The United States has launched over 100,000 air strikes during its war on (or is it of) terror. It’s blown up houses, apartments, weddings, dinners, town hall meetings, religious gatherings. It’s killed senior citizens, children, men, women. It’s tapped them, double tapped them, bugsplatted them, targeted them, kill-sported them, and collateral damaged them by the hundreds of thousands. It’s killed civilians, journalists, mercenaries, opportunists, those trying to get by through support of the dominant force in their village, and those opposing the foreign occupation of their countries. It’s killed kind people, smart people, dumb people, and nasty sadistic people who — purely because of where they were born and raised — had no opportunity to become U.S. presidential candidates.
Of course I would like all militaries to refrain from bombing hospitals, but I want to say a word in support of the not-yet-injured. Don’t people of sound body have rights too? If there is a problem with bombing hospitals, why is there not a problem with bombing everywhere else? If there’s not a problem with bombing everywhere else, why isn’t it OK to bomb hospitals too?
I suppose in a certain fantasy of honorable war, brave soldiers only kill those on the battlefield trying to kill them, so that both sides can claim self-defense in a mutual moral scam. But then shouldn’t the planes fight planes, the drones fight drones, the napalm do battle with other loads of napalm, the white phosphrous take on other launchers of white phosphorous, and the soldiers kicking in doors set up some houses so that other soldiers can kick their doors in? What in the name of all Hell does blowing up buildings with missiles have to do with honor? What does any of this have to do with honor? How do you explain to a war supporter who openly admits it’s mass murder that there’s something wrong with using torture, but that the mass murder is OK, as long as it stays away from hospitals?
Even operating under the delusion that everybody being intentionally blown up is a “combatant,” while everyone nearby is a deeply regretted statistic, why are so many combatants blown up while retreating en masse or while eating dinner with their family or sipping tea at a cafe? What kind of slacker combatants is it only possible to find at weddings? Are they doing combat singing?
The United States has young people sitting in boxes, staring at computer screens, and blowing other human beings (and whoever’s near them) to little bugsplatted bits thousands of miles away. Their victims are not alleged to be in the act of waging war. They’re alleged to be on the side of waging war, to have previously done something to wage war and/or to be planning to possibly participate in war, or to appear likely to do so given their insolent choice to live where they were born.
Well, if you’re murdering people at the command of the U.S. president because of who they are, not what they are doing, then it doesn’t much matter if they are retreating or resting or registering for a self-help class, and it’s hard to see why it matters if they’re in a hospital. Clearly the Pentagon can’t see the distinction and chooses not to pretend to, offering only the insult of a halfhearted lie that the hospital attacks are accidental.
The wars as a whole cannot be accidental, and if you pick them apart, bit by bit, eliminating each moral outrage, you’ll be left with nothing. There’s no legitimate core left standing. There’s no “legitimate enemy.” There’s no battlefield. These are wars fought where people live. They are in these wars by force. You want to “support” the U.S. troops even when you oppose the policy, cheer as for a sports team even when the sport is murder? Well, what about the non-U.S. troops? Do they not get the same understanding?