The Pentagon’s 20-Year Killing Spree Has Always Treated Civilians as Expendable
At the Pentagon, meanwhile, the bloody-thirty feast of the war profiteers continues unabated.
Norman Solomon
December 20, 2021
Top U.S. officials want us to believe that the Pentagon carefully spares civilian lives while making war overseas. The notion is pleasant. And with high-tech killing far from home, the physical and psychological distances have made it even easier to believe recent claims that American warfare has become “humane.”
Such pretenses should be grimly laughable to anyone who has read high-quality journalism from eyewitness reporters like Anand Gopal and Nick Turse. For instance, Gopal’s article for The New Yorker in September, “The Other Afghan Women,” is an in-depth, devastating piece that exposes the slaughter and terror systematically inflicted on rural residents of Afghanistan by the U.S. Air Force.
Overall, military spending accounts for about half of the federal government’s total discretionary spending—while programs for helping instead of killing are on short rations for local, state and national government agencies.
Turse, an incisive author and managing editor at TomDispatch, wrote this fall: “Over the last 20 years, the United States has conducted more than 93,300 air strikes -- in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen—that killed between 22,679 and 48,308 civilians, according to figures recently released by Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. The total number of civilians who have died from direct violence in America’s wars since 9/11 tops out at 364,000 to 387,000, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/12/20/pentagons-20-year-killing-spree-has-always-treated-civilians-expendable
