As most UK students and faculty enjoyed the Thanksgiving holiday a few weeks back, other families were experiencing a very different Thursday.

I reference the Arab families negatively affected by the 21st century United States occupation, not those native peoples’ families affected by 17th century U.S. occupations.

On the day that Christmas presents were being bought for American children, the New York Times reported that “six Afghani children were among seven civilians killed in a NATO airstrike in southern Afghanistan.” NATO claimed they were chasing “insurgents” when the trigger was pressed for the bombs to rain upon these remote Afghan villages.

Adbul Samad was an uncle to four of the children killed, which were each between 4 and 12 years old. He disputes this narrative of the attack, claiming that he and his relatives “were working in fields near their village when they were attacked without warning by an aircraft.”

Even though this extra-judicial murder, or “collateral damage” as the state likes to sanitize it as, is becoming increasingly common, I doubt it was the rain these folks were hoping would come from the sky that day.

Two months after President Barak Obama received the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, the United States secretly ordered an attack on Yemeni people with several cruise missiles. Six months later, a June 7 report by Amnesty International finally uncovered this incident. Cluster bombs were used in the attack, which killed 44 innocent civilians, including 14 women and 21 children. One question here should be that of Yemeni state sovereignty with regard to this secret cluster bomb sprinkling. What if Yemen aerially delivered a few cluster bombs throughout central Kentucky?

These two instances, though merely regarded as “accidents” by the U.S. and NATO, operate as elaborative microcosms of U.S. policy toward that region. It’s difficult to justify Afghani 4-year-olds as “insurgents,” and thus worthy of intentional American sponsored surprise death, so of course, really formal apologies and heart-felt PR statements were issued. War-state protocol for damage protocol demands this when such statistically significant murder is regrettably made internationally visible regardless to whether those children’s parents feel “we’re real sorry” actually suffices. If those were your children, would a quick sound-bite comfort you?

But, the greater immorality of formal United States’ foreign policy lies even deeper. The Yemeni and Afghani bombings are only known because international agencies found large amounts of physical evidence on top of information received through eye witness accounts that demonstrated high death tolls, and those being undeniably civilian.

An even steadier number of people are killed on a daily basis throughout the region, but are seemingly deemed largely disposable in our national news discourse because of their ascribed label of “terrorist” or “militant.”

Yet in October, a new study released by the “Afghanistan Analysts Network” showed these terms to be “so broad as to be meaningless.” The report also notes that for every alleged “militant leader” killed in nighttime raids, eight other people also die. The median estimate of non-U.S. death tolls in the Middle East over the last decade hovers more than a half million.

U.S. officials were quoted that same week in the Washington Post as saying the US had effectively defeated Al-Qaeda, rendering it “operationally ineffective.” Asked what exists of Al-Qaeda leadership, U.S. intelligence personnel said the network had been “reduced to just two figures whose demise would mean the groups’ defeat.”

This is the trick of Uncle Sam’s see-saw argument that justifies the endless war-state of the 21st century. On one side of the balance, the U.S. demeans Al-Qaeda as “operationally ineffective” to assure the public some kind of good will soon come out of these decade-old multi-state, multi-trillion dollar wars.

While on the other side of the see-saw, both war-industry pocket-padded political parties assert the terrorist networks will stay a threat for many years to come.

Republican Newt Gingrich tried to make the case in a CNN debate recently for the expansion of both the Patriot Act and the Afghanistan war because otherwise, the terrorists, whomever “they” are, will “set off a nuclear bomb in an American city.”

In justifying a new frontier of war, Democratic administration officials “now assess Al-Qaeda’s offshoot in Yemen as a significantly greater threat.” CIA officials also want to expand the murderous drone video game in Pakistan where this “effectively inoperable” group inhabits, because otherwise, “letting up now could allow them to regenerate,” an anonymous US official stated.

So, if I am getting this right, Al-Qaeda is not a threat, but we have to keep bombing children and “militants” so they don’t “maybe” pose a risk in the future. And this is, as if, such weekly woops-we-killed-your-children occurrences doesn’t justifiably encourage and create animosity toward the far-distant American drone controllers of these armed unmanned robots flying in the sky over Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq and recently Libya and Somalia?

So during these upcoming holidays, use these or any other of the countless examples of actual U.S. foreign policy to talk with relatives when this topic hopefully gets brought up.

Around me, empty rhetoric was spouted in high volumes this past Thanksgiving.

When the commercials started, the conversation started. “The U.S. just has to invade/bomb/stop/control/sanction (Country X),” someone usually says.

Hearing that, I wanted to make sure others could present evidence to counter such sound bites, often manufactured by mega-media corporations that are also largely intertwined with the war-industry.

If the stories of the above “collateral murder” don’t equip you enough for dialogue, you should refer to the Wikileaks’ video of that same name, or refer to the collateral damage of cluster bombs which, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, involves the indiscriminate scattering of “hundreds of bomblets over a large area, but with limited accuracy and high failure rates.”

While more than 100 countries have signed a treaty banning their production and use, the U.S. not only refuses to sign, but also stop using cluster ammunitions.

Even further, I should probably elaborate on the most recent and even more dangerous international convention the United States is helping to ruin — the Durban COP17 UN Climate Talks. For now though, as the U.S. says with regard to halting runaway climate chaos, “lets just talk about that some other time.”