In response to the perceived threat of terror after the 9/11 terrorist attack the United States, and its allies, engaged in what it describes as the “War on Terror.” This “war” has been defined by military intervention on a massive scale, military occupation and nation building, and efforts to reshape the politics of the Middle East by brute force. The military activities that are part of this “war” range from actual wars – such as the Afghanistan War and the Iraq Wars- to Western involvement in third party military conflicts -such as American military aid and action in the Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni civil wars, to thousands of American drone military strikes in places like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. All of it adds up to being mass murder on a monstrous, unimaginable scale, as American soldiers have accidentally, purposefully, and indiscriminately murdered millions of innocent men, women, and children across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. It is a complete disaster that has increased the power of violent extremists and made the world less safe for everyone living in it.
The Wars
The two major wars, in Afghanistan (started 2001) and Iraq (started 2003), have been complete failures by even conservative estimates.
The roots of the Afghanistan War actually go back to the 1980s. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. In response the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began funneling money and weapons to anti-Soviet resistance fighters in Afghanistan through Pakistan. The USA gave over $3 billion dollars to the mujahideen so that they could be trained in effective guerilla military tactics that would break the Soviet military machine and the material -guns, rockets, military reconnaissance, etc.- to out that training to use. This was all part of what today is known as Operation Cyclone, an apt name for the hellish storm that has resulted form it. Among those who received such training was Osama bin Laden, then seen as something of a rich dilettante rather than the dedicated fighter than he is now known to have been. After the Soviets were forced to flee, American money continued to be given to a specific group of mujahideen, now know as the Taliban who went onto to take control of around 90% of the country before 2001. Osama bin Laden was even lauded a respectable figure in Western newspapers incapable of understanding that their nation’s influence in Afghanistan would be just as unwanted as the Soviet’s had been, and would meet with the same resistance.
You can see video of one of the multiple meetings here.
After the 9/11 attacks, the United States demanded that the Taliban deliver Osama bin Laden to the US government or an international coalition led by the US, Great Britain, and France would invade Afghanistan. The Taliban responded by offering to turn him over to any third party government the US named so that he could have a fair trial, something Americans believe is a universal human right of all people accused of a crime – something which President George W. Bush flatly rejected. With that, war became inevitable and Western armies quickly overthrew the Taliban, establishing a new government with elections. But the Taliban never truly disappeared. It never even really went away, something the US government has lied to Americans about.
The Taliban controls much of the Afghani countryside outside of the large Coalition controlled cities. Members of the Taliban collect taxes from villages and serve as judges and police forces. Further, after over a decade of fighting, the Taliban has established official embassies in both Qatar and Pakistan where the US is engaging in official negotiations with the Taliban to end the war. In February 2020 the US and the Taliban signed a peace deal that would have the US agree to not let any foreign nations use Afghanistan as a base for invading other nations and to withdraw completely form Afghanistan in 14 months (so by April 2021), in turn the Taliban agreed to a ceasefire and an “intra-Afghan dialogue.”
The violence in Afghanistan has been tremendous. Adequate measures of death tolls are impossible to find in any meaningful way. More than 2,300 American military personnel and 3,500 contractors have died with more than 20,000 Americans wounded. Determining how many civilians have been slaughtered in this war is exceedingly difficult. Early on US General Tommy Franks declared, “We don’t do body counts,” and since then it has been nearly impossible to get any firm numbers, but estimates range from hundreds of thousands (in 2015) to possibly over a million. Most likely we won’t know until years from now often American soldiers have withdrawn and the Taliban, or something very much like it, re-takes control of the nation. So far the only people who have truly benefited from this war has been the military-industrial complex, reaping trillions in war profits as the cost for the conflict has surpassed $2 trillion with no end in sight. Everyone else has suffered.
