Remember What You Felt Watching An Airstrike Collapse American Buildings?

The normalization of 'domicide,' after someone did it to our buildings on a particular day. PLUS: FOREVER WARS needs your feedback!

Edited by Sam Thielman

DON'T SAY, "HEY SPENCER, you sure picked a dumb week to not produce a second edition of your newsletter." Say, "Hey, Spencer, you showed tremendous discipline in sticking with your plan to finish your book chapter last week instead of pivoting to the Yemen-bombing group chat leak and everything else that happened in a pitiful week for the country. Did you finish the chapter?" 

Why yes, thank you, I did. Not only did I finish that chapter of THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN, I have made it to the last section of the next chapter. But I probably won't finish that this week, because I have IRON MAN scripts due. Accordingly, I'm afraid, this week is probably going to be another single-edition week of this newsletter. And it won't be the last such week in 2025. In the middle of April, my family is taking an overseas vacation that my wonderful wife has spent a lot of time putting together. While last year I figured I would use the change of scenery to work on the book, this year I don't want to put my family in the position of explaining to the customs officer harvesting data from my laptop that while I am writing a book about a former member of al-Qaeda, I am not myself an Affiliate. 

Beyond all that, the realities of producing a book that requires a lot of my journalistic energy makes me nervous that you, our cherished and attractive (all genders) readership, will back away from this newsletter. I can't afford that, frankly. So I'd like to ask you for your feedback. If you're a paid subscriber, do you want two editions per week, even if that pace makes FOREVER WARS more a venue for essays/blogs-in-newsletter-form? Or would you rather a slower pace of the newsletter with more reported pieces? If you're not yet a paid subscriber—and c'mon, pal, this isn't a lending library—which of these options would incline you to open your wallet? Or am I just catastrophizing in your inbox because you're a FOREVER WARS reader for the long haul and I've got enough of a well of trust from you that you don't feel underserved by single-week newsletters? [It’s that one.—Sam] Email your thoughts to foreverwars.bullpen@gmail.com.

THE IMPORTANT THING about the Yemen-bombing plans leak is what Mehdi Hasan wrote on Friday, and I'm not saying that because he signs my Zeteo checks. It's how normalized it is for the appointed leadership of the Security State to order the destruction of residences, in pursuit of a particular target, knowing that civilians are inside. National security adviser Mike Waltz:

Building collapsed. Had multiple positive ID. Pete [Hegseth, secretary of defense], Kurilla [Gen. Erik Kurilla, commander of U.S. Central Command], the IC [intelligence community], amazing job. … Typing too fast. The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend's building and now it's collapsed. … [fist emoji] [American flag emoji] [fire emoji]

Anyone who's read Azmat Khan's Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting knows to be skeptical of a "positive ID" assurance, available near-instantaneously via a standoff capability rather than on-the-ground confirmation. Many has been the time that, oops, the U.S. didn't kill the Top Enemy Guy they said, but instead a case of mistaken identity or other intelligence failure consigned innocent people to their doom. But even if Waltz, a decorated Green Beret officer and Afghanistan veteran, is correct that they got The Top Houthi Missile Guy, it seems likely that they also killed the guy's girlfriend and whomever else was in the building. They were certainly willing to kill the girlfriend. 

No one in the Trump administration group chat stops to remark on this entailed civilian death toll. Nor was it a feature of the Atlantic coverage that broke these stories. With the exception of coverage like Mehdi's, it was just an unremarkable detail, and I recognize it's easy for the guy who took a week off to write his book to write that a week later. Still, it's hard not to see that inattention as the wages of normalization—and not just from all the times since October 7 that Israel has flattened inhabited buildings in Gaza, but from all the times since 9/11 the U.S. has, too. 

In 2011 – a year, remember, when the U.S. famously didn't order an airstrike on the Abbottabad building where Osama bin Laden and his family were – I got ahold of a cache of photographs that showed the aftermath of U.S. drone strikes in western Pakistan. (Don't click through unless you are prepared to see dead children.) Back then, it was the epicenter of such strikes, and a place few western reporters (myself included) ever visited. I still remember the way the structures sometimes remained standing thanks to the relatively small size of the repurposed anti-tank missile, the Hellfire, that Predator and Reaper drones fired, compared to the far larger munitions in the U.S. arsenal that featured in places like Iraq. Still even when parts of the buildings remained, much of the home, obviously, did not. Later, when I interviewed survivors of drone strikes, I heard about how even when those homes housed single families, that meant entire extended families often lived there. 

Still, exploring such considerations risked obscuring the obvious: The U.S. chain of command (in this case, the CIA up through to the White House) considered it acceptable to launch an airstrike on a house if the operator understood an approved target to be inside. Whomever else was also inside was, tacitly, presumed to be complicit, if they merited consideration at all. This is now known by the neologism "domicide." 

