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Caribbean Catastrophes: The Hurricane We See and the War We Don't
A deadly force is brewing—and it's not caused by the climate.
Oct 31, 2025
A deadly force, intensifying as it goes, claiming lives and destabilizing nations. Hurricane Melissa’s assault on the Caribbean was devastating. So is President Donald Trump's extrajudicial bombing campaign.
When Melissa hit Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, we saw heartrending pictures of homes underwater, families wading through muck, and hospitals with their roofs blown off. The compassion we felt was real, the urgency high, and for a news cycle or two, the media made the world pay attention.
But not too far from Melissa’s flood zone, another kind of disaster has been unfolding in comparative media quiet. This one is caused not by climate, but by our autocratic president, who gave us two month’s warning.
On September 23, in a thuggish address to the United Nations, Donald Trump explicitly threatened to blow “Venezuelan terrorist drug smugglers” “out of existence” in blatant disregard of international law or due process. Sure enough, as of the end of October, US forces had conducted 15 air strikes on multiple vessels in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific.
Politicians, pundits, and the press still have time to get the American people activated enough to stop this country’s next catastrophic war.
The White House thumps on about stopping narcotics flow, but we’ve seen no interceptions, no arrests, no narcotics cargo—only executions.
Melissa took, by an early count, 32 lives. Trump’s warships and drones have officially killed at least 61 people. The survivors and victims include nationals from Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Trinidad, mostly fishermen and boat crews whose families—and governments—dispute all allegations of narco trafficking. The Trump team doesn’t care. Nor does it care to consult Congress—as the War Powers Act requires—or offer proof.
Now, a massive military force is massed just to the south and east of Melissa’s path of destruction. The US deployment reportedly includes tens of thousands of troops, eight major warships, three amphibious assault ships, a guided-missile cruiser, several fighter jets, and a nuclear submarine. The US military has also reopened formerly inactive facilities in Puerto Rico to support these operations.
It’s the largest military buildup in the Caribbean since the invasion of Panama in 1989, and yet it’s generating less media attention than a gale-force storm.
It’s not too late. Politicians, pundits, and the press still have time to get the American people activated enough to stop this country’s next catastrophic war.
The resignation of the military commander overseeing the operation—Admiral Alvin Halsey—head of US Southern Command, should sound an alarm. Meanwhile, “Demolition Don” is making no bones about his plans. After it was revealed that he’d secretly authorized the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela, he bragged, “We are certainly looking at land now.”
What are we waiting for? The blatant buildup to this country’s next imperialist war is at least as terrifying as a hurricane—or it should be.
Catch my conversation this Friday, October 31 at 5:00 pm ET with US Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash) and Marine Captain Janessa Goldbeck on the president’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act, exclusively on Laura Flanders & Friends.
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Fears of 'Serious Escalation' Grow as Israel Bombs Lebanon and Gaza
Lebanon's caretaker prime minister said he "categorically rejects any military escalation" amid concerns that the fresh exchanges of rocket fire and airstrikes could spark an all-out war.
Apr 07, 2023
Fears of a wider conflict in the Middle East mounted Friday after Israel bombed Lebanon and the occupied Gaza Strip in the early hours of the morning, an assault that followed two consecutive nights of violent raids on the Al-Aqsa mosque compound.
The raids spurred global condemnation and retaliatory rocket fire from southern Lebanon and Gaza, prompting Israel's latest barrage of airstrikes.
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the rocket fire with hawkish rhetoric, vowing to "extract a heavy price from our enemies," other Israeli officials and Lebanon's caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati cautioned against further violence.
"Nobody wants an escalation right now," an Israeli army spokesman told reporters. "Quiet will be answered with quiet, at this stage I think, at least in the coming hours."
Najib Mikati, Lebanon's caretaker prime minister, similarly said his government "categorically rejects any military escalation," adding that an investigation into the rocket attacks that originated in southern Lebanon was ongoing.
The Associated Press reported Friday that "no faction in Lebanon claimed responsibility for the salvo of rockets," the largest such attack since the deadly 2006 war between Israeli and Lebanon.
"A Lebanese security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media, said the country's security forces believed the rockets were launched by a Lebanon-based Palestinian militant group, not by Hezbollah," the outlet noted.