Iraq has been even worse and the history between Iraq and the US is just as terrible as the history between the latter and Afghanistan. in 1979, the American puppet dictator of Iran, Mohammed Reza II, was overthrown by the Iranian people, who instituted a new theocratically based government, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Iranian Revolution sent shockwaves throw the Middle East and the West, especially in America. Reza had been favored by the US because he had allowed Iranian oil to be controlled by Western corporations in return for some of the profits (a situation he had been taught to protect earlier when the US and UK had overthrown the elected Prime Minister of Iran because he wanted to Iran to control Iran’s oil reserves.) In 1980, Saddam Hussein, hoping to seize Iran’s western oil fields before the new government could get settled into power, invaded Iran. During this war the United States lied to the public and secretly provided money, weapons, and military intelligence to Saddam Hussein to help him defeat Iran. This included selling him the machinery and materials he needed to create and use illegal chemical weapons of mass destruction, even after military satellite intelligence had proven that not only was Hussein using it in combat but that he was using it to murder hundreds of thousands of his own people. America even provided Hussein with anthrax samples during this war. This of course is why President George W. Bush could speak so confidently about Hussein having weapons of mass destruction in 2002- by that point he was in a position to know that his father (as Vice-President) had helped sell those self-same weapons of mass destruction to Iraq in the first place.
The 2003 American invasion of Iraq was a war founded on lies. Secretary of State Colin Powell purposefully and intentionally lied to the United Nations, the American people, and the entire world about the military, chemical, and nuclear capabilities of Iraq in order to portray Hussein as a heavily armed and dangerous out of control madman ready to use biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons against the world in order to justify the American invasion. There are nearly a thousand proven lies, not just errors but actual lies, told by the Bush Administration about a supposed Iraqi weapons program to develop WMDs and about supposed ties between Iraq and terrorist organization al-Qaida in order to justify the invasion. Then there is this admission from the Department of Defense:
The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and Al-Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers.
In other words, when there was no evidence that could be used to justify the American invasion of Iraq, the government just made it up and lied to the whole world about it. The invasion finally began on March 19, 2003.
Since the American invasion Iraq has been shattered by multiple civil wars. Terrorism, which, despite lies told by the US President to justify invasion, was nonexistent before, is now rampant in the nation. ISIS (Islamic State in Syria) is led partially by Iraqi generals and soldiers (Hussein’s military was disbanded by the American conquerors) and has decimated large sections of Northern Iraq and Syria where it is trying to form its own independent nation. Costs for the war have exceed $2 trillion with 4,424 total American deaths and 31,952 wounded in action. Over 2.4 million civilians have died, and that number only grows. Over 40,000 civilians were murdered in the Battle of Mosul alone. Recently, under President Trump, an Iranian general Qassem Suleimani, invited into Iraq by its government and militia leaders (some of whom were also killed in the same strike that assassinated Suleimani) to help them fight ISIS was assassinated by an American attack. In response, Iraq’s parliament voted to end foreign troop presence in the country, including thousands of US soldiers, and to lodge a complaint with the United Nations over the killing of Sulemani. When Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi asked the US to begin to develop a plan to withdraw US troops completely, the US flatly refused, which tell us that the continued US presence in Iraq has little to nothing to do with helping the country itself or respecting its government. The entire episode made it obvious that from the very start this has been a war about military occupation, domination, and control and the US government continues to murder Iraqi civilians with impunity.
Battle of Mosul.
The number of troops in Iraq have fluctuated greatly over the years, spawning arguments over whether the original 2003 invasion “ended” and everything since has been a series of “new” wars or if this has been one long endless war since 2003 no matter what politicians officially declare. The Afghanistan War has been going strong after 19 years with hope for its end only truly materializing this year (2020). It is hard to precisely know how many fighters the US has in either country. For example, officially there are around 6,000 soldiers in Iraq and around 14,000 in Afghanistan. But these numbers ignore the massive numbers of mercenary companies (“private contractors”) hired by the US military to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. In May 2019 the Department of Defense (DOD) said that concerning U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, contractors often accounted for 50% or more of the total DOD presence in country. The DOD reported 49,451 contractor personnel working for the US within the Middle East, which included 28,189 individuals located in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. So, the potential number for actual military combatants fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan for the US may be greater than the official numbers by tens of thousands. This of course also means that American casualties are potentially far higher than are being reported as official military losses as well.
