1-2-3 What are We Fighting For?

Though the dust has settled over Signalgate, all over Yemen the dust of US missiles swarms still. Everyday during the last two weeks of March, projected above the fireplace on the wall of our Philadelphia hotel lobby, pundits, those nauseating jabber jaws that populate the idea factories of the commercial political spectrum, left and right alike, argued semantics, found much humor, deflected and levied blame, and decried or praised the incompetency of the current administration, depending on their bent. In the end, it was not surprising, nor was it really news at all that Trump’s goons exposed state secrets on the same commercial messaging app everyone uses to text their drug dealer. As far as I could see, no one—with the exception of Al Jazeera’s ongoing coverage of the wars in Yemen and Gaza—was covering the real scandal in all this: the actual bombs dropped on Yemen that killed civilians, including children and at least one newborn baby.

For weeks not a single jabber jaw had stated the obvious. Then, on April 8th, three weeks after the Trump Administration began dropping bombs, Rozina Ali published “The Other Side of SignalGate” in The New Yorker. As we all must, Ali radically shifts the perspective of this singular event in our crumbling democracy. Rather than sensationalizing callous texts from out of touch murderers who reduce the humanity of their victims to hollow emojis, Ali builds trust on the ground in Yemen, and grieves with the communities that were ripped open by these most recent American attacks.

The missiles the Signal chatters dropped killed at least 15 women and children. A man who lives in Saada, Yemen, across the street from where the Signalgate missiles fell, told Rozina Ali that his brothers searched through the rubble looking to see if their friends and neighbors had survived. Instead they found the “mangled” bodies of the dead: “Risala, age thirteen; Saleh, age nine; Abdullah, age six; Nazam, age six; Abdulkader, age five; Hadi, age three; and Motlak, a newborn baby. The baby’s mother was also killed.” The Trump Administration has argued that this bombing was initiated to defend global navigation, and free passage in shipping lanes in the Red Sea. I cannot see how Risala, Saleh, Abdullah, Nazam, Abdulkader, Hadi, and Motlak were threatening shipping lanes in the Red Sea.

Enough with killing innocent children in the name of defending American values and access to markets!¹ Enough with tidily wrapping up death we cause into digestible “packages” (to quote Mr. Hegseth, the Butcher of Saada, the Secretary of Aggression) and throwing them into the landfill at the end of the insanely quick modern news cycle! The banal security breach which set off the killing in Saada scandalized our airwaves and has now left the cultural conversation. The pace at which our country is moving on from the missiles and their wreckage reminds me of the Robert Frost line from ‘Out, Out—’

“No more to build on there. And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”

We must not now turn to our affairs! We must not let the humanitarian catastrophes our government’s weapons inflict, funded by our tax dollars, fade from the forefront of our minds.

A Paradigm of Dissent

As the winds of dissent gather in this country, not for the first time, and as I formulate my own dissent for broader dissemination, I have been drawn back into Elizabeth Anscombe. As much as I admired, when a younger lad, her sparring with Wittgenstein as no one else could, I am these days drawn to her cogent and sure repudiation of Truman for dropping the bomb.

Anscombe was incensed when, in 1958, Oxford University, where she was teaching at the time, offered Truman an honorary degree. She made her dissent official and her colleagues, mostly men, voted her down. She states plainly why she opposed the decision to honor Truman in her now famous pamphlet, Mr. Truman’s Degree:

Choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder. Naturally, killing the innocent as an end in itself is murder too; but that is no more than a possible future development for us: in our part of the globe it is a practice that has so far been confined to the Nazis. I intend my formulation to be taken strictly; each term in it is necessary. For killing the innocent, even if you know as a matter of statistical certainty that the things you do involve it, is not necessarily murder. I mean that if you attack a lot of military targets, such as munitions factories and naval dockyards, as carefully as you can, you will be certain to kill a number of innocent people; but that is not murder . . .

It may be impossible to take the thing (or people) you want to destroy as your target; it may be possible to attack it only by taking as the object of your attack what includes large numbers of innocent people. Then you cannot very well say they died by accident. Here, your action is murder.

“But where will you draw the line? It is impossible to draw an exact line.” This is a common and absurd argument against drawing any line; it may be very difficult, and there are obviously borderline cases. But we have fallen into the way of drawing no line and offering as justifications what an uncaptive mind will find only a bad joke. Wherever the line is, certain things are certainly well to one side or the other of it.

Now who are “the innocent” in war? They are all those who are not fighting and not engaged in supplying those who are with the means of fighting.