No injuries or deaths have been reported in the wake of the Israeli airstrikes, which damaged homes, buildings, and other infrastructure in Lebanon and Gaza. One 19-year-old was lightly injured by shrapnel from the rocket fire into Israel, according to Israeli authorities.
The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said in a statement Friday that while Israeli and Lebanese officials have "both said they do not want a war," the "actions over the past day are dangerous and risk a serious escalation."
"We urge all parties to cease all actions across the Blue Line now," UNIFIL added.
Israeli forces' raids on the Al-Aqsa mosque compound and attacks on Palestinian worshipers this week have been vocally denounced by governments and human rights organizations. In 2021, Israeli raids of Al-Aqsa and responses from the Gaza Strip led to a devastating 11-day assault on the besieged enclave.
Heba Morayef, Amnesty International's regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement Thursday that "these orchestrated attacks demonstrate just how far Israeli authorities will go to maintain their cruel system of apartheid."
"Shocking footage from the past two days shows Israeli security forces beating men, women, and children, and dragging them out of the mosque where they had gathered to spend the night in peaceful prayer and reflection," said Morayef. "Once again, Israeli security forces have shown the world what apartheid looks like."
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Escalating US Air Strikes Kill Hundreds of Civilians in Mosul, Iraq
May 01, 2016
USA Today revealed on April 19th that U.S. air forces have been operating under looser rules of engagement in Iraq and Syria since last fall. The war commander, Lt Gen McFarland, now orders air strikes that are expected to kill up to 10 civilians without prior approval from U.S. Central Command, and U.S. officials acknowledge that air strikes are killing more civilians under the new rules.
U.S. officials previously claimed that air strikes in Iraq and Syria had killed as few as 26 civilians. A senior Pentagon official who is briefed daily on the air war told USA Today that was unrealistic, since air strikes that have destroyed 6,000 buildings with over 40,000 bombs and missiles have inevitably killed much higher numbers of civilians.
As the U.S. escalates its air strikes on Mosul, the largest city occupied by Islamic State, reports of hundreds of civilians killed by air strikes reveal some of the human costs of the U.S. air war and the new rules of engagement.
Award-winning Iraqi environmental scientist and Mosul native Souad Al-Azzawi (Ph.D. Colorado School of Mines) has compiled a partial list of air strikes that have killed civilians and destroyed civilian infrastructure from reports by Mosul Eye, Nineveh Reporters Network, Al Maalomah News Network, other Iraqi media and contacts in Mosul:
- Many government buildings have been destroyed. As U.S. officials told USA Today, attacks are often conducted at night to minimize civilian casualties, but they have killed security guards and civilians in neighboring buildings.
- Telephone exchanges have been systematically bombed and destroyed.
- Two large dairies were bombed, killing about 100 civilians and wounding 200 more.
- Multiple daytime air strikes on Mosul University on March 19th and 20th killed 92 civilians and wounded 135, mostly faculty, staff, families and students. Targets included the main administration building, classroom buildings, a women's dormitory and a faculty apartment building.
- 50 civilians were killed and 100 wounded by air strikes on 2 apartment buildings, Al Hadbaa and Al Khadraa.
- A mother and 4 children were killed in an air strike on a house in the Hay al Dhubat district of East Mosul on April 20th, next door to a house used by Islamic State that was undamaged.
- 22 civilians were killed in air strikes on houses in front of Mosul Medical College.
- 20 civilians were killed and 70 wounded by air strikes on the Sunni Waqif building and nearby houses and shops.
- U.S. air strikes on April 24th damaged the Rashidiya water treatment plant in West Mosul and the Yarmouk power station in East Mosul.
- The Central Bank of Mosul in Ghazi Street and several branches of Rafidain and Rasheed banks were bombed, with heavy civilian casualties, despite all cash reportedly being removed after the first bank was struck.
- Three workers were killed and 12 wounded in an air strike on the former Pepsi bottling plant.
- An air strike on a fuel depot in an industrial area ignited an inferno with 150 casualties on April 18th.
- Bombs have damaged a food warehouse, power stations and sub-stations in West Mosul, and flour mills, a pharmaceutical factory, auto repair shops and other workshops across Mosul.
