The New York Times ran an article the other day that’s notable both for how ordinary and how extraordinary it is. The facts are extraordinary, the attitudes taken to it predictably complacent. It’s yet another addition to my running series here on the use of “Human Shields,” not in Gaza or Southern Lebanon, but right here at home. “The U.S. Start-Up Making Low-Cost Interceptors for the Iran War,” it’s called, describing a military start-up based in downtown West Palm Beach, Florida. Here’s the beginning:
For Florida-based Powerus, becoming a global supplier of counterdrone technology has meant involving the Trumps, a golf course and a new way of doing business.
In a small warehouse in the United Arab Emirates, workers spend up to 12 hours a day snapping together 3-D printed components to make interceptors capable of knocking Iranian drones out of the sky at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour.
The facility, which came online last month, is being used by Powerus, a start-up in West Palm Beach, Fla., to make inexpensive interceptors.
The factory is the company’s first foray into the Middle East, and part of its plan to become a global supplier. Factories affiliated with Powerus make roughly 3,000 drone interceptors a month, a spokesman said, and the company is trying to establish a network of factories that will increase production to 15,000 a month worldwide by mid-2027. It would not publicly disclose the identities of its customers or contract manufacturer in the Emirates.
Naturally, the authors go on a pointless tangent about the pluckiness of the entrepreneurs involved, and the adjustments they’ve had to make to their normal way of doing business. But there are other trajectories one’s inquiries could take. Start with two painfully obvious points.
1. It’s tempting to believe, as the owners themselves seem to want us to believe, that Powerus is merely engaged in building “defensive” weapons. But there is no such thing as a defensive weapon in a war of aggression. The United States and Israel, with their Gulf Arab allies, initiated the war against Iran and Lebanon (several times over, actually, not just once). Iran retaliated against the aggressors by attacking those Gulf allies. The Iranian counter-attacks were meant to deter further U.S.-Israeli aggression, which is to say that they had a purely defensive purpose. The deterrent/defensive effect is blunted precisely by the kinds of interceptors that Powerus is making, and with that specific intention.
So Powerus’s claim to manufacturing merely defensive weapons is a deception. They are manufacturing “defensive” weapons whose only purpose is the promotion of a war of aggression. This implies that they’re not just “complicit” in that war of aggression, but primary agents in it. They are, in other words, willingly among the aggressors.
This means that if the defenders were to attack them, Powerus would in justice have no cause for complaint. I am not inciting or inviting an attack on them, just stating a fact: on any plausible conception of justice, they deserve to be attacked, and their facility deserves to be wiped off the face of the planet. Not all claims of desert should or ought to be acted on, but that doesn’t change the fact that if acted on in this case, the targets would fully deserve what they got.
2. Now consider what would happen if there was such an attack. Look at the photos below. They’re screenshots from a Google Maps query as to Powerus’s location in West Palm Beach. The issue here is not subtle. Powerus is located in a densely packed civilian space that includes restaurants, parks, schools, health facilities, ordinary office buildings, a couple of banks, a marina, and ordinary streets and sidewalks. A justified attack aimed at Powerus might kill everyone, or almost everyone, in the relevant radius.
Powerus’s “defensive” activities are in fact an open invitation to bring an attack to West Palm Beach, and make everyone in the vicinity into a human shield and target. So far, the Iranians have only engaged in cyberattacks against U.S. based targets, but setting aside questions of feasibility and cost-benefit calculations, they have every justification for doing to West Palm Beach what the United States has done to the cities of Iran, and what the Israelis have done to Gaza, to Southern Lebanon, and to the cities of the northern West Bank, like Jenin and Tulkarem. Or maybe I should qualify that by saying: they have every justification to do to West Palm Beach what the U.S. and Israel claim to be doing in those places, namely targeting them for “militants” and military supply lines while discounting any civilians killed as collateral damage. Never forget that two can play that game.
If you support this war, this is what you’re supporting: an attack on West Palm Beach (and so many places like it) that destroys a good swatch of downtown and kills lots of people in it. Don’t wallow in recriminations about the evils of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, or the Iranians. There is no sense in which you are morally superior to any of them. Focus on your own culpability, for a change: you’re not just supporting a war of aggression across the entire region over there. You’re not just supporting mass murder over there. You’re inviting it here, turning all of us into justified targets, while implicitly displacing the blame elsewhere, acting as though “terrorist” attacks on the residents of this country are the fault of the “terrorists.”
They’re not. They’re your fault, the fault of those who support U.S. and Israeli aggression. When the worst happens, if it happens, don’t pretend you weren’t warned. Don’t pretend that you’re the ones who have been aggressed against. Say the hard, cold truth out loud. You brought this on yourselves, and you brought it on innocent others. You are the face of complicity in mass death, both “theirs” and “ours.”
West Palm Peach, Florida is, of course, just the tip of a gigantic iceberg, a microcosm of the United States and Israel as such. The United States and Israel are indeed “start up nations,” just as their self-congratulatory PR suggests: start-up nations adept at starting up wars that require long supply lines. The supply lines start right here at home but extend to every killing field across the globe. The lesson should be obvious: we’re all human shields, and all conscripts in the murder-plots of our ruling class. The question is what we do about it. There’s no denying the fact itself.
