These are the three social evils Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned would destroy America from within: Militarism, materialism, and racism. Decades later, they help explain the divisions in our country that led to the January 6 attack by protesters on the U.S. Capitol. Of the three, however, the role our recent wars have played in exacerbating these conditions is often the most overlooked.
Video produced by Khody Akhavi.
Did the U.S. Navy commit a war crime?
That’s one unanswered question that lingers after the announcement Wednesday morning that an as-yet unidentified U.S. Navy submarine torpedoed an Iranian frigate that was far from its home port and had just taken part in multinational exercises hosted by India.
“War Secretary” Pete Hegseth was exultant, underlining its historic significance:
“[Y]esterday in the Indian Ocean, and we'll play it on the screen there,” he said, “an American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo, quiet death. The first sinking of an enemy ship by a torpedo since World War II.”
Indeed, the strike was lethal. Out of a crew of 180 seamen, only 32 were rescued by the Sri Lankan Navy, which also recovered the bodies of 87 more. The Sri Lankans had received a distress call from the Iranian vessel, the IRIS Dena, apparently shortly after it had been hit by the torpedo.
The frigate was 2,000 miles away from the ongoing US-Israeli campaign against Iran when it was struck and had just participated in India’s multinational Milan 2026 naval exercises in which the U.S. Navy was also represented.
Article 18 of the Second Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea, which was adopted in 1949 and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1955, states:
"After each engagement, Parties to the conflict shall, without delay, take all possible measures to search for and collect the shipwrecked, wounded and sick, to protect them against pillage and ill-treatment, to ensure their adequate care, and to search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled."
While this provision of international humanitarian law, violation of which constitutes a war crime, applies to submarines as well as to surface ships, there are limited exceptions to this obligation, particularly relevant to submarines.
For example, the relatively limited space on a submarine could make it impossible to accommodate all survivors on board. Nor is a submarine required to take actions that would compromise its safety, such as surfacing within range of enemy forces.
However, in this case, the target of the submarine’s torpedo reportedly sank relatively quickly and may not have even been armed for battle (in part because it was returning from what was essentially a diplomatic mission). And no other Iranian or other hostile ships or warplanes were reported to be anywhere near the attack.
Even assuming for the sake of argument that the American submarine fell under these exceptions, it retained an obligation to do whatever it could to help rescue survivors, if only to alert other ships in the area and/or coastal authorities, such as the Sri Lankan Navy, of the location of the target vessel so that they could render assistance.
But there is no evidence as yet that the submarine, the U.S. Navy, or United State Central Command (CENTCOM) did so. The Sri Lankan authorities indicated Wednesday that they were made aware of the incident by the distress call they received from the ship itself. They didn't even know it was an Iranian ship until they had rescued and communicated with the survivors; the ship had sunk below the surface by the time they arrived on site.
RS sent a request for comment to CENTCOM regarding compliance with Article 18. It went unanswered as of Thursday evening.
To put the issue in some historical perspective may be instructive.
In the first years of the Second World War, the much-feared German U-boats frequently surfaced to help survivors of their torpedoed targets, providing them with food, water, medical treatment, lifeboats and directions to the nearest landmass.
That practice, however, ended in mid-September 1942 when a German U-boat sank the Laconia, a British troop ship with some 2,700 people aboard, including 1,500 Italian POWs, in the South Atlantic. As other Axis ships approached to aid in the rescue effort, however, the U-boat came under attack by a U.S. Army Air Force bomber, killing dozens of survivors and forcing the submarine to dive. Several days later, the overall German U-boat commander, Admiral Karl Doenitz, issued the so-called “Laconia Order” that forbade future rescue attempts.
The unrestricted submarine warfare that followed — and that later landed Doenitz on the dock in the Nuremberg trials — helped lay the foundation for the drafting of Article 18 the Second Geneva Convention.
When Secretary Hegspeth asserted during his triumphant briefing Wednesday, "Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it," is this what he had in mind?
“I can't assess whether the U.S. undertook ‘all possible measures’ to search for and collect the shipwrecked without having a better idea of what was possible in this situation,” wrote Brian Finucane, a senior adviser specializing in military affairs with the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, in an email to RS. “But I certainly think the U.S. military needs to explain itself, particularly if no attempts at search and rescue were made.”
Despite a DoD ban on Anthropic over its demands that its tech not be used for fully autonomous military targeting, its AI model, Claude, is enjoying prime time use in the U.S. war on Iran.
