“How many deaths will it take ’til he knows that too many people have died?” 

~ Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ In the Wind,” 1963

As Americans, we are taught that our military is the greatest in the world, bravely saving poor farmers from villainous communism and socialist “dictatorships” with democratically elected leaders who raise the quality of life in their countries. It is entrenched in us that America is the greatest superpower in the world, that we are on the right side of every war we fight in, that every dead civilian is justified in the pursuit of spreading democracy, that every bombed city is a necessity in furthering our noble cause. The American eagle is an angel, bringing not Christianity to the West, but democracy to the East. It does not matter how many civilians are killed. Death comes with the territory.

On Sep. 11, 2021, I awoke to a barrage of Instagram posts of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in flames, overlaid with text paying tribute to the lives lost 20 years prior. People born five years after 2001 urged me to “never forget” a day they were not alive to remember. But, amid the raging sea of cognitive dissonance and unbridled nationalism, a small dinghy of awareness wove valiantly through the waves of ignorance: one, maybe two posts mourning not only the 3,000 Americans deaths on 9/11, but the millions of Afghan, Iraqi and Syrian deaths lost in the two decades that followed. I cannot remember the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But, I will never forget the mountains of terrorism that the United States Armed Forces relentlessly poured on the people of the Middle East for twenty years while the world watched, silent.

On Aug. 29, 2021, a drone strike fired into a densely populated neighborhood in Kabul, Afghanistan killed ten civilians, seven of them children. Multiple 2,000-pound were bombs fired at the Syrian Tabqa Dam, whose failure would kill tens of thousands of innocent people on March 26, 2017. Bombs lashing down into Mosul, Iraq on June 13, 2017 killed 33 people, leaving just one survivor. For 100 years, the U.S. military has unabashedly traded innocent civilians for strategic gains. In the last two decades, it has only gotten worse. 

Al-Qaeda’s attack on New York City and the Pentagon is often regarded as one of America’s darkest days for good reason. Two thousand nine hundred ninety-six innocent people were killed. It was a national tragedy. The families of the deceased will never fully recover from their losses, and neither will our country as a whole.

However, 9/11 was not an isolated event. It sparked the 20-year Afghan War, where over 100,000 U.S. troops served in 2010 alone according to MilitaryTimes. The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University reported that over 241,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001 —  over 71,000 of them innocent civilians — as a direct result of the conflict.

Civilians were not the only ones dying in Afghanistan. Another Watson Institute study found that over 7,000 U.S. service members and more than 8,000 contractors have died in wars in the Middle East since 2001. Naturally, people do not like when their family members die overseas in wars their country started. 

Fortunately, then-President Barack Obama had a solution. By the end of 2014, the U.S. had removed virtually all of their troops from Afghanistan, replacing them with remote, computer-controlled aircraft that could be operated thousands of miles away. According to the New York Times (NYT), Obama called it the “most precise air campaign in history.” He was dead wrong. 

America’s pummeling of Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq with airstrikes continued to increase in 2016 and 2017 as former President Donald Trump took office. By 2019, over 50,000 bombings had been executed. America’s air war in the Middle East is riddled with innocent blood, bodies trapped under rubble and zero accountability from murderers sitting comfortably in flip flops and t-shirts.

The military has never cared about civilians. It deliberately murdered 110,000-210,000 of them in World War II when it dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in 1945. The lower death estimate was made by the U.S. military in the 1940s to justify the bombings’ necessity. The higher estimate was made by anti-nuclear weapon scientists in the 1970s, shifting the narrative from strategic to vicious. 

The NYT reported on a secret attack unit formed in the height of U.S. strikes against the Middle East, firing hundreds of thousands of missiles — many of them without prior planning, approval from the chain of command or regard for civilians — in strike zones. Near-ceaseless strikes murdered hordes of families already seeking refuge from violence.

In one instance, according to the NYT, a drone strike okayed because the 10 children seen playing near the target site were considered “transient” (only passing through during daytime) killed a family of over 20 eating dinner in a nearby building. The military continually decides a dead ISIS fighter is worth 10 or more murdered civilians. It claims it is making strategic gains with its missiles. But with each strike, each building ruined, each family tree effectively ended, the U.S. military cements itself as an institution bent on killing. With each civilian death, it becomes exactly what it swears it fights: terrorists.

Thirteen men and 3,000 deaths erased the humanity of all people from the Middle East in a single day. And yet, an entire tyrannical institution responsible for millions of deaths and the destabilization of multiple countries over two decades are “good people who make mistakes.” After 9/11, being, or looking Muslim in America became Hell on Earth. Hate crimes against Muslims skyrocketed according to TheWorld, with an increase from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001. From 2002 to 2014, they averaged 139 per year. 

This widespread Islamophobia in our country proves a horrifying fact: no matter if they are being slaughtered in their homelands or immigrants trying to escape the violence pervading their countries, they will never be safe from the blinding hate of the American people. It is undeniable: the United States despises Muslims, and it is not afraid to show it.

And yet, the military seems ashamed. It establishes secret strike units that take out whole neighborhoods in an instant, away from prying eyes. It downplays the severity of its attacks, calling civilians ISIS and Taliban fighters or trying to cover up the strike entirely. It sheds crocodile tears for civilian deaths but stresses their necessity in taking out combatants. It does not want Americans to realize how brutally it treats the people of the Middle East. If it can maintain the lie that 9/11 was an unprovoked attack that justifies 20 years of war, it can keep the American people from realizing the U.S. military is the villain.

In a Dec. 2021 interview with the NYT, U.S. Central Command spokesperson Captain Bill Urban said that the military “regret(s) each loss of innocent life.” How much some captain in Virginia regrets the implacable loss of tens of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan does not absolve the U.S. military from their incessant terrorism against the people of the Middle East. Since the NYT investigated the military’s systemic murder sans accountability or consequence, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has ordered new measures to protect civilians and acknowledge claims of harm. It does not matter. 

The military will not stop. If it could execute tens of thousands of civilians with only a twinge of “regret,” a few new regulations will not slow it down. The U.S. military has been murdering innocent people in cold blood for a century. 

Its actions have cemented it as a fearsome terrorist organization bent on keeping the Middle East on its knees. Nothing can dam the ocean of innocent blood now.♦