Now Donald Trump has said that in order to defend global navigation rights and shipping lanes the Houthis “will be completely annihilated.” It may well be impossible to take the thing (or people) you want to destroy as your target; it may be possible to attack it only by taking as the object of your attack what includes large numbers of innocent people. The Signalgate airstrikes, and those since, were taking as their target “the Houthis.” But such a target, in its amorphous quality is impossible to contain within one’s sights without targeting the city fabric. The Signalchatters bragged about killing the “top missile guy” of the Houthis by bombing his girlfriend’s entire apartment building. Surely if the Houthis were to bomb the entire family home of our “top missiles guy”—the CEO of Raytheon, sole maker of the Tomahawk missiles the US uses—leaving his wife and children dead and mangled, we would rightly call this murder? Yet, we carry out equivalent attacks daily. Two weeks ago Niku Jafarnia, of the Human Rights Watch, told the Guardian, “Residential areas are being hit in the middle of the night, which is a sure-fire way to kill civilians.” Then you cannot very well say they died by accident. In the present age, in which my running watch can pinpoint me to within 3 meters of where my feet are sunk in snow, 5 miles out from the trailhead, deep in the Chugach Mountains north of Anchorage, there is no excuse for the wealthiest military in the world which has access to technology surely better than that which powers my watch (what else are our taxes paying for??) to be missing its military targets. Here, your action is murder.

This is willful. They are not aiming for military targets alone—our government has determined that the best way to “annihilate” the Houthis, to cause them to cease to exist, is to bomb their entire homeland, hoping to leave no one left at all. That, or the Trump Administration’s “unscrupulousness in considering the possibilities turns it into murder” anyways. Either this is the US choosing to kill the innocent as a means to their ends or the administration is too incompetent to reason through the ramifications of what they seek to do. Either way, as I write, the US government is murdering innocent—for they do meet Anscombe’s definition of innocent—Yemeni women and children.

A Long War in Yemen

The current atrocities in Yemen for which the US is directly responsible are not the first such acts. Our current actions make a bad situation worse. Briefly, for much has happened in the last ten years of war, here is how the US is involved in Yemen.

In 2015 the Houthis overran the capital Sanaa and a Saudi-led coalition began bombing them. Because the Houthis have ties to Iran, the US, naturally, began to support the Saudi-coalition. The Obama Administration and the first Trump Administration sold more than $40 billion worth of weaponry to Saudi Arabia, and provided airborne refueling for Saudi bombing missions of Yemen, as well as intelligence and logistical assistance to the coalition, which included, somewhat laughably given the US’s current inability, or unwillingness, to aim, targeting training. President Obama, and President Biden even ordered attacks similar to the current Signalgate strikes during their tenures in office. Those attacks differ from the present round of missiles in that they only targeted Houthi weapons sites, not, to quote Rozina Ali again, “Houthi leaders in residential areas.”

This current round of airstrikes is making a humanitarian crisis worse. Mohammed al-Attab, reporting for Al Jazeera from Sanaa on March 26th summed up the situation: “The reality for many Yemenis remains bleak. The war ongoing since 2015 has plunged nearly 20 million people into poverty, with nearly seven million facing famine.” Half of all children under the age of 5 in Yemen are malnourished. Because of our government’s actions, childhood as we know it does not exist in Yemen. When those children die, we cannot very well say they died by accident. Our action here is murder.

Why then, amidst grave famine, and against all odds, do the Houthis fight? The answer is crucial in that it might contain a pathway towards an end to all this killing and famine. Since 2023 the Houthis have been fighting as an act of solidarity with Gaza’s Palestinians. The Houthis have said that they will stop attacking ships in the Red Sea when Israel stops attacking Gaza. If Anscombe were alive I think, when faced with the actions of the Houthis, she would point to the passage of Mr. Truman’s Degree which states, “The state actually has the authority to order deliberate killing in order to protect its people, or to put frightful injustices right.” Given what is occurring in Gaza, where 17,400 children—a low-end estimate—have been murdered, the Houthis are fighting to “put frightful injustices right.”

This does not mean that what Hamas did on October 7, 2023 was right, and it does not mean that some actions the Houthis have taken in the Yemeni Civil War were right either.

And this is why, in a conflict as complex as this one, Anscombe’s framework is so helpful: there have been injustices on all sides. The Houthis have been accused of war crimes: in their fight against the Yemeni Government they have “weaponized water in Taizz” by blocking civilians access to water basins and “by laying landmines in and around water infrastructure and facilities.” As Nicolas Niarkos has reported, in the North, as they consolidated power, they were accused of arresting and torturing journalists and human-rights advocates, even threatening them with execution.