That same year, I interviewed an Army officer who encountered in southern Afghanistan multiple buildings rigged by the Taliban to explode should his soldiers venture in or near them. Afghan civilians, he said, with other reports corroborating him, had fled the three villages where the rigging had taken place. The officer ordered the villages destroyed. We might not have known that had not Paula Broadwell, a military analyst who had grown, er, close to commanding U.S. general David Petraeus, blogged about more than 49,000 pounds of bombs wiping the villages off the map. She presented it as a success story. 

A half-dozen years later, U.S. "advisory" forces and warplanes helped retake the densely populated Iraqi city of Mosul, a city I have spent time in, from the so-called Islamic State. Unlike the 2003-2011 U.S. occupation, when the war resumed, the U.S. military did not accept journalists embedding with them, and that inhibited U.S. reporting on what would become some of the most intense urban combat of the 21st century. Still, Jane Ferguson of PBS summarized a year after the recapture, "buildings were pounded into rubble. Rubble was pounded into dust… Heaps of smashed buildings stand as monuments to the lives destroyed here." After noting that the U.S. relaxed its rules of engagement in late 2016—so, under Barack Obama, not Donald Trump—Ferguson quoted a welder from Mosul named Younes Hassan who found more than half of his neighbors dead under the rubble:

The American government and the Iraqis are saying not too many civilians are dead. No, a lot are dead. All of these houses were filled with people. All their homes were destroyed, and they died in them. Very few managed to escape. 

When I was writing REIGN OF TERROR, processing the sheer volume of a generation's worth of U.S. bombardment made me remark that 20 years of relentless airstrikes all over the world were the result of the U.S. experiencing a single day of airstrikes at home. I didn't write that to diminish the horror of 9/11. I wrote that because I very vividly remember the horror of 9/11, of watching mass death rain from above on my city, with fear coursing through me for months afterward that everyone I loved could very well die this way and I could do nothing about it. How many millions of people have felt as I did after the U.S. or its allies launched airstrikes on their cities? 

But of course the defining feature of 9/11 wasn't just the transformation of hijacked airplanes into missiles. It was two very large buildings packed with thousands of people collapsing into a nightmarish end. Now compounding that horror is the horror, a generation later, of the U.S. collapsing buildings from the air so routinely that it barely registers as having happened, as far as the people ordering it are concerned. Just a self-satisfied emoji to the applause of the chat. I think of that when I see Trump nonchalantly threaten Iran with "bombing the likes of which they have never seen before." Maybe it doesn't register because American Exceptionalism tells us that we're not the kind of people who collapse buildings on innocent people and so if we collapse a building, that only means that everyone inside it was guilty all along. But either way, this is what our ruling class—and not only our ruling class, but we sure recognize it clearer when U.S. adversaries like Putin or Assad do it—has decided will be normal. 

"NATIONAL SECURITY" AS CLASS WAR: Using the pretext of "national security," Trump on Friday issued an executive order designed to inflict a crippling blow on public-sector organized labor. Read Hamilton Nolan and Van Jackson on why this is (yet another) five-alarm fire. I want to develop something at greater length about the long-obscured utility of "national security" to class war, but I would note that it runs somewhat between the lines of this Aziz Rana essay in New Left Review that's as good as everyone says it is. (Rana puts it in terms of anti-communism, which isn't wrong, but it stops the story 35 years ago in a way I am sure he doesn't intend.) And this being FOREVER WARS, I have to note that in 2002, congressional Republicans attempted to include a provision in the bill creating the Department of Homeland Security that would have exempted significant swaths of its workforce from the union-eligible, non-appointee federal civil service. I know that because that was the subject of the very first "national-security" story I ever got into a national publication. (The link is dead; I just feel compelled to cite a source for the claim.)

FREE RUMEYSA OZTURK. I don't know how many times I watched the video of her abduction by plainclothes officers, all for… writing an obscure op-ed. At this point saying anything else feels like commentary. And if you want that, Al-Jazeera's Brian Osgood called me for my perspective on the War on Terror lineage for the present state assaults on U.S. freedoms of speech and assembly. I was also interviewed for this podcast that I think is in Swedish. 

I HOPE we see each other again this week! However, I have an IRON MAN deadline I need to hit, so we're white-knuckling it here at FOREVER WARS HQ. And if you've ever had a question for me about my IRON MAN run, on Friday I'll be doing an AMA on the Iron Man subreddit! 

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! Bulletproof is also selling signed copies of my IRON MAN run with Julius Ohta, so if you want those, buy them from Flatbush's finest! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.