Letters | For powers like the US, ‘crimes are those that others commit’

Readers discuss the exceptional impunity that the US enjoys, Donald Trump’s ‘golden age of America’, and Elon Musk’s support for the extreme right

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Palestinians sit near the rubble of buildings in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on January 22, following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Photo: Reuters

Published: 11:30am, 25 Jan 2025

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Airwars is a non-profit watchdog that investigates harm to civilians during armed conflict. In its report on the Israel-Gaza war, it concludes: “By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.”

In a recent interview with Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC, outgoing US president Joe Biden recounted his first visit with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the October 7 terror attack by Hamas. According to Biden, “I said, ‘But Bibi, you can’t be carpet bombing these communities.’ And he said to me, ‘Well you did it. You carpet bombed Berlin. You dropped a nuclear weapon. You killed thousands of innocent people because you had to in order to win a war.’”

The Fog of War is a documentary film about the life of Robert McNamara, US defence secretary from 1961 to 1968. In 1945, he was serving on Guam under air force officer Curtis LeMay, who directed the firebombing campaign against Japanese cities whereby in a “single night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo: men, women, and children”.

McNamara also said LeMay’s massive firebombing campaign killed 50 per cent to 90 per cent of the people in 67 Japanese cities.

According to him, LeMay believed that if the United States had lost the war, he and those in his command would have been prosecuted as war criminals. McNamara agreed: “He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognised that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”