The War Prayer

 In a recent blog I zeroed in on one aspect of that leaked Signal chat story that I thought had received insufficient attention at the time—namely, the impact on the people of Yemen of the strike that was discussed over the thread. After senior members of the administration stupidly added a journalist to their group chat, much of the outside scrutiny focused instead on the security implications of this blunder. 

But I found myself no less disturbed by the actual content of the leaked messages themselves. The participants in the thread, after all, cheer on the bombings they are carrying out in Yemen with "fist bumps," jingoistic bravado, and flame emojis. When one of them reports that a "building collapsed" from a U.S. strike, J.D. Vance replies to this grim news with one word: "Excellent." 

How many civilians were killed in that building collapse, I wondered in that earlier post? We may never know the full answer to that question. But the New Yorker sheds partial light on the matter. In new reporting out this week, the journalist Rozina Ali speaks to a number of eyewitnesses to the bombing. These indicate that many, if not all of the casualties, appear to have been innocents:

Hassan’s brothers were already there, digging through the rubble, searching for the remains of a family. 'They were scattered and torn into pieces,' he said. Rescuers recovered mangled bodies. Among them were two faces Hassan recognized well: the five-year-old boy, Hamad, and a three-year-old girl, Dareen[....] Hamad was dead.

I keep thinking back to one particularly revolting moment in the Signal thread. J.D. Vance—that pseudo-pious fraud—at one point offers "a prayer for victory." "Godspeed to our warriors," adds Pete Hegseth, as the bombs are about to rain on these families' homes. One is reminded of a verse by Shelley: "Clothed with the Bible, as with light, [...] Hypocrisy/ On a crocodile rode by."

One is reminded even more strongly, though, of Mark Twain's classic story, "The War Prayer." I just revisited it, in light of the U.S. strikes in Yemen. In the tale, a minister offers a "prayer for victory"—much like Vance's—before the assembled jingoistic townspeople on the eve of war. But then a mysterious stranger appears to remind them of the real meaning of their supplication. 

The "unstated" part of the "prayer for victory," Twain writes, includes the lines: "help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; / help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; / help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst[.]"

That appears to have been the unspoken part of J.D. Vance's and Pete Hegseth's divine invocation as well. By wishing "Godspeed" to America's "warriors" and utterly a "prayer for victory," they were really committing the ultimate blasphemy—calling upon God to help them in the unholy task of obliterating a family's home and killing a five-year-old child "with a hurricane of fire." 

The stupidity and cruelty of these men continues to be breathtaking. They are of course now spending this week willfully destroying the entire global economy in a way that seems calculated to gratuitously harm the already-poorest parts of the globe. Their own incompetence and malice are upending people's lives in a way that has fast become inescapable not only in this country, but across the entire human world. 

They are dismantling the entire global infrastructure of U.S. foreign aid, in the name of cost-saving. But at the same time, they also just proposed to elevate the U.S. military budget to above 1 trillion dollars for the first time in history. Apparently, the country can no longer afford to send humanitarian aid to places like Yemen—but it can spend billions more dollars to keep bombing it. 

One cannot help but agree with Longfellow's words, which I also quoted in the previous post: 

Were half the power, that fills the world with terror,

      Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,

Given to redeem the human mind from error,

      There were no need of arsenals or forts:

The warrior's name would be a name abhorred!

      And every nation, that should lift again

Its hand against a brother, on its forehead

      Would wear forevermore the curse of Cain!