The Civil Wars
America’s military involvement in the Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni civil wars have all been equally catastrophic for all those places as America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been for those nations.
In 2011, a civil war began in the North African nation of Libya as rebel forces tried to overthrow the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. From the start American forces intervened by backing the rebels and bombing government installations. Qaddafi was quickly overthrown, but things only got worse form there. The nation was quickly riven into rival factions with each faction claiming portions of the territory. Al-Qaida and ISIS both gained influence and power in the country. This civil war continues with rival governments claiming the right to rule the nation. As a result, violence, crime, poverty, and civilian death rates have skyrocketed. The slave trade has even restarted with video leaking of Africans being sold in illegal open markets in Libya.
In 2011 a civil war also started in Syria with anti-government forces seeking to overthrow President (for Life) Bashir al-Assad. Once again, the US immediately began to interfere with the CIA and Pentagon funding, training, and arming various rebel forces. Perhaps ironically, one of the groups that American forces funded, trained, and armed was al-Nusra, the Syrian al-Qaida group (pg. 3)- i.e. America funded al-Qaida in Syria to fight Assad. Similarly, because the US was so cavalier about who it supported among the Syrian rebels it ended up giving weapons and training to what would become the Islamic State in Syria- ISIS. At one point around 90% of all the weapons ISIS was using were provided by the US and its allies. In 2012 a declassified intelligence report revealed how the US government knew that all the major players on the rebel side of the Syrian Civil War were tied to terrorist groups with Al-Qaida being among the largest. This intelligence report also predicted the rise of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Iraq along the Iraq and Syrian border, something the US government wanted as it would weaken Syria.
So while calling Obama something like the “Founder of ISIS” may be too literal, it isn’t as far off the mark as his supporters like to pretend because his Administration knowingly trained, funded, and armed terrorist groups in Syria and encouraged the development of a third party extremist group with ambitions of creating their own nation as a way to break Syria apart, all of which is the origin, purpose, and goal of ISIS, which is why it is called the Islamic State in Syria. The report also predicted the conflict would become a proxy war, which it quickly did as Russia began to openly arm and support Assad’s government while the USA armed and trained the rebel groups. Cities thousands of years old with histories and cultures older than anything in the US have been laid to waste by the various sides using foreign weapons and foreign money to destroy each other for the benefit of foreign powers and their own greed.
Conservative estimates of civilians deaths estimate between 500,000 and 600,000 Syrians have died in the war with 13 million Syrians fleeing the war as refugees. Over 80% of the country is now below the poverty line and mass starvation is a major concern (along with the mass oppression, torture, and slaughter suffered by the Syrian people) as the war has already caused the price of food to double even before Western sanctions, designed supposedly to help victims of Assad’s regime, drove up costs even more and making it even harder for the common person to survive. The war is ongoing though President Assad has retaken control of much of the nation.
The Yemeni Civil War (2015-ongoing) began when a group of Yemeni tribes united under the Houthi Movement to resist the oppressive Yemeni central government, backed by a coalition of Arabian countries led by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, a corrupt and evil regime itself and yet one of America’s dearest allies, began to pour arms and money into the Yemeni government while carrying out indiscriminate military strikes against Houthi towns, destroying villages, schools, farms, weddings, hospitals, etc. America became involved as it sold weapons to Saudi Arabia, refueled its warplanes in mid-air to help them continue their strikes, and even began a blockade of Yemen that makes it nearly impossible to get basic supplies such as food and medicine into the country as well as prevent civilians form fleeing the slaughter of war. The death toll and living conditions have climbed to genocidal levels since the start of the blockade.
