face of war is airbrushed and camouflaged with euphemisms and buried under a blizzard of acronyms.
If we are to end war and prevent atrocity, we must seek to name things accurately while calling up mental images (no matter how disturbing) appropriate to the horrors of war. The guide at wordsaboutwar.org is an important step in that direction.
Update: I went on Podcast by George today to talk about all this:
Extensive U.S. bombing overseas kills lots of innocent people: who knew?
So this blinding statement of the obvious popped up in my email today from the New York Times:
A five-year Times investigationfound that the U.S. air wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan led to thousands of civilian deaths.
Hidden Pentagon records show a pattern of failures in U.S. airstrikes — a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.
The military’s own confidential assessments of over 1,300 reports of civilian casualties since 2014, obtained by The Times, lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children. None of these failures resulted in a finding of wrongdoing. We are making these Pentagon records public.
Finally, at the end of 2021, the Times is willing to speak up against America’s murderous regimen of bombing overseas. I wrote about this myself at this site in 2016 and 2017, and I’m hardly the only person to have pointed this out. At TomDispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt has been reporting for years and years on wedding parties being wiped out by U.S. bombing missions based on “faulty intelligence.” The mainstream media have largely played down these atrocities until now, when the war in Afghanistan is finally (mostly) over, at least for the U.S.
As I wrote in 2013 for TomDispatch.com, airpower is neither cheap nor surgical nor decisive. Indeed, because it provides an illusion of effectiveness, and because America dominates the “high ground” of the air, all of this “precision” bombing serves to keep America in wars for far longer than is tenable on tactical grounds. Imagine how long the Iraq and Afghan wars would have lasted if America didn’t dominate the air, if the U.S. military had to rely exclusively on ground troops, and thus had suffered much higher casualties in ground combat. My guess is that these wars would have ended earlier, but “progress” could always be faked with all those statistics of bombs dropped and alleged “high value targets” eliminated.
I suppose it’s good to see the “liberal” New York Times cover this issue of murderous bombing after 20 years of the global war on terror. The question remains: why did it take them two decades to cover this issue in depth?
Presidents become “presidential” when they bomb other countries. Meanwhile, Julian Assange rots in prison. Maybe he needs to bomb a few countries?
Update (12/21/21)
More notes on U.S. bombing and the Times report, courtesy of ReThink Round Up:
“Not a single file [from the military about the bombings] includes a finding of wrongdoing. An effort within the military to find lessons learned to prevent future civilian harm was suppressed. An analyst who captures strike imagery even told the Times that superior officers would often “tell the cameras to look somewhere else” because “they knew if they’d just hit a bad target.”
Responding to the report, a Pentagon spokesperson acknowledged that preventing civilian deaths is not just a “moral imperative” but a strategic issue because civilian casualties can fuel recruiting for extremist groups. [New York Times/ Azmat Khan]”
*****
Again, to state the obvious here:
1. There’s no accountability in the system. Murderous mistakes are covered up and no one is held responsible (“tell the cameras to look somewhere else”).
2. The bombing attacks were counterproductive. Guess what? Killing innocents creates more “terrorists.” Who knew?
Murderous inaccuracy, making matters worse, with no accountability: WTF? So much for America’s “awesome” military, as Andrew Bacevich writes about today at TomDispatch.com.
Most drone-strike images show technology, e.g. drones, missiles, or targeting crosshairs with foreigners appearing as ant-like creatures in infrared cameras. Rarely do we see damage, and, rarer still, the shredded and blasted bodies of innocents
W.J. Astore
When do humans count in drone warfare, and when do they not?
I thought of this question as I read Christopher Fuller’s “See It/Shoot It: The Secret History of the CIA’s Lethal Drone Program.” Revealingly, U.S. pilots and crews who operate these drones, such as Predators and Reapers, reject the terminology of “drones” and UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) or UAS (unmanned aerial system). They prefer the term RPA, or remotely piloted aircraft. They want to be known as the essential humans in the loop, they want to stand out, they want to count for something, and in fact the Department of Defense at various times has suggested a new “drone medal” to recognize their service.
Whereas American pilots want to stand up and be recognized as the pilots of their “remote aircraft,” the Pentagon doesn’t want to think about the targets of these drones as human beings. Civilian casualties are grouped and shrouded under the term “collateral damage,” a nasty euphemism that combines a banking term (collateral) with the concept of damage that hints at reversibility and repair. But collateral damage really means innocents blown up and blasted by missiles. Shouldn’t these humans count?
Another term that Fuller discusses is “neutralization.” The U.S. counterterrorism goal is to “neutralize” opponents, meaning, as Fuller notes, “killing, rendition, and imprisonment.” Again, with a word like neutralization, we’re not encouraged to think of those being attacked as humans. We’re just “neutralizing” a threat, right? A terrorist, not a fellow human being. Right?
Interestingly, the whole idea of terrorism is something they do, not us. Why? Because the U.S. defines terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.” Note that word: subnational. By this definition, nations do not commit terrorism, which is handy for the U.S., which presents its drone attacks as defensive or proactive or preemptive.
