The US military has a long history of neglecting civilians, starting in Nicaragua when Marines harmed civilians 100 years ago. The United States has never counted the dead and wounded properly, The Intercept reports.
In 2021, the US military opened fire on a man travelling through the Afghan capital of Kabul. Believing him to be a terrorist, they launched a missile, killing him and hitting nine other civilians. The same mistake led to a drone strike in Somalia, in 2018, resulting in the deaths of at least three, and possibly five, people.
The US has repeatedly labelled or wrongly labelled ordinary people as enemies without investigating allegations of harm to civilians. They have justified casualties by their inevitability, failing to prevent their recurrence or hold troops accountable.
This long-standing practice is at odds with the US government’s public campaigns presenting its wars as benign, air campaigns as overriding, and the deaths of innocents as a “tragic” anomaly. Such campaigns have largely served to conceal the true toll of the American way of warfare.
During World War II, the British bombing of Dresden, Germany, caused a firestorm, and the British wave was followed by hundreds of American bombers. Some 25,000 to 35,000 people burned in flames.
Faced with accusations of “terrorist bombing” after the attack, the head of the US Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay claimed that war “must be destructive and to a certain extent inhuman and ruthless.” Some 600,000 German civilians were killed in air raids during the war.
In Japan, the United States attacked 67 cities, killing more than 600,000 civilians and leaving 8.5 million homeless. The mass death and destruction made Secretary of War Henry Stimson concerned that the United States would “get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities.”
Yet Stimson signed off on an atomic strike on the city of Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people, mostly civilians, and another strike on Nagasaki, which killed about 70,000 people. The United States has never compensated the victims’ families or survivors of the attacks.
In Cambodia, US attacks killed about 150,000 civilians between 1969 and 1973. The United States also bombarded Laos with more than 2 million tonnes of munitions, making it the most heavily bombed country in history.
Key elements of the devastating US aerial warfare resound in the present as well. Israeli officials have repeatedly justified attacks on Gaza in recent weeks, citing the methods used by the United States and its allies against Germany and other nations during World War II.
The United Nations has stated that “there is already clear evidence that war crimes may have been committed” by the Israeli army and Hamas militants. Israel has also taken part in the use of “free-fire zones” in the Gaza Strip. The US used such zones to open wide areas of South Vietnam to virtually unrestricted attacks that left countless civilians dead.
In the first 20 years of the war on terrorism, the US has carried out more than 91,000 airstrikes in seven major conflict zones – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen – and killed up to 48,308 civilians, according to a 2021 analysis by Airwars, a UK-based airstrike monitoring organisation.
A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents found most have gone uninvestigated. Annie Shiel, CIVIC’s US advocacy director, stated:
It is unacceptable that in this strike and so many others, civilian survivors and families continue to struggle to get any kind of acknowledgment from the United States.