Indeed, the U.S. military leveraged its AI targeting tools — which still employ Claude — to strike over 1,000 targets in Iran during the first 24 hours of the now rapidly expanding war.
The U.S. is using Claude through Anthropic’s partnership with controversial software company Palantir. As sources told Bloomberg, Claude is central to Palantir’s Maven Smart System, which provides real-time targeting for military operations against Iran. Because of its centrality to the war targeting, Claude won’t be phased out until the DoD has found a replacement, according to sources that spoke with the Washington Post.
The use of AI in military targeting has been controversial dating back at least to the Gaza war. Indeed, IDF forces largely ignored its AI targeting software’s 10% false positive rate when using its “Lavender” system to target and attack alleged militants in Gaza — killing an untold number of civilians in the process.
Now there is concern about its use in Iran. Leading up to the initial attack on Iran, the Washington Post reported that Maven, powered by Claude, proposed “hundreds” of targets for the U.S. military to strike, prioritized them in order of importance, and provided location coordinates for them — helping the U.S. carry out attacks quickly, and blunting Iran’s ability to respond in kind.
But what about oversight? It is not comforting that DoD Secretary Pete Hegseth exclaimed there were “no stupid rules of engagement” in the war at a press conference early this week.
The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual says the U.S. military must take “feasible precautions to verify that the targets [it plans to attack] are military objectives” such as enemy combatants. As these rules dictate, civilians and military medical and religious personnel, and locations like schools, hospitals, places of worship are not to be attacked.
Given the rapid deployment of AI in wartime, whether the U.S. military is truly taking “feasible precautions,” to ensure it is targeting true military objectives, rather than civilians, deserves scrutiny.
"You can rapidly produce long lists of targets much faster than humans can do it by automating that process," Peter Asaro, associate professor of media studies at The New School in New York, and the vice chair of the Stop Killer Robots campaign, told Japan Times. "The ethical and legal question is: To what degree are those humans actually reviewing the specific targets that have been listed, verifying their legality and their value militarily before authorizing?”
As Brianna Rosen, a senior fellow at Just Security and the University of Oxford, previously told RS: “Even with a human fully in the loop, there's significant civilian harm because the human reviews of machine decisions are essentially perfunctory.”
Although the government is set to slowly phase Anthropic out of its systems following the DoD spat with its CEO Dario Amodei, the company is in talks with Emil Michael, under-secretary of defense for research and engineering, to see if a new deal between it and the DoD can be reached.
Anthropic previously received a $200 million DoD contract in July of last year. Claude was the first AI model approved and deployed for use in classified settings, which permitted it to work with partners like Palantir.
The U.S. military previously employed Claude, through its partnership with Palantir, to prepare for an operation that removed Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro from power in early January.
As the conflict in the Middle East engulfs more countries, recent media reports alleging that the CIA is planning to arm Kurdish ground troops to spark an uprising in Iran have been met with vehement denials by Iraqi Kurdish officials.
However, while the Trump administration has denied that report, it is engaged in outreach to the various Kurdish groups to enlist their participation in an uprising against the Iranian regime. Meanwhile, after unconfirmed reports that some Kurdish groups were already engaging in cross-border attacks on Wednesday, the Iranians launched airstrikes at what they say are “anti-Iran separatist forces” in the mountains of Western Iran.
This only underscores the concern that in wartime, even unsubstantiated claims can imperil the hard-won stability of Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region, placing it in the crosshairs of a conflict it neither started nor supports. Erbil and Sulaymaniah have already been struck by missiles.
Iraq’s First Lady, Shanaz Ibrahim Ahmed, married to President Abdul Latif Rashid, is well versed in the region’s complicated matrix of interests. She spent decades in opposition during the rule of Saddam Hussein, later joined the Iraqi National Congress, and went on to serve as representative of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in Europe during the term of Iraq’s first post-war president, Jalal Talabani.
Speaking to Responsible Statecraft on Thursday, Ibrahim Ahmed insists this is not Iraq’s war and that the best thing for Iraq is not to get involved.
“It is not our war, and the Iraqi people should not be placed in danger of another round of destruction. Even now, we are still uncovering mass graves of people who were killed during Saddam Hussein’s regime more than 35 years ago,” she says.
The interview here:
As the war between Iran, Israel and the United States intensifies, how concerned are you about the risk of spillover into Iraq?