Finally, the Pentagon and the CIA are at pains to assert they take the utmost care in reducing “collateral damage” in their “neutralization” efforts. Yet as Fuller notes in his book (page 214), “the U.S. government did not always know the identity or affiliations of those killed in its drone strikes.”
So who counts, and who doesn’t? Whose humanity is to be celebrated (pilots of RPAs?), and whose humanity (innocent victims) is to be suppressed?
Addendum: On how the U.S. seriously undercounts civilian deaths in its air strikes, see this article.
Just another civilian casualty incident? Original caption: Mourners carry the coffin of a child at the funeral procession for those killed in an airstrike on a bus in Yemen. Photograph: Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images
W.J. Astore
Last night, as I was watching the PBS News Hour, I snapped to attention as I heard a new euphemism for murdered innocents from bombing: “civilian casualty incidents.”
A PBS reporter used it, unthinkingly I believe, repeating bureaucratic jargon about all the innocents in Yemen smashed to bits or shredded by “dumb” bombs, cluster munitions, and even “smart” bombs that are really only as smart as the pilots launching them (and the often imperfect “actionable intelligence” gathered to sanction them).
The overall tone of the PBS report was reassuring. General Mattis appeared to comfort Americans that the Saudis are doing better with bombing accuracy, and that America’s role in helping the Saudis is limited to aerial refueling and intelligence gathering about what not to hit. Of course, the Saudis can’t bomb without fuel, so the U.S. could easily stop aerial massacres if we wanted to, but the Saudis are our allies and they buy weapons in massive quantities from us, so forget about any real criticism here.
I’ve written about Orwellian euphemisms for murderous death before: “collateral damage” is often the go-to term for aerial attacks gone murderously wrong. To repeat myself: George Orwell famously noted the political uses of language and the insidiousness of euphemisms. Words about war matter. Dishonest words contribute to dishonest wars. They lead to death, dismemberment, and devastation. That’s not “collateral” — nor is it merely a “civilian casualty incident” — that’s a defining and terrifying reality.
What if innocent Americans were being killed? Would they be classified and covered as regrettable if inevitable “civilian casualty incidents”?
What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground — would she be simply “collateral damage”?
W.J. Astore
The term “collateral damage” is a terrifying euphemism. The U.S. military didn’t invent it, but it sure has embraced it. The dictionary definition is “unintended civilian casualties or damage in a war,” which is about as anodyne a description as one could imagine.
In common usage, “collateral” is something we put up to secure a loan, so it often has a positive meaning. (No worries: I have lots of collateral.) “Damage” is a neutral-sounding word: the book was damaged in shipping. Storm damage. And we also speak of “damages” when we sue someone. In sum, “collateral” and “damage” are impersonal and imprecise words.
Let’s think personally and precisely. What is “collateral damage” in the “war on terror”? Bodies blown to bits. Blood everywhere. Skin burnt and melted by Willy Peter (White Phosphorous). Eviscerated children. Rotting corpses.
The military has a colorful saying: “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” Maybe we need a new saying: “Don’t murder my child and tell me it’s collateral damage.”
In his latest mini-essay introduction at TomDispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt notes how “collateral damage” has become a central and defining reality of America’s endless war on terror. The main article (Burning Raqqa) by Laura Gottesdiener details U.S.-led air strikes in Syria that go horribly wrong:
By the beginning of May, the Abdos’ neighborhood was under almost daily bombardment by the U.S.-led coalition forces. On May 3rd, coalition warplanes reportedly launched up to 30 airstrikes across Tabqa’s first, second, and third neighborhoods, striking homes and a fruit market and reportedly killing at least six civilians. The following night, another round of coalition airstrikes battered the first and third neighborhoods, reportedly killing at least seven civilians, including women and children. Separate airstrikes that same night near the city’s center reportedly killed another six to 12 civilians.
On May 7th, multiple bombs reportedly dropped by the U.S.-led coalition struck the building where Muhammed and Salam had taken shelter, killing them and their 12-year-old grandson. Three days later, the Syrian Democratic Forces announced that they had fully seized control of Tabqa and the dam. The militia and its U.S. advisers quickly set their sights east to the upcoming offensive in Raqqa.
But for the Abdo family, the tragedy continued. Muhammed and Salam’s bodies were buried beneath the collapsed apartment building. It took 15 days before Wassim’s brother Rashid could secure the heavy machinery required to extract them.
“Nobody could approach the corpses because of the disfigurement that had occurred and the smell emanating from them as a result of being left under the rubble for such a long period of time in the hot weather,” Wassim told me in a recent interview.
That same day their bodies were finally recovered. On May 23rd, his parents and nephew were buried in the Tabqa cemetery.
Specifics such as these are generally not reported by the U.S. military or in the U.S. media. Instead, we get headlines about militants or terrorists being killed, along with snippets about collateral damage, “regrettable” but framed as unavoidable.
Tell that to the families of the dead.
