Aletho News

JD Vance Falsely Claims the US Does Not Murder Civilians

By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | September 5, 2026

Vice President JD Vance is doing a poor job of paving over the war crimes of the Trump administration. On September 1, he declared Iran is lying about the US bombing of a wedding celebration in Kuhestak, southern Iran, that killed five, including a child, and injured at least 60 people. “What I can say with 100% confidence is that unlike the IRGC, the United States never targets civilians in combat,” Vance said, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary. “We never will do that. We never have done that.”

Since World War II, civilians have accounted for approximately 60–75% of deaths in major wars involving the United States.

James A. Lucas writes “that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.”

Although the aforementioned figure includes all fatalities, including those of military personnel, the vast majority of these deaths are civilian. According to official estimates, approximately 1.5–3 million civilians were killed during the Korean War, while military casualties stand at roughly one million. The US military conducted a “scorched earth” bombing campaign in North Korea. In addition to military targets, the US bombed cities, villages, industrial facilities, and dams.

Mi Young Lee, a Korean filmmaker, discovered a wealth of declassified material while conducting research for the documentary Scorched Earth (Chotohwajagjeon). Among the findings previously unreleased are pilot mission reports that provide documentation or corroboration of accounts of bombings and strafing runs. For instance, these reports detail attacks on North Korean refugees attempting to cross the Imjin River on January 1, 1951.

The US conducted a number of massacres during the Korean War, including the No Gun Ri (Nogeun-ri, South Korea) massacre that killed around 400 civilians. This war crime was perpetrated by the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, of the US Army. JD Vance is obviously unaware that the No Gun Ri massacre was ordered by the US military. Survivors and military veterans reported that they were told to “fire on everything, kill ‘em all.” The majority of victims were women, children, and the elderly.

US forces dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea, destroying nearly every major city and town. General Curtis LeMay estimated the US. “eventually burned down every town in North Korea… Over a period of three years or so, we killed off… twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure.”

During the Vietnam War, more than 2 million civilians were killed, in contrast to approximately 1.1 million military fatalities among North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, along with the deaths of South Vietnamese, US, and other allied military personnel. However, this is likely an underestimate, as other sources put the number of civilian deaths at more than 4 million.

Is it possible JD Vance never heard of the My Lai massacre? On March 16, 1968 members of Charlie Company from the US military killed between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians, predominantly women, children, and elderly men, in the village of Sơn Mỹ located in Quảng Ngãi province. The official count provided by the U.S. Army is 347, while a memorial in Vietnam records 504 names.

During Operation Speedy Express conducted between December 1968 and March 1969, US military operations resulted in the deaths of thousands of Vietnamese, with subsequent estimates indicating that a significant number were civilians. The Pentagon documented approximately 10,899 enemy fatalities, yet only 748 weapons were seized, suggesting that many of those killed were non-combatants.

The CIA’s Phoenix Program, between 1965 and 1972, designed to assassinate Viet Cong, killed an estimated 26,000–41,000 people, many of them civilians. This program has faced significant criticism due to its high number of civilian casualties and its methods, which involved torture.

More than 150,000 civilians lost their lives due to US bombing campaigns in Cambodia. The bombings in Cambodia resulted in the destruction of numerous villages and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. The legacy of these wars continues today, as unexploded ordnance continues to injure and kill people across the region.

During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the US used “precision bombs” against the Amiriya air raid shelter in western Baghdad, murdering more than 400 civilians. It was the largest single case of civilian casualties that occurred during Operation Desert Storm. In addition to attacking civilians directly during the war, the US targeted the Iraqi electrical grid, water treatment plants, bridges, roads, schools, and other civilian infrastructure, leading to an unprecedented number of civilian deaths.

Sanctions imposed on Iraq during George H.W. Bush’s illegal war, and continued by President Bill Clinton, “were deeply cruel and inhumane. People could no longer acquire basic food products or medical supplies. This led directly to starvation, chronic child malnutrition and other severe health conditions, and death. Conservative estimates indicate that at least two million people died as a direct result of the sanctions,” notes the Transnational Institute in the Netherlands.