Well, I am very much concerned because war is just like fire. It accelerates if it is not controlled, and once it gets out of hand it becomes impossible to stop. Because we have lived through war for many years, we know the trauma that comes afterward. We know the damage and destruction. It takes years and years to rebuild any country, and even longer for human beings who have lived through war. It is not easy to erase the sounds you hear, the cries, the pain and the fear people experience.
Do you believe Iraq is prepared, politically and socially, to withstand another external shock?
Surely not. Iraq has been through a great deal, and people have only recently begun trying to return to normal life, trying to rebuild the country and restore it to where it once was as a functioning state. Mentally, socially and economically, people are not prepared to go through what they have endured before. That is why you can see fear in everyone’s eyes.
There have been reports circulating about Kurdish involvement in the Iran war. How do you respond to these reports, and what is your understanding of the Kurdistan Region’s position in this escalating crisis?
You cannot trust everything you hear. The reality may be one thing, but some media outlets and websites say something entirely different. Considering what the Kurdish people have gone through throughout history and how they have been treated, I do not think you would find any reasonable or sensible Kurd who would allow themselves to be used in such a way.
What effect are these allegations having on the stability and reputation of the Kurdistan Region? Erbil and your hometown Sulaymaniyah have both been hit by missiles. How worried are you that these attacks will inflame tensions within the Kurdish region, Iraq or with neighboring countries?
I am extremely worried. When false reports appear, they put you directly in danger and expose you to anyone who might want to attack the region. As Kurds, we have often said that we know we have no real friends in this world. So this situation is extremely sensitive. These reports are damaging and they affect the daily lives of ordinary people. I do not know whether those who are spreading such reports understand the consequences of what they are doing, but it risks making the Kurds targets once again.
Many people across Iraq fear that the region may be moving toward a full-scale “Great War.” From your vantage point, how real is the danger of a broader regional conflagration, and what steps can Iraqi leaders take now to prevent that outcome?
From what we see and hear, many countries are already involved in what is happening. This creates the impression that the conflict could expand further, because every day we hear that another country has been attacked by one side or the other. They are destroying each other’s countries and demolishing what these societies have built and been proud of.
Even if it does not become a world war, the damage is already enormous. If it does not stop now, it will continue, and more countries may become involved, whether they want to or not.
The best thing for Iraq is not to become involved in this war in any way. It is not our war, and the Iraqi people should not be placed in danger of another round of destruction. Even now, we are still uncovering mass graves of people who were killed during Saddam Hussein’s regime more than 35 years ago.
In times of crisis, misinformation spreads quickly. How damaging do you believe propaganda and unverified reports are to Iraq’s stability?
It is extremely damaging. Even without war, trust between Kurds and Arabs, between other communities in Iraq and trust with neighboring countries, is still fragile. That trust has only just begun to rebuild. False reports create divisions and drive a wedge between communities.
You are First Lady of Iraq, but also a politician in your own right, having played a key role in the exiled Iraqi opposition in the run-up to the 2003 war. At this critical juncture, what message would you send to policymakers? What should they understand about Iraq’s position, the Kurds’ position and what is at stake if tensions continue to rise?
First of all, I am really surprised and shocked because this new American administration said at the very beginning that it would bring peace to the Middle East. That made everyone extremely happy, because people were looking forward to peace and stability in the region. But it did not turn out that way.
So I would ask them: after all this destruction and war, what comes next? What are they thinking? What is their plan? Do they believe that by destroying all these countries they will eventually achieve peace? I do not believe peace can be reached through fire and destruction.
If there is a plan behind this destruction, then explain it. If sacrifice is needed, justify it. If this devastation is meant to secure stability, then demonstrate it to those who are paying the price. Recycled slogans don’t mean anything here anymore when we have endured war after war. What we need is dialogue, not war. Even the American people are tired of war.
Iraq is in a unique position in the region. Longstanding good relations with both Washington and Tehran. In the context of the current crisis, can Baghdad play a mediating role?
It is always possible. Yes, it is possible. And Iraq should be given that chance to mediate. No country wants to be part of destruction. But I believe there are countries that would be willing to take part in reconstruction and in bringing real peace to the region.
Because once the region is in danger or destabilized, it affects everyone. It affects all countries. Therefore, Iraq’s position should be taken more seriously. Its offer to mediate should be treated seriously and considered while it is still on the table.
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