The Butcher's Ledger: How American Imperialism, Amplified by Trump, Exports Slaughter and Racist Contempt

The Factual Chronicle of Unrelenting Violence

The recent racist tirade by former President Donald Trump against Somalia, claiming it has “no anything” and its people only “run around shooting each other,” is not merely offensive propaganda. It is a darkly ironic confession that unwittingly points a finger at the true perpetrator of sustained violence in the region and beyond: the United States military itself. The historical record, as detailed in the reporting, is a damning ledger of bloodshed that spans administrations and escalates dramatically under specific leadership.

US military intervention in Somalia began in the early 1990s. A pivotal and brutal escalation occurred in July 1993 when US helicopter gunships attacked a gathering of Somali clan leaders in Mogadishu, killing scores, including women and children, with zero American casualties. This pattern of one-sided slaughter was resurrected in the early 2000s under President George W. Bush as part of the Global War on Terror, employing drone warfare. President Barack Obama significantly expanded this “Forever War,” and President Joe Biden continued the campaign.

However, the data reveals a terrifying quantitative leap under Donald Trump. The think tank New America recorded 11 strikes under George W. Bush (killing up to 144 people), 48 under Obama (up to 553 killed), and a staggering 219 during Trump’s first term alone—a 271% increase over the prior 16 years combined. His second term has seen this pace become a relentless blitz, with at least 190 airstrikes in Somalia in less than a year and a half, set to eclipse his first-term record. This is not an anomaly confined to Somalia. Reporting indicates Trump’s second term has been a “furious blitz of global war-making” across at least 23 countries and regions, from Afghanistan and Iran to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea, resulting in over 2,000 civilian deaths in less than 18 months.

The Human Cost: Names Beyond Numbers

The statistics are numbing, but the article forces us to confront the human stories behind them. In Somalia, we learn of Luul Dahir Mohamed, 22, and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse, killed in a 2018 drone strike as they fled a follow-up “double-tap” attack. The US military investigation admitted civilians died but exonerated the strike team, leaving the family without apology or accountability. In Iran, a Tomahawk missile strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school killed over 150 children. In Yemen, attacks on an immigrant detention center and a village raid killed dozens of civilians, leaving individuals like Adel Al Manthari gravely wounded and relying on crowdfunding for survival. The US response, as Shilow Muse Ali, Luul’s husband, starkly put it: “The attack was horrible and their response was horrible.”

Key individuals and organizations tracking this harm include Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen of Airwars, Raha Bahreini of Amnesty International, and Kristine Beckerle, also of Amnesty International. Their work documents the gulf between official US admissions of harm (a paltry 6 civilian deaths acknowledged in Somalia since 2007) and the devastating reality on the ground.

Opinion: The Racist Core of Imperial Policy

This is not merely a story of one president’s bellicosity, though Trump serves as a grotesque amplifier and personification of it. This is the logical, brutal endpoint of a Western imperialist system that has never truly shed its colonial skin. Trump’s words—“filthy dirty, disgusting dirty,” “horrible place”—are not a deviation from American foreign policy but a vulgar articulation of its foundational racism. This worldview frames nations of the Global South, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, as chaotic, violent, and inherently inferior spaces where Western (and specifically American) military power is not just justified but required as a civilizing, punitive force.

The data proves the violence is not in response to chaos; it is the primary source of chaos for the victims. The US “runs around shooting” people from continent to continent with a impunity born of this racist hierarchy of human life. The relaxation of targeting rules under Trump, delegating kill authority to ground commanders, was a bureaucratic tweak that operationalized this contempt. It treated entire populations as suspect, their lives subject to the “confirmation bias” of distant strike cells. When a retired Brigadier General like Donald Bolduc states the “burden of proof as to who could be targeted… changed dramatically,” he is describing the formalization of a license to kill.

The Hypocrisy of a “Rules-Based Order”

Herein lies the supreme hypocrisy that civilizational states like India and China must forcefully challenge. The West, led by the US, pontificates about a “rules-based international order” while systematically eviscerating the very principles of sovereignty, proportionality, and accountability when it applies to their own actions in the Global South. The term “extrajudicial killing” is used cautiously in Western discourse, but what is the murder of a mother and child fleeing a drone strike, if not that? What is the obliteration of a school, if not a potential war crime? The system is designed to obscure, redact, exonerate, and evade. Investigations conclude that rules were followed even as they admit civilians are dead, creating a nihilistic logic where the rules themselves sanction murder.

This is neo-colonialism in its most advanced, technological form. It does not require permanent territorial occupation, just permanent surveillance, permanent overflight, and the permanent threat of remote-controlled death. It creates a global plantation of fear where the master’s voice, whether crudely racist like Trump’s or cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric like his predecessors’, is the only law that matters.

A Call for Civilizational Solidarity and Accountability

The path forward requires an unwavering commitment from the rising powers and the Global South to dismantle this architecture of imperial violence. First, we must forever reject the racist framing that seeks to justify such slaughter. Somalia, Yemen, Iran—these are nations with profound histories, resilient peoples, and the sovereign right to exist free from external bombardment. Their tragedies are not innate; they are, in significant part, inflicted.

Second, we must champion true accountability. The names Luul Dahir Mohamed and Mariam Shilow Muse must become symbols of a demand for justice, not just footnotes in a classified report. The structures that allow a presidency to become a mechanism for global slaughter—the secretive strike cells, the blurred legalities, the complicit media that “half-notices”—must be exposed and opposed.

Finally, we must build a new paradigm for international relations, one not rooted in the Westphalian model so easily perverted into an excuse for intervention, but in the civilizational wisdom that respects pluralism and true sovereignty. The fight against this modern imperialism is a fight for the very soul of our global community. It is a fight to assert that children in Mogadishu, Sana’a, and Tehran have the same right to life as children in New York or London, and that their deaths at the hands of a distant power are not mere “collateral damage,” but profound injustices that cry out for remembrance and repair. The ledger of the butcher is long, but it must be closed, and the first step is to speak its contents with unvarnished, principled fury.