The American Century of War Crimes and the Witness of the Cross
A Reckoning Long Overdue
There is, among the citizens of this empire, a peculiar form of moral amnesia. We are taught from the cradle to think of the United States as a nation that goes to war reluctantly, that fights cleanly when it must fight, that liberates rather than conquers, and that, when innocents are killed, mourns them as the unintended cost of necessary action. The mythology is total. It saturates the textbooks, the films, the political speeches of both parties, and, most shamefully, many pulpits of the American church.
From the perspective of the Gospel, this mythology is a lie of demonic proportions. The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been, for the United States, an unbroken season of bloodshed, and the blood that cries out from the ground is not measured in the hundreds, or the thousands, or even the tens of thousands. It is measured in the millions. To ignore this, to look away, to invoke the flag and the eagle and the comforting story of American innocence, is to take our place among those who, as the prophet Jeremiah said, “have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14)
We must obey God rather than men. And the God we serve is the God of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. He is not the God of drone strikes. He is not the God of cluster munitions. He is not the God of the imperial budget. To love Him is to look squarely at what our nation has done, in our name, with our tax dollars, and to refuse to call it good.
The Magnitude of the Slaughter
Let us begin with the numbers, for the numbers themselves are a kind of testimony. The Costs of War project at Brown University, the most rigorous public accounting we possess, estimates that direct violence in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria has killed at least 940,000 human beings, of whom more than 432,000 were civilians. These are people directly torn apart by American bombs, American bullets, American missiles, or by the bombs and bullets of forces armed, trained, and directed by the United States.
That figure, monstrous as it is, is only the beginning. When one accounts for the indirect deaths, the children dead of malnutrition because the water plant was bombed, the mothers dead in childbirth because the hospital had no electricity, the old men dead of treatable disease because the pharmaceutical supply chain collapsed, the families dead in displacement camps from cholera and exposure, the total death toll attributable to the post-9/11 wars rises to between 4.5 and 4.7 million souls, and counting.
Four and a half million. Pause and hold that number in the mind for a moment. The population of the city of Los Angeles. Greater than the entire population of Ireland. Each one of them made in the image of God. Each one of them with a mother who loved them. Each one of them now silenced by an empire that calls itself Christian and goes to war on Sunday.
The Iraq War alone, that most cynical and unprovoked of imperial adventures, was estimated by a 2006 study published in The Lancet to have caused some 655,000 excess Iraqi deaths in just the first three years, the great majority of them violent. Subsequent years would only multiply that toll. The war was sold to the American public on lies that the men who told them have never paid any price for telling. Bush. Cheney. Rumsfeld. Powell. They, or more properly their acolytes are honored guests on Sunday morning talk shows. They published memoirs. They are paid for speeches. The bones of their victims molder in mass graves from Fallujah to Mosul.
To this catalogue must be added the secret wars, the ones the empire prefers we forget. The drone campaigns over Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, conducted under three successive presidents, killed thousands of people, with credible estimates from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism putting civilian deaths in those four countries at over 1,500 by direct strike alone. Wedding parties were vaporized. Funerals were targeted. American citizens were executed without trial, including a sixteen-year-old boy named Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, killed in Yemen in 2011 by a drone strike personally authorized through the chain of command of a president who had pledged to be different. He was different in style only. The killing was bipartisan.
And now, in this present hour, the empire has graduated to underwriting the wholesale annihilation of Gaza. Since October 7, 2023, more than ten percent of the population of Gaza has been killed or wounded by the U.S.-armed and U.S.-funded Israeli military. As of October 2025, by the count of the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 75,000 people have been killed and more than 170,000 wounded out of a population of 2.2 million, with the indirect death toll certain to climb far higher in the years to come. The bombs that fall on the children of Gaza are American bombs. The fighter jets that drop them are American jets. The vetoes that protect the killers from accountability at the United Nations are American vetoes. There is no honest way to call this anything other than complicity in the slaughter of an entire people.
The Treasury of Mammon
The financial cost is the second indictment. The Costs of War project estimates that the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and elsewhere have cost the American taxpayer roughly eight trillion dollars, and this figure does not include future interest on the borrowed money used to wage them. It does not include the two-and-a-quarter to two-and-a-half trillion dollars that will be required to care for post-9/11 veterans through the year 2050, the cost of the broken bodies and broken minds of young men and women who were sent abroad to do the empire’s killing and came home shattered.
