July 10, 2017
This is the state of war in the United States in July
2017.
The US bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria is now the
heaviest since the bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1960s-70s,
with 84,000 bombs and
missiles dropped between 2014 and the end of May 2017
That is nearly triple the 29,200 bombs and
missiles dropped on Iraq in the “Shock and Awe” campaign of
2003.
The Obama administration escalated the bombing
campaign last October, as the U.S.-Iraqi assault on Mosul began, dropping
12,290 bombs and missiles between October and the end of January when President
Obama left office. The Trump administration has further escalated the
campaign, dropping another 14,965 bombs and missiles since February
1st. May saw the heaviest bombing yet, with 4,374 bombs and missiles
dropped.
The U.K.-based Airwars.org monitoring
group has compiled reports of between 12,000 and
18,000 civilians killed by nearly three years of U.S.-led
bombing in Iraq and Syria. These
reports can only be the tip of the iceberg, and the true
number of civilians killed could well be more than 100,000, based on typical ratios between
reported deaths and actual deaths in previous war-zones.
As the U.S. and its allies closed in on Mosul in Iraq
and Raqqa in Syria, and as U.S. forces now occupy eight military bases in
Syria, Islamic State and its allies have struck back in
Manchester and London; occupied Marawi,
a city of 200,000 in the Philippines; and exploded a huge truck bomb inside
the fortifications of the “Green Zone” in Kabul, Afghanistan.
What began in 2001 as a misdirected use of
military force to punish a group of formerly U.S.-backed
jihadis in Afghanistan for the crimes of September 11th has escalated
into a global asymmetric war. Every country destroyed or destabilized by
U.S. military action is now a breeding ground for terrorism. It would be
foolish to believe that this cannot get much, much worse, as long as both sides
continue to justify their own escalations of violence as responses to the
violence of their enemies, instead of trying to deescalate the now global
violence and chaos.
There are once again 10,000 US troops in
Afghanistan, up from 8,500 in April, with reports that four thousand more may
be deployed soon. Hundreds of
thousands of Afghans have been killed in 15 years of
war, but the Taliban now control more of the country than
at any time since the U.S. invasion in 2001.
The US is giving vital support to the
Saudi-led war in Yemen, supporting a blockade of
Yemeni ports and providing intelligence and in-air refueling to the Saudi and
allied warplanes that have been bombing Yemen since 2015. UN reports
of 10,000 civilians
killed are surely only a fraction of the true numbers killed,
and thousands more have died from disease and hunger.
Now Yemen is facing a humanitarian
crisis and a raging cholera
epidemic due to lack of clean water or medicine caused by the
bombing and the blockade. The UN is warning that millions of Yemenis could die
of famine and disease. A Senate bill to
restrict some U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia was defeated by 53 votes (48
Republicans and 5 Democrats) to 47 in June.
Closer to home, U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM)
recently hosted a conference with
the presidents of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in Miami. This
signaled a further militarization of the U.S. war on drugs in Central America
and efforts to limit immigration from those countries, even as a report
by State and Justice
Department inspector generals held State Department and Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents responsible for the killing of four
innocent civilians (one man, two women and a 14-year-old boy) by machine-gun
fire from a State Department helicopter near Ahuas in Honduras in 2012.
The inspector generals’ report found that DEA
officials repeatedly lied to Congress about this incident, pretending the
Hondurans were killed in a shoot-out with drug traffickers, raising serious
doubts about accountability for escalating U.S. paramilitary operations in
Central America.
Right wing opposition protests in Venezuela have
turned more violent, with 99 people killed since
April, as the protests have failed to mobilize enough popular support to topple
the leftist government of Nicolas Maduro. The U.S. supports the
opposition and has led diplomatic efforts to force the
government to resign, so there is a danger that this could escalate into a
US-backed civil war.
Meanwhile in Colombia, right wing death
squads are once again operating in areas where the
FARC has disarmed, killing and threatening people to drive them off land
coveted by wealthy landowners.
Looming over our increasingly war-torn world are
renewed U.S. threats of military action against North Korea and Iran, both of
which have more robust defenses than any that U.S. forces have encountered
since the American War in Vietnam. Rising tensions with
Russia and China risk even greater, even existential dangers,
as symbolized by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, whose
hands now stand at 2-1/2 minutes
to midnight.
Although our post-9/11 wars have probably killed at least 2 million people in
the countries we have attacked, occupied or destabilized, U.S. forces have
suffered historically low numbers of casualties in these operations.
There is a real danger that this has given U.S. political and military leaders,
and to some extent the American public, a false sense of the scale of U.S.
casualties and other serious consequences we should look forward to as our
leaders escalate our current wars, issue new threats against Iran and
North Korea, and stoke rising tensions with Russia and China.
This is the state of war in the United States in July
2017.