Do the United States possess the most advanced military technology on the planet?
By almost every standard of comparison, the answer is yes.
Stealth aircraft, precision-guided munitions, satellite targeting systems, and now, as the Pentagon itself admits, artificial intelligence integrated into the target selection process. The question, therefore, is logical and hard to avoid: If American military targeting is so precise, why has the US war machine caused some of the highest numbers of civilian casualties in modern military history? War after war, decade after decade, on every continent that had the misfortune of confronting the American military presence.
Iran: A wedding turned into a cemetery
On September 2, 2026, a wedding was underway in Kuhestak, a mountain village in the Sirik region of Hormozgan province in Iran. Families had gathered as families do everywhere: music, food, and children in colorful clothes playing and smiling. Until an American airstrike struck the home where the wedding celebration was taking place. At least five people were killed. The youngest was a child who should have been dancing at a family wedding that evening, not lying in a cold mortuary. And those who survived? They must now learn to live with the trauma and the guilt of survival. Sirik, however, is not an isolated incident. It is simply the latest entry in a long list. Since December 2001, the US has struck more than a dozen wedding gatherings in different countries, effectively turning weddings into funerals.
From Afghanistan and Iraq to Yemen
In July 2002, the US attacked a wedding in Uruzgan, Afghanistan. Only two women survived. In May 2004, in Iraq, another wedding was targeted in an American attack. In July, in Nangarhar, Afghanistan, an airstrike on a wedding procession killed 47 people, including the bride, who had survived two explosions before finally being killed in the third. Months later, in November 2008, a wedding in Wech Baghtu in Kandahar was hit. The toll was 37 dead, including 23 children. In December 2013, an American drone struck an 11-vehicle wedding procession in Rada’a, Yemen. At least 12 people were killed, while the bride was injured by shrapnel. Weddings. Of all possible events, it is once again weddings that end up on American target lists.
Minab, Lamerd, and a hospital: A repeating pattern
Sirik is not an isolated incident. On the very first day of the US-Israeli war against Iran, a strike on the Shahid Naimi Sports Hall in Lamerd hit a group of volleyball girls during practice. At least 21 people were killed, including several children. Independent investigators identified the weapon as the US Precision Strike Missile, a new weapon system that had just entered operational service, not an old munition where age or technological obsolescence could be used as an excuse. Just hours earlier on the same day, an attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab had killed more than 160 people, the majority of them children. It was the deadliest strike of the war up to that point. And the incidents do not stop there. At midnight between March 1 and March 2, joint US-Israeli strikes damaged the Gandhi Hotel Hospital in Tehran, destroying the IVF unit and forcing staff to evacuate embryos and newborns in the middle of the night. Confirmation followed from the World Health Organization regarding more than 300 health facilities damaged in the weeks that followed. War is terrifying. That is taken for granted and no one disputes it. The question, however, is different: How is it possible, over so many decades and in so many different wars, for civilian casualties on such a scale to be recorded time and again as an "accident"? History functions like any honest observer: it looks for patterns. And patterns create theories. When one places side-by-side what happened from Kabul to Baghdad, Kandahar, Yemen, and elsewhere, the explanation that recurs is that of the arrogance of imperialism. Because if there is one thing that imperialism has historically been associated with, it is violence, barbarity, and crimes against people deemed inferior.
From weddings to funerals – A decades-long pattern
The American attack on a wedding event in southern Iran represents the latest chapter in a decades-long history. From Afghanistan and Iraq to Yemen and now Iran, hundreds of civilians have been killed, while moments of celebration were transformed into scenes of mourning. The critical question, however, does not concern only the weapons. It concerns the psychology that allows a system to continue.
The psychology of the "Other"
Psychology indicates that humans are not evil by nature. Inflicting harm on another human being usually causes genuine emotional stress to the perpetrator. Soldiers often carry this burden for the rest of their lives through nightmares, addiction, post-traumatic stress, and an increased risk of suicide. How, then, can a system convince ordinary people to repeatedly kill wedding guests and children in schools, generation after generation, without the entire mechanism collapsing under the weight of guilt? It creates the "Other". The soldier is trained to view the person on the other end of the gun as somehow less human. Thus, the emotional cost of killing is reduced before the trigger is even pulled.
"Exceptionalism" and the idea that some are above the rules
To be fair, Western imperialism did not invent the practice of "othering". The process by which one society treats another as "foreign" or "inferior" has existed as long as tribes and empires have existed. The Western world, however, perfected it and combined it with something even more insidious: exceptionalism. Namely, the belief that a state stands above the moral rules that govern everyone else. That it is inherently uncorrupt and, therefore, whatever it does is automatically justified. First, because it is done against people who have already been characterized as inferior. And second, because it is supposedly done for good and noble purposes. General William Westmoreland, who commanded US forces in Vietnam, said it on camera in the 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds, explaining why Vietnamese deaths did not weigh on him in the same way as American casualties. "The Oriental doesn't attach the same high value to the human life as does a Westerner," he stated. A four-star general was essentially speaking on behalf of an entire doctrine. Another US Marine veteran in Vietnam, Lloyd Lofthouse, made a smaller but equally revealing admission in his essay Cultural Differences and the Ignorant American in Vietnam. He could not remember a single man in his unit who showed genuine interest in the culture or history of the country they were occupying. Why? Because you cannot mourn what you never learned to see.
