Syria Support Movement solidarity with the Syrian people
The following article is republished from Moon of Alabama:
Apologists for war crimes are a dime for a dozen. With a new piece in The New Yorker Anand Gopal has joined that trade.
Headlined America’s War on Syrian Civilians the piece starts out with some hand wringing about the total destruction of Raqqa in 2017 by an extremely violent U.S. attack on the ISIS held city.
For four months in 2017, an American-led coalition in Syria dropped some ten thousand bombs on Raqqa, the densely populated capital of the Islamic State. Nearly eighty per cent of the city, which has a population of three hundred thousand, was destroyed. I visited shortly after ISIS relinquished control, and found the scale of the devastation difficult to comprehend: the skeletal silhouettes of collapsed apartment buildings, the charred schools, the gaping craters.
It follows some mumbling about the historic and current view of ‘human war’.
Then comes this monster of a paragraph:
The U.S.-led coalition waged its assault on Raqqa with exacting legal precision. It vetted every target carefully, with a fleet of lawyers scrutinizing strikes the way an in-house counsel pores over a corporation’s latest contract. During the battle, the coalition commander, Lieutenant General Stephen J. Townsend, declared, “I challenge anyone to find a more precise air campaign in the history of warfare.” Although human-rights activists insist that the coalition could have done more to protect civilians, Townsend is right: unlike Russia, America does not bomb indiscriminately. The U.S. razed an entire city, killing thousands in the process, without committing a single obvious war crime.
Aaron Maté quoted that paragraph and remarked:
Aaron Maté @aaronjmate – 14:24 UTC · Dec 17, 2020A masterclass in US war crimes apologia from @Anand_Gopal_ in the New Yorker: “unlike Russia, America does not bomb indiscriminately. The U.S. razed an entire city [Raqqa], killing thousands in the process, without committing a single obvious war crime.”
Gopal is, as usual, loose with the facts and disingenuous in his judgment.
First the U.S. not only “dropped some ten thousand bombs on Raqqa”. It dropped much more:
>From June 2017 until Raqqa’s liberation in October, U.S. aircraft dropped just under 20,000 total munitions.
Moreover it was not the bombs that were the most destructive in Raqqa but the artillery:
Coalition aircraft supporting the liberation of Mosul and Raqqa still managed to drop less munitions than the 18 guns fired by the Marines in northern Syria.
The amount of artillery ammunition spent was enormous:
“They fired more rounds in five months in Raqqa, Syria, than any other Marine artillery battalion, or any Marine or Army battalion, since the Vietnam war,” said Army Sgt. Major. John Wayne Troxell, the senior enlisted adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
…
“In five months they fired 35,000 artillery rounds on ISIS targets, killing ISIS fighters by the dozens,” Troxell told Marine Corps Times during a roundtable discussion Jan. 23. “We needed them to put pressure on ISIS and we needed them to kill ISIS.”To put the numbers in context: During all of Operation Desert Storm, both the Marines and the Army fired a little more than 60,000 artillery rounds.In the invasion of Iraq, just over 34,000 rounds were fired.
During the five months on average one round of least 10 kilograms TNT hit Raqqa every 6 minutes – day and night for five long month. This was on top of the aerial bombing. The artillery ammunition that was used has a circular error probability of 50 meters. That means that half of the rounds fired hit more than 50 meter away from the intended target. These were not surgical strikes. This was a kind of warfare that minimized the regard for civilians still living in the city and maximized the destruction.
Gopal does not even mention the artillery and the destruction it created in Raqqa. His claim that this was not indiscriminate fire but that the army “vetted every target carefully” is obviously nonsense that does not hold up to reality.
Moreover what Gopal totally ignores, as Aaron Maté also points out, is that the U.S. war in Syria was (and is) by definition illegal and a crime.
Anand Gopal quoted Maté’s tweet and accused him of a lack of ‘reading comprehension’:
Anand Gopal @Anand_Gopal_Reading comprehension may not be your strong suit, but the point of the article is to critique the way the US uses the legal designation of “war crime” to legitimize war
I have read the New Yorker piece and that intent, if it exists, is in no way discernible in it.
As Matè responded:
Aaron Maté @aaronjmate
Replying to @Anand_Gopal_1/ I don’t think integrity is your strong suit.
The point of the sentence I’m quoting is to make the laughable argument that “unlike Russia, America does not bomb indiscriminately.” Do you actually believe that? How do you know it?2/ And the impact of your legalistic “critique” of war crimes law is to presuppose that the US has right to “raze an entire city” in Syria and “kill thousands in the process”, without questioning what right we have to do that. I wonder why that thought doesn’t occur to you?
3/ If you think I have problems with reading comprehension, and you actually think you can defend writing such a statement, would you like to come debate it on @PushbackShow?
There followed no reply.
I especially like Maté’s allusion to Gopal’s integrity. That is indeed in doubt.
In May 2017 this blog published a piece that analyzed claims about Syria Anand Gopal’s had made during an interview with Democracy Now. Back then Gopal had claimed that the U.S. had no ‘regime change’ policy in Syria.
The piece presented the vast evidence that ‘regime change’ in Syria had been, was (and is) the official U.S. policy and remarked:
Gopal is daft, or a lying piece of shit, when he claims that the U.S. did not and does not pursue “regime change” in Syria. Does Anand Gopal really believe that the bombing of Syrian Army positions and infrastructure is just ‘After-Dinner Entertainment’ at Mar-a-Lago, not an active “regime change” policy?
Gopal further claimed that ISIS in Syria was ’caused’ by the Syrian government. An absolute lie as ISIS was created and armed by the U.S. to achieve its ‘regime change’ aim in Syria. The piece provided ample evidence for that and concluded:
“Regime change” in Syria has been and is the declared policy of the U.S. government since 2006 and it continues to be the aim, even when it is, at times, not always openly promoted as such.Gopal claims it was the Syrian government that caused people to join the Islamic State. Gopal’s own (criminal) promotion of how to join ISIS contradicts his assertion.
Hours after Moon of Alabama published that piece Gopal deleted his ISIS recruitment tweet.
The same Anand Gopal who had supported the ‘rebels’, recruited for ISIS on Twitter and lied about the ‘regime change’ war is now justifying the war crimes the U.S committed when it destroyed Raqqa and killed thousands civilians who lived there.
Integrity is, indeed, not his strong suit.
