A Blockbuster NYT Report on a Military Cover-Up Should Force the U.S. to Reassess How It Wages War

U.S. military commanders covered up an air strike over Syria that killed several dozen civilians, dishonestly portraying it as a successful attack against ISIS fighters and ignoring firm recommendations--filed by military lawyers--to investigate the strike as a war crime. The attack and subsequent cover-up--revealed in a long, extensively documented story in this weekend's New York Times--took place in 2019, during the final phase of the U.S. and allied campaign to oust the Islamic State from its self-declared caliphate in Syria. The Times report comes a few months after the final U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan in August, which Pentagon officials touted as halting a terrorist attack--but which in fact, as another Times investigation soon revealed, killed 10 civilians, none of whom had any connection to terrorists. Together, the two reports raise questions about the moral and strategic wisdom of launching airstrikes in areas where civilians and fighters routinely mix. These questions have been raised many times in the course of America's 20-year "global war on terror."