Dragons, War, and State Terrorism

What "Game of Thrones" tells us about war crimes and the American way of war

Two recent reports on the Ukraine War made me laugh but not in a good way. Both concern drone strikes in late July on glittering office towers in Moscow that resulted in minor damage and casualties. 

Zelensky all but took responsibility, saying, “Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia — to its symbolic centers and military bases, and this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process.”

As I said in my last article on Ukraine, chest thumping about war crimes is irrelevant. Of course they are happening and Russia is the main perpetrator. But when it comes to American Empire, war crimes are a feature not a bug. 

First is a report in the Financial Times. An unnamed “senior Western military official” defended drone strikes on civilians, “[Morale] can be undermined directly, but also via soldiers’ families and the civilians that sustain the fight at home.”

I laughed because the official used the same justification that the Allies used to incinerate 100,000 civilians in Tokyo and 25,000 in Dresden in the waning months of World War 2. Some British and Americans argued the mass murder of civilians would break the morale of Germany and Japan and win the war faster.

Bombing civilians was controversial during the war, and the architects now seen by many as war criminals — Royal Air Force Marshal Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris and General Curtis LeMay, the inspiration for General Jack D. Ripper who ignites nuclear armageddon in Dr. Stranglove. 

There is little evidence bombing civilians breaks morale, and it can backfire. Bloomberg News made that exact point last winter about Russia bombing Ukraine’s infrastructure, saying it could be “counterproductive, since such campaigns can cause a rally-around-the-flag effect.”

It gets worse. A Ukrainian official said of the attack, “Those who work in Moskva-City towers are the privileged class of government officials and business people. They saw with their own eyes that Russian authorities are incapable of and cannot protect even their social group. There is no air defense, air raid alerts, bomb shelters for them.”

Ukraine is adopting an Osama bin Laden — and Rambo-like — mentality, “There are no friendly civilians.” Ukraine, in the words of its Commander-in-Chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, will “decide how to kill this enemy. It is possible and necessary to kill on his territory in a war.” This shows Ukraine’s intent to commit war crimes that is matched by dozens of attacks it has carried out against civilian targets in Russia, even if the atrocities are a tiny fraction committed by Putin.

The U.N. swiftly condemned the attacks since attacking civilians is a war crime. But don’t hold your breath waiting for liberals who love the taste of Zelensky’s boot to demand that he be tried for war crimes alongside Putin. Russians, like Japanese and Germans, are unworthy victims.

Western “experts” justify collective punishment against Russians as a means to break their will to fight — even though a few months earlier other Western experts scoffed at the idea that Russian atrocities against Ukrainians would break their will to fight.

At the same time, drones with puny payloads are a minor threat to civilians. Ukraine’s attacks in Moscow make far more impact in the media than in the lives of Russian civilians. But Ukraine feels it has impunity to commit war crimes because it’s “natural and absolutely fair process.”

This type of hypocrisy greases the wheels of America’s war machine. Any time Russia kills a Ukrainian civilian it’s front-page news. But it is nearly impossible to find recent reports on the deaths in Afghanistan caused by brutal U.S. sanctions. In early 2022, right as Putin launched his criminal invasion, about 1,200 Afghan newborn babies were dying every week, with “worsening malnutrition, hunger-related diseases, and the collapse of the country’s healthcare sector” playing a significant role. U.S. sanctions may have killed hundreds of thousands of Afghans since 2022, but there is no reporting I can find. 

No country has levied so many harsh sanctions so extensively as the United States, with close to 2 billion people living in sanctioned countries. U.S. sanctions on Russian food, fuel, and fertilizer is pushing dozens of countries to the brink of collapse. There is plenty to blame Russia for, chiefly launching an illegal war. But Russia wants to sell commodities, and U.S. sanctions are killing far more people in the Global South than Putin is killing in Ukraine. 

The Ukraine War is white lives matter for pro-war liberals and leftists. Their callousness toward victims of U.S. policies, or Ukraine seeking collective punishment of Russian civilians, is nothing new. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky described it as worthy versus unworthy victims in their essential work, Manufacturing Consent. Read this passage if you haven’t in a while.

When it comes to war crimes the U.S. stands alone in the death and destruction it has dealt out since World War 2. Much of that is the form of remote killing from 30,000 feet up. But we never see up close what the American way of war looks like. A pop culture staple is videos of B-52s unleashing bombs on Vietnam and fighter-jets saturating villages with napalm. The point of view is always from the pilot though. There is a terrifying beauty to the shock wave rippling out or the fiery blossom of death spreading upward. 

I have been thinking about this since the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a few days ago, and more attention is being paid this year because of the Oppenheimer biopic. It’s vital to remember these atrocities because the threat of nuclear war hangs over humanity, not least of because the Ukraine War. And many historians argue the evidence shows the horrors unleashed on innocent civilians was completely unnecessary. 

We know Japan’s military dictatorship was unfazed by the atomic bombs. To them it was like fire bombings. But the Soviet Union’s entry into the Pacific war convinced them surrender was the only option. Truman’s decision to murder an estimated 210,000 civilians was the first shot in the Cold War against Stalin. 

Carpet bombing of civilians in Germany and Japan probably killed more people than the two nukes. And the U.S. has kept on carpet-bombing since: Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia. No other country commits such extensive atrocities by bomb and bank. It’s state terrorism, and the U.S. is by far and away the global leader, as Chomsky has documented for decades.

The U.S. bombing of Mosul in 2017 resulted in the massacre of more than 40,000 civilians. Thousands of Iraqis were reportedly entombed in their homes. The death toll exceeds the highest estimate of Ukrainian civilian deaths in 18 months of Russia’s war. 

We never see the effects of U.S. bombing. But there is a fictional instance that stunningly portrays the horrors of bombing. It’s from the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones in its limp final season. You don’t need to know anything about the show, you can hate it, but watch this clip starting at the two-minute mark. It’s barely a minute.

The dragon is a fighter-bomber saturating the city with napalm-like fire. We see the perspective of victims who are a mix of soldiers and civilians, all powerless. We sympathize with them, experience their terror and agony and the horror. The viewer is being napalmed.

To my knowledge, no one has made this connection between the dragon and U.S. aerial firepower. I don’t think the filmmakers realized it either, they were just using CGI to model the physics of the dragon assault. It’s similar to how the destruction of Hometree in Avatar looks just like the burning towers on 9/11. 

In Game of Thrones the fictional characters are worthy. The main characters who represent justice and the quest for morality look on horror. Even the soldiers are treated as worthy victims. 

It’s not like the Persian Gulf in 1991. After the U.S. deliberately bombed the Amiriyah air raid shelter in Baghdad, incinerating 400 civilians. It was a straight-up war crime. I remember to this day the person-on-the-street interviews on the national news. New Yorkers justified the massacre of innocents, saying, “It was their own fault.” (The big three news networks used to all be based in Manhattan.) Secretary of State James Baker crowed about Iraq being “bombed back to the stone age.” A war crime on the scale of his predecessor, Henry Kissinger. And that’s not even mentioning the 100,000 Iraqi soldiers who may have died, many of them slaughtered while retreating on the “Highway of Death.” But the U.S. “was never forced to account for its actions.”

Being America means you never have to say you’re sorry for the atrocities you commit. That privilege apparently extends to Ukraine now as well.