How US imperialism dehumanizes the 'other' to justify ghastly war crimes and escape accountability

Does the United States possess the most advanced military technology on Earth? By almost every measure, yes. Stealth aircraft, precision-guided munitions, satellite targeting, and now, by the Pentagon’s own admission, artificial intelligence woven into the targeting process itself. 

So the glaring question then is: if the targeting is this precise, why has the US war machine produced some of the highest civilian casualty tolls of any modern military? War after war, decade after decade, on every continent that has had the misfortune of US military presence.

On September 2, 2026, a wedding was underway in Kuhestak, a mountain village in Sirik County, in Iran’s Hormozgan Province. Families had gathered the way families gather everywhere, with music, food and joyful children wearing colorful clothes. 

Then an American airstrike hit the home hosting the wedding celebration. At least five people died. The youngest was a child who should have spent that night dancing at a family wedding and instead spent it in a cold morgue. And those who survived? Well, they must now learn how to live with the trauma and guilt of survival.

Sirik was not an aberration, though; it was the latest entry in a lengthy ledger. Since December 2001, the US has struck more than a dozen wedding parties across multiple countries, effectively turning weddings into funerals.

 In July 2002, the US attacked a wedding in Uruzgan, Afghanistan; only two women survived that attack. Iraq, May 2004: another wedding, another US attack. In July, Nangarhar, Afghanistan: an airstrike on a bridal convoy killed 47 people, including the bride herself, who survived two blasts before the third one found her. Months later, in November 2008, a wedding in Wech Baghtu, Kandahar, was hit — 37 dead, 23 of them children. In December 2013, a US drone fired on an 11-vehicle wedding procession in Rada’a, Yemen, killing at least 12 people; the bride was wounded by shrapnel. Weddings, of all things, keep ending up on American target lists. [MORE]