"No, the United States does not target civilians"
About this Quote
A denial this crisp is never just a statement of fact; it is a performance of legitimacy. “No” arrives first, like a gavel strike, shutting down debate before it starts. Then comes the careful bureaucratic phrasing: “the United States” as an abstract actor, not commanders, pilots, or policymakers; “does not target” as a term of art from the laws of armed conflict; “civilians” as the morally charged category everyone agrees must be protected. The sentence is engineered to sound like principle, even as it dodges the messier question the public actually asks: not whether civilians are ever deliberately singled out, but whether civilian death is structurally tolerated, repeatedly foreseeable, and politically managed.
Feith, a key Defense Department figure in the post-9/11 era, spoke from inside a system that had to sell war in the language of precision and restraint. The subtext is the old Washington move: shift the argument from outcomes to intentions. If the intention is clean, the body count becomes “collateral,” the tragedy becomes “unintended,” and accountability can be rerouted into process talk - rules of engagement, intelligence failures, regrettable mistakes. The power of the line lies in how it tries to preempt the moral indictment by anchoring the conversation in a legalistic definition of targeting, where precision munitions and careful wording can be treated as absolution.
It also functions as a loyalty test. Agreeing signals you accept the state’s self-image as fundamentally humane; disagreeing risks being cast as accusing the country of war crimes. That’s why it works: it’s less an empirical claim than a boundary-setting device for what can be said aloud during war.
Feith, a key Defense Department figure in the post-9/11 era, spoke from inside a system that had to sell war in the language of precision and restraint. The subtext is the old Washington move: shift the argument from outcomes to intentions. If the intention is clean, the body count becomes “collateral,” the tragedy becomes “unintended,” and accountability can be rerouted into process talk - rules of engagement, intelligence failures, regrettable mistakes. The power of the line lies in how it tries to preempt the moral indictment by anchoring the conversation in a legalistic definition of targeting, where precision munitions and careful wording can be treated as absolution.
It also functions as a loyalty test. Agreeing signals you accept the state’s self-image as fundamentally humane; disagreeing risks being cast as accusing the country of war crimes. That’s why it works: it’s less an empirical claim than a boundary-setting device for what can be said aloud during war.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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