- The Al Hurairah Bridge was destroyed by air strikes.
At the very least, U.S. air strikes have killed hundreds of civilians in Mosul and destroyed much of the civilian infrastructure that people depend on for their lives in already dire conditions. And yet by all accounts, this is only the beginning of the U.S.-Iraqi campaign to retake Mosul. One and one-half million civilians are trapped in the city, 30 times the UN's estimate of the number of civilians in Fallujah before the November 2004 assault that killed 4,000 to 6,000 people, mostly civilians. Meanwhile ISIL prevents civilians from evacuating the city, believing that their presence protects its forces from even heavier bombardment.
International humanitarian law strictly prohibits military attacks on civilians, civilian areas and civilian infrastructure. The presence of several thousand ISIL militants in a city of 1.5 million people does not justify indiscriminate bombing or attacks on civilian targets. As the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq warned U.S. officials in a Human Rights Report in 2007, "The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian nature of an area." UNICEF protested the bombing of a water treatment plant in Syria last December as "a particularly alarming example" of how "the rules of war, including those meant to protect vital civilian infrastructure, continue to be broken on a daily basis."
The fundamental contradiction of the militarized "war on terror" has always been that U.S. aggression and other war crimes only reinforce the narratives of jihadis who see themselves as a bulwark against foreign aggression and neocolonialism in the Muslim world. Meanwhile U.S. wars and covert operations against secular enemies like Hussein, Gaddafi and Assad create new zones of chaos where jihadis can thrive.
President Obama has acknowledged publicly that there is therefore "no military solution" to jihadism. But successive U.S. administrations have proven unable to resist the lure of military escalation at each new stage of this crisis, unleashing wars that have killed about two million people, plunged a dozen countries into chaos and exploded Wahhabi jihadism from its original safe havens in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Pakistan to countries across the world.
If the U.S. and its Iraqi allies follow through with their threatened assault on Mosul, the resulting massacre will join Fallujah, Guantanamo and U.S. drone wars as a powerful catalyst for the next mutation of Wahhabi jihadism, which is likely to be more globalized and unified.
But although Al Qaeda and Islamic State have proven adept at manipulating U.S. leaders into ever-escalating cycles of violence, the jihadis cannot directly order American pilots to bomb civilians. Only our leaders can do that, making them morally and legally responsible for these crimes, just as Islamic State's leaders are responsible for theirs.
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Libya 2.0? After Sowing Chaos with 2011 Invasion, US Bombs Destabilized Nation
At least 40 reported dead following strikes on northern city of Sabratha
Feb 19, 2016
The United States on Friday conducted air strikes in Libya, a country described as having "all but collapsed" since the NATO military intervention there five years ago.
Local officials say that at least 40 people were killed from the strikes in the early morning, with others critically wounded, news agencies report. The location of the strike was a reported Islamic State training camp in the northern Libyan city of Sabratha.
The Pentagon said that it was not clear yet whether the target of the attack, Noureddine Chouchane, was among those killed.
Chouchane, a Tunisian national, has been linked to attacks in 2015 on a Tunis museum and a beach in the resort town of Sousse.
"He facilitated the movement of potential ISIL-affiliated foreign fighters from Tunisia to Libya and onward to other countries," the Associated Press reports Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook as saying.
The Guardian reports that the new
airstrike, the third by the US in Libya since June, raised questions about the US opening another front against an enemy whose strength in Libya has grown in the chaos resulting from Nato's 2011 war aiding the revolutionaries that killed dictator Muammar Gaddafi. But some officials suggested that the strike on Chouchane was a target of opportunity, rather than the inaugural shots of a long-telegraphed initiative. The two previous strikes hit an Isis base in Derna in November and an al-Qaida gathering at Ajdabiya in eastern Libya in June.
As journalist Glenn Greenwald and professor of international relations Vijay Prishad both indicated in early-morning tweets, Friday's bombing should be read as an indication of the Obama administration's failed strategy in Libya:
Last month, after speaking with his French counterpart, Gen. Pierre de Villiers, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "It's fair to say we're looking to take decisive military action against ISIL [in Libya] in conjunction with a legitimate political process."
The strikes come just days after President Obama said, "With respect to Libya, I have been clear from the outset that we will go after ISIS wherever it appears, the same way that we went after al Qaeda wherever they appeared."
