America does not take strikes to punish individuals; we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people, and when there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat. And before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured -- the highest standard we can set.Now, this last point is critical, because much of the criticism about drone strikes -- both here at home and abroad -- understandably centers on reports of civilian casualties. There’s a wide gap between U.S. assessments of such casualties and nongovernmental reports. Nevertheless, it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in every war. And for the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss. For me, and those in my chain of command, those deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred throughout conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.But as Commander-in-Chief, I must weigh these heartbreaking tragedies against the alternatives. To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties -- not just in our cities at home and our facilities abroad, but also in the very places like Sana’a and Kabul and Mogadishu where terrorists seek a foothold. Remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes. So doing nothing is not an option.
Obama's rhetoric was soaring. The implementation was nearly nonexistent.
As the New York Times reported in an extensive investigation in 2021:
Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed.In early 2017 in Iraq, an American war plane struck a dark-colored vehicle, believed to be a car bomb, stopped at an intersection in the Wadi Hajar neighborhood of West Mosul. Actually, the car had been bearing not a bomb but a man named Majid Mahmoud Ahmed, his wife and their two children, who were fleeing the fighting nearby. They and three other civilians were killed.In November 2015, after observing a man dragging an “unknown heavy object” into an ISIS “defensive fighting position,” American forces struck a building in Ramadi, Iraq. A military review found that the object was actually “a person of small stature” — a child — who died in the strike.None of these deadly failures resulted in a finding of wrongdoing.These cases are drawn from a hidden Pentagon archive of the American air war in the Middle East since 2014.The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.
The two-part, two day, quite detailed NYT article is based on Pentagon reports that admitted that civilians were killed, but in nearly all of the cases the Pentagon did not admit to these failures publicly.
I cannot point to specific cases and say that there were war crimes committed, or that the commanders violated the principles of distinction or proportionality. Those determinations are made in real time based on the best intelligence available at the time. The US is a moral army and it would not wantonly kill civilians.
But what is clear is that the army was clearly not doing what Obama had claimed they would do: only firing when there is a "near certainty" that there are no civilians who would be killed or injured. In fact, that rhetoric may have contributed to the apparent hiding of the evidence of these thousands of cases where the military knew they screwed up.
This opacity in the reporting apparently resulted in no changes in policy to minimize the chances of a mistake next time. No taking of responsibility. No censure, or criminal charges.
The contrast with Israel is stunning. In many cases in this current war, Israel has been able to confirm or deny its alleged actions within a couple of days, complete with videos and photos to back up their assertions.
The more we learn about the World Central Kitchen airstrikes, the more it appears that every military in the world would have made the same mistake with the same information. Hamas militants were in the area, even shooting; the WCK employees were traveling in the same white Toyota pickup trucks that Hamas uses.
Even so Israel immediately fired two people involved in the decision-making and came up with a solution for aid vehicles to be more identifiable at night - all less than a week after the incident. I am unaware of anything close to that happening that that speed in the US military.
This is just conjecture, but one wonders whether the US and other Western countries' criticisms of Israel is more a function of their own shortcomings in war ethics compared to Israel. After all, every new innovation that Israel comes up with to minimize civilian deaths - drones with loudspeakers, "knocking on the roof," extensive mappings to instruct civilians, warning even when it will give an advantage to the enemy, hundreds of thousands of phone calls and leaflets - must now be copied by all other armies because they don't want to look worse than Israel.
Obama's frustration and antipathy towards Israel is well known. Only months after this speech, he felt justified in having administration officials clearly express anger at incidents of civilians being killed during Operation Protective Edge, discounting Israeli explanations.
Is it possible that he wanted to ensure that the US has the moral high ground that would allow him to make those criticisms? As the US military proved time and time again that it was not up to the high standards Obama outlined for them, but he needed to maintain that fiction if he was going to attack Israel - and he wanted to attack Israel.
After speaking about how civilian deaths at the hands of his army "haunts" him, why didn't he publicly take responsibility or apologize for the hundreds of incidents of civilian casualties that followed his speech?
Perhaps the reason is that he did not want the US military to appear to be less ethical than Israel's. Perhaps he wanted to have free rein to criticize Israeli actions and not have to answer for US actions that were just as dangerous to civilians and aid workers.
And maybe the rest of the Western world jumps on the bandwagon of criticizing Israel in order to avoid having to live up to Israel's exceptional standards of not only distinguishing civilians from militants to the highest degree possible given Hamas' human shields strategy, but also Israel's stellar record on transparency and speed of investigations while still fighting.
To be sure, Israel has advantages in Gaza that other armies haven't had - a knowledge of every single person there, near perfect aerial coverage along with being able to have possibly perfect signals intelligence. But Hamas has advantages that other terrorist groups never had: hundreds of miles of tunnels too deep to bomb with airplanes, with thousands of shafts for ambushing, all deliberately placed directly under civilian areas, schools, mosques and hospitals. This war is what other wars against terrorists will look like in a decade or two. Israel's decisions now blaze the way for how every other civilized nation will defend themselves in years to come. And apparently, this makes everyone else a little jealous that they are having to follow in the footsteps of Israel.
There are many theories as to what causes antisemitism. One of them is that the very existence of Jews and Judaism forces people to confront their own moral shortcomings. Christianity and Islam come from Judaism and the Hebrew Bible is the most important moral code ever made. Much of the canon of Western law is based on Jewish sources. Whether Jews live up to it or not, their calling is to be a light unto nations, and their existence forces people to consider how they should improve themselves - which is often an unsettling thought.
Israel fulfills the same role. Just as with Jews, despite all the vitriol, Israel is an amazing success story and that includes its conduct in war. It forces other nations to examine where they might be falling short.
And many people are uncomfortable thinking about that. Instead, they would rather attack the people or nation that makes them uncomfortable, to put them down in order to believe that they are better.
I'm not saying that this is conscious, but the treatment of Israel when it is objectively doing a better job at war than anyone else would under the same circumstances elicits a desire to knock it down a few pegs to feel self-righteous.