Dr. Ahmed al-Haifi in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a spoke about the consequences of these blockades and estimated that 25 people are dying every day at the hospital for want of medical supplies, “We are unable to get medical supplies, anesthetics, medicines for kidneys. There are babies dying in incubators because we can’t get supplies to treat them. They call it natural death, but it’s not. If we had the medicines, they wouldn’t be dead. I consider them killed as if they were killed by an air strike, because if we had the medicines, they would still be alive.” An UN-commissioned report undertaken by the University of Denver found that more of Yemen’s civilians are dying from hunger, disease, and a dearth of health clinics than from actual fighting. By the end of 2019, an estimated 131,000 Yemenis had died from the consequences of the war such as the destruction of civilian infrastructure, including the targeting of hospitals, schools, buses, and homes by Saudi planes armed with weapons bought from the USA. Refugee Nouria Awbali described her experience being bombed, saying:
“There were so many airplanes. My daughter Naria came to me and said: ‘The skies are on fire.’ Then the first air strike hit and 13-year-old Naria received deep shrapnel wounds in her arm. Naria was in deep pain and regularly suffers convulsions of terror when aircraft go overhead. They are so serious that she needs to be forcibly held down. Her right hand is withered.”
The family ran from village to village, but everywhere there were air strikes. Mrs. Awbali was heavily pregnant when the fighting started and gave birth to her daughter Regan as they were escaping from a new wave of Saudi attacks. She told us that her first action after the birth was to leap on top of the baby to protect her as a bomb exploded nearby.
‘Too Frail To Even Cry’: The War in Yemen and Its Bounty of Suffering
Things continued to get worse after Joe Biden became the American President. Though he made many public statements in opposition to the war, he continued to sell hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons of mass destruction so they could continue to decimate the people of Yemen. And the media has been absolutely silent about it, covering up both for Biden’s lies and for the continuing Yemeni Holocaust the American government is helping to perpetuate in Yemen this very minute.
Terrorist Nation
Across the Middle East and Africa, at the end of the Bush era and the start of the Obama Administration, the US began to carry out drone strikes against supposed terrorist targets. In reality, over 90% of those killed have been civilians. The total death toll from drone strikes is hard to figure out- the data is parsed out country by country and no one seems to have added it all up in one location. But using Pakistan, the country drone bombed more than any other outside of Afghanistan, as an example by 2016 the civilian death toll amounted to 4,026 people killed. Using the Intercept’s ratio, that means in Pakistan alone around 3,624 civilians were murdered. When you add airstrikes carried out in Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan that number increases by another 1,337 civilians murdered, for a total of at 4, 961 civilians murdered during the Obama Administration just in those four countries and not counting any strikes still kept classified or are simply unknown to the public. Including those even conservative hypotheticals would justify pushing the number of civilians terrorized and murdered by American drones bombing schools, buses, soccer, games, hospitals, and weddings, and more to well over 5,000. In fact, as far back as 2013 you had Congressmen estimating it was as high as 4,700 then! If Osama bin Laden was rightly called a monster for orchestrating the murder of nearly 3,000 people on 9/11 and his supporters are rightfully labeled terrorists for helping him to do so, then what is Barack Obama and what should we call his supporters for killing almost double the amount? And Trump has been even worse.
The Obama Administration also instituted “double tap” policies where the drone would carry out a strike and then circle back around and strike again once emergency personnel -such as police and ambulances- had arrived. This is clearly a war crime making Obama a war criminal (and Trump as well.) In order to hide the numbers of children being killed the Obama Administration quietly redefined “potential terrorist killed” to include anyone in a drone strike zone who was male and “military aged” including children. As one Obama White House official explained, ““It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants. They [the CIA] count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.” The Atlantic commentary on this revelation says it well, “Lest you skim over that last quote, ponder its meaning. A former high-ranking official in the U.S. government is asserting that the CIA kills innocent people in other countries, counts the corpses, and reports that they’re militants, even though they don’t actually know who the guys are.” That includes murdering American teens by drone bombings and murdering American children during military raids as well. All these are powers continued to be used by Trump today.