The economy of the occupied body
When imperialism is discussed, death and torture are usually at the center. There is, however, another dark crime that receives less discussion: the economy of the occupied body. Between 1966 and 1969, approximately 70,000 American soldiers passed through Thailand as part of official "Rest and Recreation" leaves. The Pentagon officially discouraged prostitution, while at the same time its own patrols accompanied soldiers to bars where women were waiting. Economists later found that around former US bases, there were five times more commercial sex workers compared to areas of Thailand where military bases had not been established. An economic demand shock that continues to affect the region's economy even six decades later. And if all this sounds like ancient history, there is one more question: After 286 days at sea conducting operations against Iran, where did the American aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln make its first actual port call on September 2, 2026? In Laem Chabang, in an area known as a sex tourism hub. Sailors were transported directly to hotels in Pattaya for "rest and recuperation". Same country. Same coastline. Same phrase. Sixty years apart.
The same practice in Korea and Kenya
In Korea, this culture acquired an official form. After the Korean War, the US military and the South Korean government jointly created and operated the so-called "camptowns". There were even state-controlled clinics aimed at keeping the system functional so that the women working in it—many of whom were orphans or abandoned girls—could continue working. In Kenya, British soldiers who have been training for decades at the Army Training Unit near Nanyuki have fathered children with local women and subsequently returned to England. With thousands of documented cases of sexual violence and hundreds of verified incidents, not a single soldier was punished. The children grow up in their villages as pariahs. They carry the stigma of how they were conceived, are called "British" as an insult, are visibly different from others, and essentially grow up without a father. They wait for a country that never recognized them and a father who may not even know they exist.
"Dehumanization" returns within the armies themselves
The logic of the occupied body, however, does not stop outside the military camps. It returns to the interior of the armies themselves. Women serving in these forces have reported sexual assaults at rates exceeding those of almost any equivalent civilian work environment. In 2025 alone, the Pentagon estimated that more than 20,000 members of the US armed forces suffered unwanted sexual contact. Women reported such incidents at a frequency more than four times higher than men. Patriarchy, ultimately, has its own version of the "Other" inside the barracks. A female soldier can be treated as possessing less right to bodily autonomy than the mission itself in which she participates. And here we arrive at the critical issue: the lack of accountability that allows crimes to continue.
"I asked God for a few more minutes of life"
When bombs struck an area near a hospital in Tehran, nurse Neda Salimi took three newborns in her arms and moved them to safety. Her silent heroic act became a symbol of the human cost of the US-Israeli war against Iran. A nurse, three newborns, and a city under bombardment. Yet another image of a war in which civilians pay the heaviest price.
When the whistleblower is punished and the perpetrator is not
In 2005, US Marines in Haditha, Iraq, killed 24 unarmed civilians, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair and six children. A subsequent investigation described the incident as an act of revenge following a roadside improvised explosive device attack. In the end, only one Marine was convicted of anything: dereliction of duty. For the murder of dozens of people, including children, one soldier was demoted without serving any prison time. A year earlier, at Abu Ghraib prison, it was US Army reservist Joe Darby who handed over the photographs that exposed the torture of Iraqi detainees. For this act, he received death threats, was placed under armed protection for six months, and was labeled a traitor by his own community. His colleague Samuel Provance, who spoke to the press about the abuse, was demoted and threatened with up to ten years in military prison. The people who committed the torture served comparatively short sentences. The people who exposed it lost their safety, their reputation, and, in some cases, their careers.
Where is the accountability?
If rules of war exist, why do those who report their violation suffer more than those who violate them? If rules exist, why are they applied so rarely? And if they are applied, why is there such limited accountability? And if there is no accountability, then there is no deterrence. Without deterrence, the system essentially sends the same message to every soldier, pilot, and commander: Do whatever you want. In simple terms, this is how a terrorist organization is created.
Artificial intelligence and precision "mistakes"
In an era when the US military states that it uses artificial intelligence extensively in its targeting process, how is it possible for a strike to hit the same school in Minab and still be labeled a "mistake"? How can a new American precision weapon technology be tested in Lamerd against a team of schoolgirls playing volleyball? How can a hospital be turned into "collateral damage" not just once, but as part of more than 300 health facilities that suffered damage? Why was no one meaningfully punished for the hell of Abu Ghraib, for the massacres at weddings in Afghanistan, or for the documented, decades-long pattern of sexual violence by British, American, and allied soldiers against women from Kenya to Okinawa? And why do hundreds, if not thousands, of sexual violence reports by female soldiers within these militaries so often end in silence?
No need to believe in a secret conspiracy
None of this requires one to believe in a secret conspiracy. It only requires observing that when the same countries, for generations, produce the same categories of harm—the bloody wedding, the bombed school, the brothel around the military base, the soldier who attacks because he knows he can, the whistleblower punished more severely than the criminal—then the honest explanation cannot be an endless series of coincidences. It is a doctrine. A doctrine inherited from empire and never truly abandoned. The general who characterized the pain of an entire people as cheap. The pilot who struck a volleyball court with the newest missile system in the arsenal. The sailor bused to Pattaya after nine months of war. All of them, in different ways, were first taught the same lesson: That some people are the protagonists of History and others are simply the people to whom bad things are destined to happen. And that is the darkest legacy of imperialism: turning the "Other" from a human being into a target—and then attempting to present their destruction as inevitable, necessary, or simply as another "mistake" of war.
www.bankingnews.gr
Readers’ Comments