Prior to the War on Terror, the US killed an estimated 500–1,000 Somalis during the “Black Hawk Down” operation in 1993, including women and children, along with armed fighters. The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, conducted primarily by the United States, killed approximately 500 civilians over a 78-day period. The bombing of a passenger train at Grdelica Gorge killed at least 10 people, and a convoy of ethnic Albanian refugees targeted near Gjakova killed 73.

According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, an estimated 241,000 people died as a direct result of George W. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Among the fatalities, 71,344 were civilians who lost their lives on both sides of Afghanistan’s extensive and permeable border with Pakistan. Specifically, at least 47,245 civilians have perished in Afghanistan, while 24,099 have died in Pakistan. Bombing and ground operations killed thousands in Kandahar, Sangin and Lashkar Gah, during the Kunduz hospital airstrike, and drone strikes in Kabul, and elsewhere.

In Iraq, between 2003 and 2011, between 200,000 and over a million civilians were killed by the United States (estimates vary depending on the source and methodology). The US “shock and awe” campaign and subsequent fighting killed thousands.

JD Vance believes, or was told, the US does not strike wedding parties, and yet, in May of 2004, a US airstrike on a wedding celebration at Mukaradeeb, a small village in Anbar Province near the Syrian border, killed 42 civilians, including 11 women and 14 children. The United States military has refuted claims that a wedding was struck, asserting that the site was a valid military target and that insurgents were eliminated. Generals of the US military declined to issue an apology for the incident

In Haditha, Iraq, US Marines killed 24 unarmed civilians, including women, children, and an elderly man in a wheelchair, after a roadside bomb killed a Marine. In Baghdad on July 12, 2007, a US Apache attack helicopter murdered Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Footage of the killing was later made public by WikiLeaks.

“The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, the most violent conflicts in which the U.S. government has engaged in the name of counterterrorism since September 11, 2001, have taken a tremendous human toll,” reports the Costs of War project at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs. “Indirect deaths are estimated to be 3.6-3.8 million, bringing the total death toll, including direct and indirect deaths, to 4.5-4.7 million and counting. Precise mortality figures remain unknown.”

Moreover, as of May 2023, more than 7.6 million children under five in post-9/11 war zones suffered from acute malnutrition, while in the same period over 38 million people in from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria were displaced, either abroad or within their own countries.

Unbeknownst to Vance, a US drone strike in December 2013 targeted a wedding procession in al-Bayda province, Yemen, resulting in the deaths of between 12 and 17 people, predominantly civilians.

As per a Pentagon evaluation, US military actions in 2025 resulted in the deaths of 153 civilians and injuries to 243 others, all linked to three US airstrikes in Yemen during April 2025. Central Command determined that these strikes were “more likely than not” to have caused civilian casualties. Furthermore, an additional 15 incidents in Yemen were still being evaluated as of February 2026.

The United States has carried out numerous drone strikes in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, drone strikes in Pakistan alone are estimated to have killed between 400 and nearly 1,000 civilians, including approximately 160 to 200 children, from 2004 to 2018.

Between 2018 and 2019, Amnesty International and Airwars documented numerous coalition strikes in eastern Syria, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of civilians, frequently in single-family homes. In 2019, it was reported that the US military admitted carrying out a war crime during a Baghuz airstrike in Syria that killed dozens of people.

The incidents mentioned above account for a small portion of the overall civilian fatalities linked to US military operations. Cumulative estimates for the post-9/11 War on Terror indicate that the total civilian death toll ranges from approximately 387,000 to 801,000. The Costs of War project at Brown University has recorded that more than 432,000 civilians lost their lives directly due to US-led conflicts up to 2021. “An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting,” the project concluded.

The Trump administration is notorious for twisting facts and promulgating outright lies and falsehoods about everything from the economy to its illegal war against Iran. Despite Vance’s seeming ignorance about the shameful multiplicity of war crimes administered by the US military since the end of the Second World War, there is a mountain of evidence that reveals the United States is not the untarnished and honorable paragon of virtue and restraint Vance and his boss make it out to be.

September 5, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Deception, War Crimes | Human rights, United States