Let’s be clear, Iran has provided money, weapons, and training to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen. While these groups often claim variously to represent national liberation and resistance movements or political parties, let’s stipulate that they’re terrorist organizations because they intentionally direct violence at civilians to achieve political ends, which is the common legal and academic definition of terrorism.
If we look at such deaths inflicted on civilians by Iran and its proxies over the past few decades, it appears they’re implicated in thousands or perhaps even tens of thousands of deaths worldwide. Even the highest estimates of American deaths in these incidents, including service members and military contractors, run to the low thousands. For me, those deaths are both tragic and unjustifiable from a moral point of view.
But what about our own behavior? Since 1980, the US has launched or led major military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia and elsewhere, as well as more limited strikes in Grenada, Panama, and Serbia – not to mention our more recent activity in Venezuela and Iran. Moreover, the US has provided weapons, intelligence, refueling, and diplomatic cover to other states such as Israel and Saudi Arabia involved in extensive bombing campaigns in populated areas.
What’s the civilian toll of those campaigns? Brown University’s Cost of War Project estimates that post-9/11 US led or supported wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen alone are associated with more than 400,000 direct civilian deaths. If we count war related deaths from disease, displacement, infrastructure destruction, and other related causes resulting indirectly from our military actions, the count climbs to nearly 4 million civilian deaths. Clearly, insurgent groups, militias, ISIS, and sectarian violence contributed to the indirect death toll, but would these deaths have occurred without our military involvement?
We can disagree over precisely what constitutes a just war, a war crime, or terrorism. Perhaps we didn’t intentionally inflict those deaths on civilian populations to achieve political ends. But when the US repeatedly engages in cross-border political violence that foreseeably inflicts suffering and devastation on large numbers of civilians, it’s hard to see how we hold the moral high ground – even if our motives or intentions may differ from Iran and its proxies.
Ron Rabidou
Bennington, Vermont