Airwars is a nonprofit, watchdog organization that investigates harm to civilians during armed conflict. In its study on the Israel-Gaza war titled, Patterns of harm analysis, this organization concludes:
By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.
In a recent interview, President Joe Biden recounted his first visit with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the October 7 terror attack by Hamas. According to Biden:
“And I said, ‘Bibi, you can’t be carpet bombing these communities.’ And he said to me, ‘Well, you did it… you carpet bombed Berlin. You dropped a nuclear weapon. You killed thousands of innocent people because you had to in order to win a war.'”
The Fog of War is a documentary film about the life of Robert McNamara, who was the U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968. In 1945, McNamara served on the island of Guam under General Curtis LeMay, who directed the firebombing campaign against Japanese cities.
According to McNamara, in a “single night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo: men, women, and children.” A pilot who participated in the raid wrote, “We had created an inferno beyond the wildest imaginings of Dante.”
McNamara goes on to describe how LeMay’s massive firebombing campaign killed 50% to 90% of the people in 67 Japanese cities, including Yokohama, Toyama, Osaka and Nagoya.
General LeMay believed that, if the United States lost the war, he and those under his command would’ve been prosecuted as war criminals. McNamara agreed:
“I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”
Returning to the present day, at his confirmation hearing as Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth refused to say whether the U.S. should abide by the Geneva Convention or use torture.
And Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, questions whether there are any innocent Palestinian civilians.
In the words of political activist and author Noam Chomsky, “For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”
Terry Hansen
Milwaukee, Wisconsin