(The photo shows Mosul after its destruction in 2017)

“In a roundtable discussion Wednesday [8 May], former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and Palantir CEO Alex Karp defended Israel’s massacre of Palestinian civilians by advocating military brutality as a general principle. ….  “Before we all get self-righteous about what Israel is doing, we shouldn’t forget that the United States killed a lot of innocent people in Mosul and Raqqa,” Milley said, referring to the US attacks on the Iraqi cities in 2016 and 2017, notorious for indiscriminate bombing that led to thousands, or tens of thousands, of civilian casualties.

Milley then turned to the US war in the Pacific during World War II, declaring, “We destroyed 69 Japanese cities, not including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we slaughtered people in massive numbers, innocent people who had nothing to do with their government, men, women, and children.

“War is a terrible thing. But if it’s going to have meaning, if it’s going to have any sense of morality, there has to be a political purpose, and it must be achieved rapidly with the least cost, and that is done by speed.”

At this point, Karp jumped in, declaring, “The peace activists are actually the pro-war activists, and we’re the peace activists. So if you don’t want war, you better be strong. You have to scare your adversary.”

This discussion took place at the Ash Carter Exchange, a conference sponsored by the Special Competitive Studies Project, a US think tank founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. David Cohen, the Deputy Director of the CIA, and Schmidt himself also participated in the discussion. Both Google and Palantir are major contractors for both the United States and Israeli militaries and intelligence agencies. 

The transcript of the discussion was not made public, and no official video recording is available. However, clips began to immediately circulate on social media revealing excerpts from what was discussed behind closed doors.

A major focus of the discussion was the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, which all participants vociferously defended. Strikingly, Milley and Karp argued in defense of Israel’s actions not on the basis of particular expediencies or exceptions, but by asserting the claim that war crimes are a positive good and a means to achieve “peace.”

Milley, in agreement, added, “They’re out there supporting a terrorist organization.”

It is worth carefully considering these statements. What does it mean to say that the means to achieve “peace” is for an army to be “fierce,” and to “scare your enemy”? The logical conclusion is that those armies that are the most violent, who do not fight in accordance with the laws of war, are most effective, and therefore, the most moral and peace-loving.

By this logic, the most peaceful army in history was the German Wehrmacht under Adolf Hitler, which dispensed with the law of war entirely, illegally killing tens of millions of people—civilians and captured soldiers alike.

The remarks by Milley and Karp are unique only in that they express with particular bluntness, in a semi-public sphere, the general conceptions that have come to dominate US war planning. Dominant sections of the US political establishment are adopting as their mantra the first slogan of the party in George Orwell’s 1984: “War is peace.”

Milley, in particular, has repeated this argument on numerous occasions. “Preparation for war and deterrence is extraordinarily expensive, but it’s not as expensive as fighting a war,” Milley said in congressional testimony last year. “This budget prevents war and prepares us to fight it if necessary.”

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/10/nqhi-m10.html

John Minahane commented:

“This is one of the rare truthful references to what happened in Mosul and Raaqa. They were carpet-bombed. Raaqa looked like Gaza City does now, or worse. But because ISIS was so very awful, no one expressed any qualms about it. 

If I remember rightly, Mosul and Raaqa were not among the historical examples chosen by Israeli propagandists at the beginning of this conflict, to justify what they proposed to do to Gaza.  They said: you did Dresden, you did Hiroshima, you did the firebombing of Japan, you did the German blockade. They didn’t say: you did Mosul, you did Raaqa.”