by Danny Sjursen<\/p>\n
What\u2019s the value of an American life in the age of Donald Trump? If you were judging by the death of\u00a0Nawres Hamid<\/a>, an Iraqi-American contractor killed in late December after an American base in Iraq was mortared by a Shiite militia believed to have ties to Iran, the answer would be obvious: enough to risk war. After all, the president\u00a0cited<\/a>\u00a0Hamid\u2019s death in going after that militia and then\u00a0drone-assassinating<\/a>\u00a0Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani. In response to the mortar attack, U.S. air strikes in Iraq and Syria killed\u00a0at least 25<\/a>\u00a0Iraqi militia fighters and then, as January began, that drone strike near Baghdad International Airport took out a figure who was often considered the number-two man in Iran, as well as its possible future leader. In addition, it\u00a0killed<\/a>\u00a0an Iraqi militia commander and\u00a0eight other<\/a>\u00a0people.<\/p>\n So you might say that the president considers any American death under such circumstances worth not just 35 Iraqis and Iranians, but the possibility of adding in a significant way to America\u2019s forever wars (that he\u2019s long\u00a0denounced<\/a>). Of course, you would have to reach a different conclusion if you considered\u00a0the deaths<\/a>\u00a0in early January of an American soldier and two American contractors at an airport in Kenya after an attack by the Somali terror group al-Shabaab. In that case, there was no obvious response at all, not even a comment from the president. And the same would be true of the\u00a0two dead<\/a>\u00a0and two wounded U.S. soldiers whose vehicle recently ran over a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan (deaths immediately claimed by the Taliban). Again, neither a comment nor a response from you-know-who.<\/p>\n In other words, as\u00a0TomDispatch<\/em>\u00a0regular<\/a>\u00a0and retired U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen points out today, who can be surprised that, in the age of Trump, this country\u2019s forever wars are also a chaos machine? If you\u2019re looking at the non-American dead, of course, that\u2019s been so since the beginning. After all, the U.S. military has\u00a0taken out<\/a>\u00a0one wedding after another across the Greater Middle East since it invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and it\u2019s counted for nothing, mattered not at all. And the slaughter of civilians never ends. Only recently, for instance, in an attack in Afghanistan that killed a Taliban commander and some of the militants under his command, U.S. air strikes also reportedly killed at least\u00a060 civilians<\/a>, including women and children. And in the Trump era, although we know that\u00a0civilian casualties<\/a>\u00a0have been\u00a0rising<\/a>\u00a0in Washington’s ever-spreading war zones, a penumbra of secrecy has fallen over such deaths. American air strikes against al-Shabaab in Somalia, for instance,\u00a0rose dramatically<\/a>\u00a0in 2019, but we have almost no idea how many civilians died in the process. (Rest assured that they\u00a0did<\/a>, though.)<\/p>\n Now, take a moment, with Sjursen, to consider just what it\u2019s meant for a \u201ctrue stable genius<\/a>\u201d to inherit such an unstable killing machine.\u00a0Tom<\/em><\/p>\n