George Orwell famously noted the political uses of language and the insidiousness of euphemisms. As I wrote a year ago, words about war matter. Dishonest words contribute to dishonest wars. They lead to death, dismemberment, and devastation. That’s not “collateral” — that’s a defining and terrifying reality.
I teach a course on the Holocaust, so I’ve had ample opportunity to confront the use of euphemisms by the Nazis to cloak their murderous intent. The most infamous euphemism was “the final solution to the Jewish question,” which of course refers to the mass murder–the extermination–of all Jews everywhere. But there were many other euphemisms, to include “evacuation” and “resettlement” for the shipment of Jews to death camps in Poland.
Such coded language was intended in part to deceive the Jews, but it was also an exercise in self-deception (or self-desensitization, perhaps). The Nazis, in other words, deflected some of the horrors of their murderous activities by thinking of them in banal terms. The banality of language helped to make possible the “banality of evil” exercised by Nazi functionaries like Adolf Eichmann. He was just “removing” and “resettling” Jews, or so he may have preferred to think (when he thought at all).
Comparisons between Nazism and other systems are always difficult and often tendentious. Godwin’s Law suggests that Internet debates often degenerate to name-calling in which Nazi analogies, carelessly applied, are trotted out in an attempt to triumph over one’s opponent. It’s a good law to keep in mind.
Yet it’s remarkable to me the proliferation of euphemisms in U.S. military and political discourse. “Enhanced interrogation techniques” for torture. “Extraordinary rendition” for kidnapping. “Collateral damage” for the death of innocents (often children) in combat operations. Guantanamo Bay as a “detention camp” for “detainees” rather than a prison (or concentration) camp for prisoners. Even the “global war on terror” was rebranded in 2009 as “overseas contingency operation,” as if one can deny the deadly realities of war simply by changing the name.
George Orwell warned us about the political uses of language in his famous essay from 1946. We ignore his warning at our peril. Cloaking violent, even murderous actions in banal language may make a few functionaries sleep easier at night. But they should make the rest of us profoundly uncomfortable.
Banal language facilitates and helps to actuate the banality of evil. As Vaclav Havel noted in his essay “A Word About Words” (1989), “The point is that all important events in the real world–whether admirable or monstrous–always have their prologue in the realm of words.”
The more we invoke euphemisms to cloak harsh realities, the more we ensure that harshness will endure; indeed, that it will grow harsher, more pernicious. Even worse: that it will become banal, even “normal.”
Torture is torture. Kidnapping is kidnapping. Dead infants are dead infants. War is war. And extermination is extermination.
Employing euphemisms is not just an exercise in banality of language; it’s often a betrayal of humanity.
A recent article at NBC News is unusual in that it highlights the awfulness of war even when the killing is “surgical” and done by drones. Brandon Bryant, a former drone operator for the Air Force, suffers from PTSD and feels that killing by drone caused him to lose respect for life, that he became like a sociopath. Especially upsetting to Bryant was when his commander gave him a “diploma” (most likely an award citation) that stated he had contributed to the deaths of 1,626 people.
Drone strikes are basically extra-judicial death sentences from the sky. For Americans, they seem unproblematic because we’re not exposed to them and because our government tells us only “militants” and evil-doers are being killed.
But the temptations of drone warfare are considerable, as I wrote in an article for Truthout in August 2012. Here’s what I said back then:
What happens when we decouple war’s terrible nature from its intoxicating force? What happens when one side can kill with impunity in complete safety? General Robert E. Lee’s words suggest that a nation that decouples war from its terrors will likely grow too fond of it. The temptation to use deadly force will no longer be restrained by knowledge of the horrors unleashed by the same.
Such thoughts darken the reality of America’s growing fondness for drone warfare. Ourland-based drone pilots patrol the skies of foreign lands like Afghanistan in complete safety. They unleash appropriately named Hellfire missiles to smite our enemies. The pilots see a video feed of the carnage they inflict; the American people see and experience nothing. In rare cases when ordinary Americans see drone footage on television, what they witness is something akin to a “Call of Duty” video game combined with a snuff film. War porn, if you will.
Many Americans seem happy that we can smite foreign “militants” at no risk to ourselves. They trust that our military (and the CIA) rarely misidentifies a terrorist, and that “collateral damage,” that mind-numbing euphemism that obscures the reality of innocent men, women, and children obliterated by missiles, is the regrettable price of keeping America safe.
But the reality is that sloppy intelligence and the fog and friction of war combine to make seemingly antiseptic drone warfare much like all other forms of war: bloody, wasteful, and terrible. Terrible, that is, for those on the receiving end of American firepower. Not terrible for us.
There is a real danger that today’s drone warfare has become the equivalent to the Dark Side of the Force as described by Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back: a quicker, easier, more seductive form of terror. It is indeed seductive to deploy the technological equivalent of Darth Vader’s throat-constricting powers at a safe distance. We may even applaud ourselves for our prowess while doing so. We tell ourselves that we are killing only the bad people, and that the few innocents caught in the crosshairs constitute an accidental but nonetheless unavoidable price of keeping America safe.
Bracing Views 