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The one thing you can say about Donald Trump in his second term in office is that, whatever he may be doing at home, hes not fighting any wars abroad, right? Well, actually, wrong! Yes, American ground troops are no longer actively fighting wars around the world, but when it comes to air power, think again. And I dont just have in mind his brief but devastating recent air assault on Iran (in conjunction with Israel) in which he dispatched B-2 stealth bombers to use (for the very first time) 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs on that countrys nuclear facilities. After all, in the two months of this year in which he ordered the U.S. Air Force to bomb Yemen (yes, Yemen!), as the Guardian reported, the result would be the deaths of almost as many civilians as in the previous 23 years of U.S. attacks on Islamists and militants in the country.
Of course, youre right that, while the attack on Iran got major media attention, theres next to no news about the other bombing campaigns hes ordered. Since he took office in January 2025, his administration has launched air strikes in Somalia yes, Somalia! at least 68 (yes, 68!) times to almost no coverage whatsoever in this country (unless you happen to be reading Dave DeCamps work at the website Antiwar.com). That beats Trumps previous record there of 63 set in 2019.
Its true that, in his first term, he withdrew U.S. ground troops from Somalia, but the ongoing air war there has been brutal. Of course, air wars always are, though these days thats something thats seldom thought about, which is why, especially given the ongoing nightmare in Gaza, TomDispatch regular Norman Solomons piece today is so painfully appropriate. Tom
From Guernica to Gaza
Mass Killers Have Been Above It All
Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground cant match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.
Nine decades have passed since aerial technology first began notably assisting warmakers. Midway through the 1930s, when Benito Mussolini sent Italys air force into action during the invasion of Ethiopia, hospitals were among its main targets. Soon afterward, in April 1937, the fascist militaries of Germany and Italy dropped bombs on a Spanish town with a name that quickly became a synonym for the slaughter of civilians: Guernica.
Within weeks, Pablo Picassos painting Guernica was on public display, boosting global revulsion at such barbarism. When World War Two began in September 1939, the default assumption was that bombing population centers terrorizing and killing civilians was beyond the pale. But during the next several years, such bombing became standard operating procedure.
Dispensed from the air, systematic cruelty only escalated with time. The blitz by Germanys Luftwaffe took more than 43,500 civilian lives in Britain. As the Allies gained the upper hand, the names of certain cities went into history for their bomb-generated firestorms and then radioactive infernos. In Germany: Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden. In Japan: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
Between 300,000-600,000 German civilians and over 200,000 Japanese civilians were killed by allied bombing during the Second World War, most as a result of raids intentionally targeted against civilians themselves, according to the documentation of scholar Alex J. Bellamy. Contrary to traditional narratives, the British and American governments were clearly intent on targeting civilians, but they refused to admit that this was their purpose and devised elaborate arguments to claim that they were not targeting civilians.
Past Atrocities Excusing New Ones
As the New York Times reported in October 2023, three weeks into the war in Gaza, It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to try to defeat those countries.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told President Joe Biden much the same thing, while shrugging off concerns about Israels merciless killing of civilians in Gaza. Well, Biden recalled him saying, you carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died.
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