America’s actions have destabilized the Middle East while doing little to protect the world from terrorism. This is especially true in the nations that the US and its allies have invaded, occupied, and/or attacked as part of the “Global War on Terror,” where the majority of terrorism occurs. Outside of those countries often terrorism is still connected to and inspired by those invasions. An example of this is the infamous Orlando night club shooting. The shooter, Omar Mateen was a first generation American born to Afghani immigrants. During the shooting Mateen tried to spare black people, at first, because, as he said, “”This is about my country. You guys suffered enough.” This suggests his attack was in response to US military actions in Afghanistan (his country). If the purpose of America’s military actions was to limit terrorism, then it has been an abject failure. Terrorism has only increased since 9/11. Al-Qaida has grown over 300% expanded its influence across the Middle East and Africa since 2001. ISIS was born and became a threat in Africa and Asia. There were more than 10,000 terrorist attacks worldwide last year — five times as many as there were in 2001.
The reason for this is simple. As Dr. Robert Pape, one of the world’s foremost experts on terrorism, has explained, the causes of terrorism have nothing to do with religious fanaticism. Terrorism is the method of military retaliation a militarily weaker people use against a militarily stronger nation that is invading, bombing, and occupying land the terrorist consider their homelands or which they greatly prize. You can read an online version of the book he wrote on the subject here. The 9/11 attacks are a prime example of this fact. 15 of the 19 hijackers were form Saudi Arabia and when you watch the videos they made (start around 7:24) explaining why they carried out their strikes- it is because they believe the American military presence in Saudi Arabia acts as an occupying force that props up a brutal and oppressive regime. Sure, they hope God will bless them with success and hope God curses America and so on, but not once do they say they’re carrying out their attacks because their religion tells them to do so. Other al-Qaida recruitment videos (start around 4:25) echo the same message- America and its allies are terrorist nations that murder innocent civilians across the Middle East and therefore the people of the Middle East need to come together to destroy the American threat to their nations through military force. This means that far from decreasing terrorism in the world, the actions of the United States and its allies in the Middle East have ultimately only inspired more terrorism.
As loathe as we may be to agree with such violent people, they aren’t wrong about the true nature of these wars and the nations that wage them. What else do you call a foreign government that murders its own people, that indiscriminately murders children, that has slaughtered millions of innocent men, women, and children across the planet, that has acted to overthrow the internationally recognized legal governments of multiple foreign nations, destroying not just entire countries but entire civilizations in the process, that routinely assassinates and kills people without compunction or accountability, that sells weapons of mass destruction to some of the most brutal, oppressive, and authoritarian nations on the planet, that intentionally starves nations full of innocent men, women, and children, that funds international terrorism, that arms and trains terrorist such as known al-Qaida groups, that helps to purposefully create new terrorist groups such as ISIS, that refuses to respect the governments of foreign nations and uses its military to occupy them by force and/or assassinate their leaders, that asserts its will through overwhelming military violence, that reigns with “blood and horror upon the Earth”? What else do you call any nation that does these things other than a terrorist nation? Far from being a shining beacon on a hill, the United States is the largest, cruelest, most dangerous, and most violent terrorist nation on the planet. It deserves neither loyalty, respect, nor love from anyone subject to its domination internationally or domestically. All people of honor, humanity, morality, righteousness, and courage will seek to end its reign of terror through the world through nonviolence, noncompliance, and civil disobedience to any and all of its orders. We can not be complicit in its wars of terrorism and we cannot be complacent in the face of its evils. Too much, including the soul of the nation and, perhaps, even our own, is riding on this to do anything less. To shrink from this duty now when we know so much or to allow our own partisan biases to draw us into defending politicians in our chosen political parties would simply be cowardice in the service of monstrosity.