"We will continue to take actions where we've got a clear operation and a clear target in mind. And we are working with our other coalition partners to make sure that as we see opportunities to prevent ISIS from digging in, in Libya, we take them."
But this reflects an approach akin to "a game of whack-a-mole spanning multiple unstable foreign countries," argues Paul Pillar, professor at Georgetown University for security studies.
He explains:
Opening up a real military front against [ISIS in Libya] with Western armed forces might seem to be an appropriate going to where the action is, but it also would perpetuate a fundamentally flawed conception of counterterrorism as revolving around military offensives against whatever presence on the ground has been established by whatever radical group currently worries us the most.
[...]
The underlying problem in a place such as post-Gaddafi Libya is a lack of good governance or of any governance. Inadequate governance has multiple bad effects, including the sort of chaos that violent extremists exploit. Libya does not have a governance problem because ISIS is there; ISIS is there because Libya has a severe governance problem.
Yet another fallacy in common thinking about counterterrorism is that whacking the offending group is progress. It is not, if what is left after the whacking is just more of the inadequate governance that led to the group establishing its presence there in the first place.
Others similarly described the governance problem. From the Guardian earlier this week:
"Libya is becoming a scenario whereby you will have three governments," says Ludovico Carlino of IHS Jane's, a London defense analyst. "An intervention [without a unity government] will probably cause more anarchy and chaos."
The reporting adds this comment from Guma El-Gamaty, the rebel government's London envoy during the revolution: "We are now suffering the legacy of Gaddafi, the lack of institutions, no democracy, the lack of knowing how to come together."
Reuters reports: "A U.N.-backed government of national accord is trying to win support but is still awaiting parliamentary approval. It is opposed by factional hardliners and has yet to establish itself in the capital Tripoli."
Last month, in an article entitled "The U.S. Intervention in Libya Was Such a Smashing Success That a Sequel Is Coming," Greenwald wrote that since the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya, the country.
so predictably -- has all but completely collapsed, spending years now drowning in instability, anarchy, fractured militia rule, sectarian conflict, and violent extremism. The execution of Saddam Hussein was no vindication of that war nor a sign of improved lives for Iraqis, and the same was true for the mob killing of Qaddafi.
[...]
the much bigger question was when (not if, but when) the instability and extremism that predictably followed the NATO bombing would be used to justify a new U.S.-led war -- also exactly as happened in Iraq.
[...]
Just as there was no al Qaeda or ISIS to attack in Iraq until the U.S. bombed its government, there was no ISIS in Libya until NATO bombed it. Now the U.S. is about to seize on the effects of its own bombing campaign in Libya to justify an entirely new bombing campaign in that same country.
And in a statement Friday, Prashad said, "The U.S. Air Force should have named this current bombing run in Libya 'Operation Deja Vu.' It is the third such strike at ISIS. What is not clear is the strategy being followed by the U.S. Occasional bombing runs have not stopped ISIS from fully taking Sirte and now expanding along the edge of the Gulf of Sidra."
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Homes, Markets, Mosques, Schools: Civilian Deaths by Explosive Weapons Soar
Civilians made up nearly 80 percent of more than 41,000 reported deaths last year, caused by bombs, missiles, shelling, and other explosive violence
Jun 22, 2015
For the third year in a row, global civilian deaths and injuries caused by explosive weapons has increased--in some areas making up 92 percent of casualties, a new report published Monday by the international advocacy group Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) revealed.
In 2014, a total of 41,847 people around the world were killed or wounded by explosive weapons. Seventy-eight percent (32,662) were civilians, almost three times as high as the previous year, AOAV found in its report, Explosive States: Monitoring Explosive Violence in 2014 (pdf).
The most deadly places to be a civilian last year were Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Nigeria, and Pakistan--but these areas were only a handful of the dangerous zones where civilians endure the majority of explosive weapon harm, AOAV reported.
AOAV, based in London, began tracking the use of explosive weapons in 2011. Since that time, almost 150,000 people have been reported killed or injured by weapons like air bombs, missiles, rockets, landmines, artillery shells, grenades, car bombs, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), among others, the report found. In the cases of ground-launched weapons like mortars and grad rockets, civilian deaths accounted for 90 percent of casualties. And deaths from IEDs increased in countries such as China, Egypt, and Yemen.