The same rings true of the Yemeni government forces. Before the Houthis laid mines in Taizz, Human Rights Watch found that the Yemeni government took control of several wells in the city’s only water basin and sold public water to civilians for their own profit. Coalition forces acting on behalf of the Yemeni government have conducted airstrikes on civilian water supplies all over the country. This has escalated the threat of famine just as much as actions by the Houthis have.

A similar tension plays out 1,000 km away in Gaza. Many politicians in this country, including the Democrat John Fetterman, cannot see beyond the fact that Hamas killed 1,200 Israeli civilians and has committed war crimes in the past, notably in 1996 when Hamas suicide bombers killed 120 Israeli civilians. They seem to think that this history makes the killing of innocent Palestinian women and children okay, or at least turns the killings into a reasonable by-product of the so-called legitimate goal of exterminating Hamas.

Sounds a lot like the Japanese and how we were taught to feel about their actions in the lead up to and during World War II, no? The Japanese absolutely committed war crimes in Korea and in China, and further afield in Southeast Asia during World War II. Truman dropping the bomb was still wrong.

Here is the brilliance of Anscombe’s argument. We may push aside the noise of the ‘but-what-about-ers.’ Anscombe helped me see clearly that none of it matters. Indeterminate targets—“annihilating the Houthis,” “exterminating Hamas”—entities which necessarily proliferate through the entire fabric of cities are not legitimate targets precisely because killing innocent people is their inevitable entailment. “But what about the 1,200 people Hamas killed?” That was wrong. It does not justify the killing of innocent Palestinians. “But there are no innocent Palestinians; all are combatants.” This is a ridiculous premise—never in war has an entire population been guilty of fighting or supplying the fight. Look to the protests by the Palestinian People against Hamas as proof. To the movement here against Vietnam. To the Houthis, whom our government is currently identifying with all Yemenis, cutting off civilian water supplies which were separate from their own. With which resources would the Palestinian people be supplying Hamas? Israel, in their recent expansion of their perimeter, has cut off all supply lines into Gaza.

Just as we must not be distracted by the spectacle of Signalgate, we must not be distracted by the crimes of combatants. Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Since October 7, 2023, our tax dollars have funded “$22.76 billion [in] military aid to Israel and US operations in the region. This includes $4.86 billion spent on operations against the Houthis.” Our funding of genocide must stop. Our killing of Yemeni civilians must stop. Perhaps one might facilitate the other.

What are We to Do?

Something Anscombe articulates near the end of her pamphlet gives me pause as I write my dissent. She writes, “protests by people who have not power are a waste of time.” So why bother writing out our dissent at all?

My first thoughts come from turning over a passage in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism which I found while browsing the stacks of the Cincinnati Public Library while Kyra was in rehearsal. Fisher writes,

“As any number of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order,’ must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”²

The ‘natural order’ in the US and in its sphere of influence since World War II has been to fight on foreign soil to ensure American access to markets, and oil, against “insurgents” who usually deeply disagree with the cultural implications of the US whether that be capitalism, christianity, or our historical support for Israel. From Korea, to Vietnam, to the War on Terror, our bombing caves, and jungles, and desert mountains to try to completely root out insurgency has only bred more insurgents with even less to lose precisely because of our bombs. Ben Taub summarized the failures of the War on Terror back in 2019 in The New Yorker,

“the military has become much better at killing insurgents, but only because the war on terror, with all of its excesses and mistakes, has created so many of them. The Taliban currently controls more of Afghanistan than it has since the earliest months of the invasion. Al Qaeda has expanded from a group that had a few hundred adherents, mostly based in southern Afghanistan, into a global terror franchise, with branches in West Africa, East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Central Asia, the Sinai Peninsula, South Asia, and the Levant.”

