Bring the Troops Home, But Also Stop the Bombing

As our nation debates the merits of President Donald Trump’s call for withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan, absent from the debate is the more pernicious aspect of U.S. military involvement overseas: its air wars. Trump’s announcement and General James Mattis’ resignation should unleash a national discussion about U.S. involvement in overseas conflicts, but no evaluation can be meaningful without a clear understanding of the violence that U.S air wars have unleashed on the rest of the world for the past 17 years.

By our calculations, in this “war on terror,” the U.S. and its allies have dropped a staggering 291,880 bombs and missiles on other countries—and that is just a minimum number of confirmed strikes.

As we contemplate that overwhelming number, let’s keep in mind that these strikes represent lives snuffed out, people maimed for life, families torn apart, homes and infrastructure demolished, taxpayer money squandered, and resentment that only engenders more violence.

After the horrific crimes of September 11, 2001, Congress was quick to pass a sweeping Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). While three presidents have claimed that the 2001 AUMF legally justifies these endless wars as a response to the crimes of 9/11, no serious reading of the authorization could interpret it that way.

• Strafing runs: U.S. Airpower Summaries for 2004-2007 include a note that their tally of “strikes with munitions dropped… does not include 20mm and 30mm cannon or rockets.” But the 30mm cannons on A-10 Warthogs and other ground attack planes are powerful weapons, originally designed to destroy Soviet tanks. They fire up to 65 shells per second and can blanket a large area with deadly and indiscriminate fire, but that does not count as a “weapons release” in U.S. Airpower Summaries.
• Yemen: Journalist Iona Craig, who has reported from Yemen for many years and manages the Yemen Data Project (YDP), told us she doesn’t know what proportion of actual airstrikes its data represents, and that the number of bombs or missiles recorded in each “air raid” in the YDP’s data is only a minimum confirmed number. Whatever fraction of total air raids YDP’s data represents, the actual number of bombs dropped on Yemen is certainly higher than these figures. YDP just doesn’t know how much higher.
• The U.S. and allies conducting “counter-insurgency” operations in West Africa and other regions.

The U.S. public soon lost its appetite for sending our own sons and daughters to fight and die in all these wars. So, like Nixon with Vietnam, our leaders reverted to bombing, bombing, and more bombing, while small deployments of U.S. special operations forces and larger numbers of foreign proxies do most of the real fighting on the ground.

Our enemies call us cowards, especially when we use drones to kill by remote control, but more importantly, we are behaving like arrogant fools. Our country is acting as an aggressor and a bull in a china shop at a critical moment in history when neither we, nor the rest of the world, can afford such dangerous and destabilizing behavior from a hyper-militarized, aggressive imperial power.

After U.S.-led bombing, artillery, and rocket fire destroyed two major cities in 2017, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, the U.S. and its allies conducted fewer airstrikes in 2018, but actually increased the number of strikes in Afghanistan.

We are heading into 2019 with new initiatives to reduce U.S. military involvement overseas. In Yemen, that initiative is the result of massive grassroots pressure on Congress, and is being done in opposition to Trump’s continued support for Saudi aggression in Yemen. In the case of Syria and Afghanistan, it is coming from Trump himself, with broad popular support but bipartisan opposition from Congress and D.C. elites.