Eight trillion dollars. Consider what that sum could have done if it had been left in the hands of the productive sector of the economy to create real, sustainable wealth. Consider how many hungry could have been fed, how many naked could have been clothed, how many sick could have been visited, how many imprisoned could have been ransomed. Consider how many jobs could have been created in the holler towns of Appalachia or the South Side of Chicago. Consider how many homeless veterans could have been housed. Consider how many of our own neighbors, here in this country, could have been lifted out of the economic miasma that they have wallowed in for the 21st. century and in realty long before that.
Money is a moral document. Show me a nation’s budget and I will show you what it worships. The United States, despite the pieties uttered on Capitol Hill, despite the prayer breakfasts and the flag-draped pulpits, worships the god of war. From 2020 to 2024 alone, private firms received some 2.4 trillion dollars in Pentagon contracts, this is more than twice the final budget of President Eisenhower, adjusted for inflation, at the height of the Cold War. The arms industry has metastasized into a parallel state, a permanent power that no president and no congress dares to challenge, that funds both parties, that occupies the think tanks, that staffs the news networks with retired generals masquerading as analysts. This is precisely the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower warned of as he walked out the door, having spent eight years building it.
Every dollar spent on a missile is a dollar stolen from a productive person, who simply seeks the dignity of work.
A Crime Without Repentance
The deepest scandal is not the killing alone. It is the absence of repentance. No American president has stood before the world and confessed the sin of the Iraq War. No senator who voted for it has surrendered office in disgrace. No general who oversaw torture at Abu Ghraib or at the black sites has gone to prison. The torturers themselves have been promoted. The lawyers who wrote the memos justifying torture, men like John Yoo and Jay Bybee, hold professorships and federal judgeships. The architects of the drone program serve on corporate boards. The men who lied us into Iraq lecture at Harvard.
This is what the Scripture calls hardness of heart, and it is the unforgivable posture, not because God will not forgive it, but because the heart that refuses repentance refuses the very forgiveness God offers. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). The empire says it has no sin. The empire deceives itself. The truth is not in it.
We add to this the post-October-7 record, in which the United States has not merely participated in but has actively underwritten and shielded what credible international observers, including United Nations special rapporteurs and a chorus of human rights organizations, have described as a genocide. The State Department continues to certify Israeli compliance with humanitarian law. The arms shipments continue. Congressional appropriations continue. And much of the American church, by and large, continues to cheer it on, mistaking the modern nation-state of Israel for the people of God and forgetting that, in the New Covenant, the people of God are those who follow the Lamb who was slain, not those who wield the sword of empire.
It is too early yet to say what the final butcher’s bill will be for the latest imperial war of choice that emperor Trump has lied and stumbled the U.S. into. No doubt it will rival those wars already prosecuted this century and will be met with the same lack of repentance.
What the Gospel Demands
What, then, are we to do?
We are to refuse. We are to refuse, first, the lie. We are to refuse to call evil good and good evil, to refuse the mythology of American innocence, to refuse the bipartisan consensus that says these wars were tragic mistakes rather than what they actually were: war crimes, undertaken with calculation, sustained against all evidence of their wickedness, and ongoing as we speak.
We are to refuse, second, the financing. The empire wages its wars with our money, and our complicity in its monetary system is not a neutral matter. To strip the state of the means of waging war, to live debt-free where we can, to give generously to the works of peace, to invest in such a manner as does not enrich the merchants of death, these are not optional pieties. They are the practical shape of obedience in an empire that demands we worship at its altar.
We are to refuse, third, the silence of the churches. Our pastors from the pulpit, are not to make this critique. Yet, our congregations must hear it. That means it is incumbent upon us as the church whole to proclaim the evil nature of this bloodletting. The blood of millions cries out from the ground and we sing “God Bless America” while it cries. We must stop. We must repent. We must, like the prophets of old, name the sin and call our nation to the judgment seat of God.
The Lord Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, did not die so that we might bless the bombs of Caesar. He died so that we might be set free from the love of the sword. The witness of the Cross is the witness of suffering love, of enemy-love, of the rejection of every imperial pretension. The empire has killed millions in our century alone. The Kingdom calls us to a different way.
May we have the courage to walk it.
Praise Be to God.