In that same article, Ben Taub details how the Bush Administration painted Abu Mu’sab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS, as an associate of Osama bin Laden in order to use the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001 to invade Iraq in 2003. Zarqawi, who was not associated with bin Laden, and had actually been rebuffed by Al-Qaeda back in 1999 when he visited Afghanistan, had been hiding in Iraq, and so Bush used this made-up connection to Al-Qaeda to satisfy the AUMF’s requirement that force be reserved for “those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.” Zarqawi’s celebrity, crafted from the lies of the Bush Administration, gave legitimacy to his cause and ultimately precipitated his establishment of ISIS. In other words, it was actions by the US, in the name of rooting out insurgency that led to the rise of another brutal insurgent faction. ISIS very well might not exist without Bush trying to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Appealing to the moral compasses of our leaders has not stopped them from pursuing the same tactics in Yemen that decimated Afghanistan without destroying either Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. So what if we drastically changed our tactics? What if we started telling our leaders that we actually agreed with the motives of the War on Terror. We just think that withdrawing military aid from Israel is the first step towards achieving them. The Houthis, the current insurgents, will stop fighting if Israel stops its assault on Gaza. Israel will be hard pressed to keep the war in Gaza going without US military aid. Fighting the Houthis in an effort to annihilate them will only strengthen them by making more people in Yemen hate America for all the killing we inflict there with faceless predator drones. What if we demanded that “what is presented as necessary and inevitable” be treated as a contingency that has actually already been proven false.

What if we demanded a new doctrine of deterrence built out of a complete withdrawal from funding Israel and a complete cessation of all military action abroad? What if we demanded our government push for a treaty to establish a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone in the Middle East as has been tossed about the UN for decades, always blocked by the US which views Israeli Nuclear Weapons as crucial for deterrence?³ Since World War II the US has deemed creating a safe homeland with a stable growing economy to be impossible through non-violence. I believe that stopping our air strikes and ending our funding of Israel will cause the Houthis to end their hostilities in the Red Sea which is the Administration’s stated goal. Let’s make it seem attainable, so that the killing of innocents may stop.

But could a protest with this demand even be successful?

I have been finding many answers to this question in recent weeks. One reason to voice our dissent came to me in a DIY printed newsletter that I found in Philadelphia. I’ll talk more about that in my forthcoming Letter from Philly. I found the other in the course of researching this piece, and it comes from an unusual source—some professors at the Naval Postgraduate School.

In 2018, Chad W. Seagren and David R. Henderson, the aforementioned professors, argued in The Independent Review that the prevailing attitude amongst top brass of the US military is that “anything that undercuts the people's support ultimately places military victory at risk.”⁴ Thus opens a real avenue for our collective dissent to shift American strategy in foreign wars. Because many US commanders believe that defeat is likely without the support of the public, and they are not very keen on fighting wars they don’t think they can win, our collective dissent could lead them to end the violence. Especially if we insisted that we thought ending the violence was how to bring about victory.

This is why I write. When enough US citizens decry the war path of our nation, when enough accuse that war path of leading to defeat and a breached national security, that path might change. We are not without power if enough of us speak up and begin to sustain protest. We will never inspire people to protest by focusing on the semantic wizardry of our foolish butcher leaders texting each other on Signal. Such fodder has never roused dissidents en masse. We must acknowledge the children buried in the rubble of our missiles and we must be moved by our compassion, pathos, and outrage for their plight to demand that our government stop funding the violence in Gaza, as a means to achieve our government’s longstanding commitments to ending insurgency and securing global free navigation.

“It is still possible to withdraw from this shameful business in some slight degree,” writes Elizabeth Anscombe in the coda of Mr Truman’s Degree. The same is true for us. Though it’s not 1969, and we are not now watching our boys come home in a box, if we are ever to force a withdrawal, we must speak as one with the same urgency as the crowd at Woodstock chanting with Country Joe. I fear, as I think Anscombe would, “in case God’s patience suddenly ends,” what will happen if we cannot find this voice, and raise it high enough to be heard above the distracting noise most recently trumpeted by Signalgate.

1. President Clinton formulated this policy goal in his last National Security Strategy document in 2000 saying that US military intervention was justified when “ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.”

2. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, (Zero Books: Winchester, UK, 2009), 17.

3. The call for a Mideast Nuclear Weapons Free Zone is backed by all of the Arab states, including Iran. It is also backed by the Global South and the G-77, making for a total of 134 countries which are in support of making the Mideast free of nuclear weapons. The US consistently vetos such an idea, most recently when Obama used the veto in 2015. Israel is the only state in the region that has nuclear weapons. If the US would push Israel to disarm then Iran would not feel like it needs nuclear weapons also. Nuclear deterrence via nuclear proliferation has not lead to peace on earth since the end of WWII. What if we tried deterrence through disarmament. Only the US stands in the way.

Noam Chomsky discusses a nuclear free Middle East in his book A Livable Future is Possible. See page 235.

4. Chad W. Seagren and David R. Henderson, “Why We Fight: A Study of U.S. Government War-Making Propaganda,” The Independent Review, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Summer 2018), 70.