Aha Dua Permata: 'Immoral' US Warfare 'Never Sought to Minimize Civilian Deaths'

Monday, 13 November 2023

'Immoral' US Warfare 'Never Sought to Minimize Civilian Deaths' - Scholar

©USMC/Cpl. Samuel Corum

Amid the growing global outcry over the Palestinian death toll and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the US has offered Israel its wholehearted support and refrained from joining calls for a ceasefire in the enclave. It has also remained highly opaque regarding the specific military assistance it has pledged Tel Aviv.

Throughout its history, the United States has never allowed concerns about the civilian death toll to impact its warfare strategy, and current developments in Gaza are yet another glaring example of this, scholar, educator and journalist K.J. Noh told Sputnik Media.

"The fundamental immorality of US warfare… is that it has never sought to minimize the deaths of civilians. We know that US wars recently have been somewhere in the range of 90 percent civilian deaths,” the scholar underscored.

Recalling US doctrine implemented in countries like Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, it has been “simply to kill anything that moves. You create a free fire zone, you kill anything that moves, and the murder is indiscriminate,” the pundit said. Afterwards, they may use mainstream media to “paste it over” with "PR means and releases."

US Business 'is War'

Whether it is fuelling weapons to fuel the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, or sending military assistance to Israel in its fight against Hamas, “fundamentally, the business of the US is war,” K.J. Noh emphasized.

“You know, the US is number one supplier of arms to the world. It's 40 percent of all arms sales… and it sells them to quisling governments and to governments that are involved in the Pacific pivot - this escalation to war against China,” underscored the scholar, adding that Washington is “turning the entire planet into an armed madhouse” using taxpayers’ dollars.

Ever since the Hamas attack of October 7, Israel’s strong response, with its relentless strikes and then ground operation in Gaza that has been driving up the civilian death toll in the enclave has boosted sympathy for the Palestinian issue across the globe. And yet, we see how Washington has doubled down on its determination to offer “unwavering” support for Israel. As Israel Defense Forces (IDF) continue their onslaught on Gaza, the Palestinian death toll in the enclave since 7 October has exceeded 11,000, according to local health officials. US President Joe Biden, however, has rejected calls for a ceasefire, with Washington floating the suggestion for a brief “humanitarian pause” in Israel’s assault to allow aid to enter Gaza or permit civilians to leave the enclave.

After the Biden administration asked for an additional $14 billion for Israel from Congress, Washington committed to delivering to Tel Aviv Iron Dome air defense missiles, small diameter bombs and Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits, besides the earlier agreed weapons deals, as per US media reports. At the same time, unlike the case with Ukraine, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby acknowledged that Washington's military supplies to Israel were shrouded in secrecy. During an October 23 press briefing, Kirby said that "We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course."

“Transparency in war is largely an illusion or at best, selective. You know, war is always deception. Both the published lists and the unpublished lists. The published lists are designed to intimidate, or message, or signal, or posture. And the unpublished lists are… often hiding dirty criminal tactics.”

As far as the ongoing developments in besieged Gaza, which is being pounded by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), “the US is providing the weapons,” K.J. Noh pointed out, adding:

“It is now the accomplice, or it has always been the accomplice to this genocide of which we know 99.6 percent have been civilians so far by any tabulation that we can see. And so because the US is accomplice to this genocide, it has said there are no restrictions on how the weapons are used. So then it makes sense that it would obscure the weapons that it provided.”

“The use the use of war by the US has been a constant, certainly at least since the 1990s, and certainly… the use of proxies as well… We know that ISIS* itself was cultivated by the US until it started to blow back,” the expert recalled.

Furthermore, now Israel has reportedly requested several hundred expendable switchblade kamikaze drones, K.J. Noh pointed out, which signals “that there is going to be intense urban warfare with intense casualties.”

“And it just speaks to the constant escalation, and the fact that there is the ‘no holds barred’ [approach] as this war continues to move forward," he said.

'Real Costs of War'

From the Biden administration's opaque arms deals with Israel, and lack of concern for the civilian death toll in Gaza, the educator weiged in on the American establishment's attitude towards its own soldiers.

“We don't understand or we choose not to understand the real costs of war,” K.J. Noh said.

A recent report in The New York Times appeared to shed light on strange new physical and psychic wounds discerned among military gun crews, dating back to a "secret US offensive during 2016 and 2017" seeking to defeat the Islamic State in Syria. At the time, a plan to put a minimal number of American boots on the ground to target the enemy with artillery fire backfired in the sense that the US soldiers returned plagued by nightmares, panic attacks, depression, etc. Many, as per the report, have died by suicide. The Marine Corps in 2019 issued findings of an investigation that showed these gun crews were likely injured by having to fire a huge number of rounds daily. And yet, the military appeared to dismiss these concerns.

“What this article does, in my opinion, is it takes what looks to me like a description of war trauma, PTSD, moral injury, and then tries to shoehorn it into a kind of biophysical symptom that is blast exposure or blast shock. Now, this is not new. This type of thinking goes all the way back to World War II,” claimed the expert.

According to K.J. Noh, its “part of an ideological crusade that wants to distract from the moral costs, and to turn moral damage into a medical phenomenon which that you can then treat with medical procedures."

“The simple fact is that when you seek to snuff out another human's life, you have to silence your own conscience. And sometimes that doesn't work, and so then this conscience returns with a vengeance... And I think these types of hauntings and hallucinations are part of that phenomenon,” K.J. Noh underscored.