"This is the third consecutive year that we have seen an increase in civilian deaths and injuries from explosive weapons," said Iain Overton, AOAV director of investigations, in a statement on Monday. "With civilians bearing the brunt of explosive weapon harm in Gaza, Ukraine, Nigeria, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan the question has to be: 'How many more will have to die before states agree to end the use of explosive weapons in populated areas?'" "These explosive weapons are designed for open battlefields, not built-up urban areas [...] This is not about the weapons themselves--it's about where and how they are used."
--Peter Maur, International Committee for the Red Cross
Rounding out the list of the top six state perpetrators of explosive violence was the U.S., which earned its spot through its bombing campaign against Islamic State (ISIS) fighters in Iraq and Syria. "It should be noted that the impacts of the international coalition aerial bombing campaign in Syria and Iraq were very poorly reported in 2014," the report states, adding:
AOAV recorded only 26 casualty-causing air strikes resulting from coalition bombing in 2014. These resulted in 541 casualties, 88% (474) of which were fatalities. Civilians made up 19% of reported casualties from these air strikes (83 deaths and 20 injuries), 87% of which were documented in Syria.
...It is extremely difficult to draw effective assessments of the impacts of the international coalition's use of explosive weapons on civilians in Syria and Iraq in 2014. Security conditions on the ground and a lack of access to areas outside of government control make it challenging for independent agencies to evaluate the impact of airstrikes. Moreover while the number of individual attacks is publicly recorded by the coalition, there is a lack of transparency surrounding the impacts of these strikes in terms of casualty figures.
The most dangerous areas for a civilian include densely populated cities, markets, and bazaars, and, for children, in their own homes. "Civilian casualties...dramatically increased by 43%, from 2,468 deaths and injuries in 2013 to 3,521," the report found.
"State use of heavy explosive weapons shot up last year," wrote AOAV lead researcher Robert Perkins. "More governments are using more bombs, and all too often they are trying to take out targets within populated areas. Our data has shown year after year that this practice kills and injures civilians far too often for it to be chalked up as unavoidable, isolated mistakes."
The Guardian adds:
In Syria, government forces made dramatically increased use of barrel bombs - containers filled with fuel, explosives and chunks of jagged metal typically pushed out of helicopters by hand, killing people and destroying buildings over a wide areas. In 2013, barrel bombs accounted for 20% of aerial attacks. In 2014, that proportion had doubled. The bulk of barrel bomb attacks (85%) were on urban areas.
Israeli air attacks accounted for more than half the civilian casualties in Gaza in 2014. According to UN figures, there were 2,131 deaths from Israel's Operation Protective Edge in July and August, 69% of which were civilian. But Israel also used high explosive ground-launched and naval shells during that campaign against built-up targets. As a result, Israel outdid even Syria as the state responsible for the most civilian casualties from explosive weapons in 2014, according to the AOAV report.
"Ultimately, civilians in Syria, Gaza, Israel, Afghanistan, Libya, eastern Ukraine and other conflict hotspots pay the price when the shells aimed at military targets end up hitting homes, hospitals and schools. This simply has to stop," Peter Maur, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in October 2014 in a quote cited in AOAV's report. "These explosive weapons are designed for open battlefields, not built-up urban areas [...] This is not about the weapons themselves--it's about where and how they are used."
Explosive violence can be reduced through concrete measures, the report concluded. Those measures include, among others:
- Acknowledge that use of explosive weapons in populated areas tends to cause severe harm to individuals and communities and furthers suffering by damaging vital infrastructure;
- Strive to avoid such harm and suffering in any situation, review and strengthen national policies and practices on use of explosive weapons and gather and make available relevant data;
- Work for full realization of rights of victims survivors;
- Develop stronger international standards, including certain prohibitions and restrictions on the use of explosive weapons in populated areas.
"[B]ombing and shelling is not just a problem of the battlefields of Iraq or Afghanistan. It's one that hits us in our homes, our markets, our mosques and our schools," said Steven Smith, CEO of AOAV. "The use of heavy explosive weapons in populated areas is unacceptable, but all too predictable."
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