The Unpunished Crime: How America Turned War Into an Industry-and Trump Into Its CEO
For decades, the US has waged war not for freedom, but for profit. With Donald Trump, the mask has finally slipped. This is the story of an empire built on bombs and the man now auctioning it off.
The girl’s name was Zainab. She was seven years old, and on the morning of February 28, 2026, she was carrying a jug of water across the courtyard of her home in a village near Hamadan, in western Iran. The sky did not rumble with the approach of bombers. There was no air raid siren, those had been destroyed in the first wave. There was only a shift in the light, a whistle that her grandfather later told reporters sounded almost beautiful, and then the courtyard was a crater and Zainab was simply gone. Not dead in the way we are taught to imagine death, with ceremony, with a bedside, with a final sentence. She was here, and then she was not. The official statement from Central Command would later describe the strike as having “degraded Iranian missile launch capabilities.” It did not mention the jug, or the courtyard, or the fact that Zainab had been afraid of the dark and now she was in it forever.
This is the only honest place to begin. Not with doctrine, not with geopolitics, not with the careful euphemisms of State Department briefings. You begin with the body of a child for whom there was no vote, no provocation, no say in the empire that decided her existence was an acceptable price for someone else’s concept of national security. Because for seventy five years, that is what the United States has done: it has built the most sophisticated killing machine in human history, justified it with the language of freedom, and billed the rest of humanity for the privilege of being its target.
The argument is not complicated, though it has been made to seem so by decades of expert obfuscation. The United States does not wage war primarily to defend itself, or to spread democracy, or to maintain global stability. Those are the hymns. The liturgy is profit. The United States wages war because war is the most profitable enterprise its ruling class has ever devised, and with the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, the last polite fictions have been swept away, revealing not a guardian of the liberal order but a shopkeeper measuring the world in dollars and corpses.
Let us be precise about the scale of the atrocity. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has militarily intervened in scores of countries, overthrown democratically elected governments, and killed millions of people. The numbers accumulate like a stain that will not lift: three million dead in Vietnam, half of them civilians, their bodies counted in the New York Times but their names never learned. Five hundred thousand to one million dead in Iraq, many from depleted uranium munitions that leave children born without eyes or with brains developing outside their skulls. Seventy thousand dead in Afghanistan, though the number is soft because the Pentagon simply stopped counting civilians in 2019. In Korea, three million, with entire cities turned to ash by napalm that stuck to skin and burned to the bone. In Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Libya, Syria, Yemen, the list is not a list; it is a headstone the size of a continent.
The Brown University Costs of War project estimates that nearly one million people have died directly from US led post 9/11 violence alone, and that the financial cost has reached eight trillion dollars. Eight trillion. To grasp that number, you must understand that it is not an abstraction. It is the schools that were never built in Mississippi, the bridges that collapsed in Pittsburgh, the opioid addiction clinics that never opened in West Virginia. It is the wealth of an entire nation, siphoned upward.
Siphoned to whom? The answer is the only constant in American foreign policy. Between 2020 and 2024, private contractors received $2.4 trillion in Pentagon contracts, fifty four percent of all defence spending. The lion’s share went to five firms: Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. Lockheed alone secured $313 billion. To put that in terms that do not glaze the eye: these five corporations earned nearly twice what the US government spent on diplomacy, development, and humanitarian aid combined. They earned it by building the bombs that fell on Zainab’s courtyard. They earned it by lobbying Congress to ensure that the bombs would keep falling. They earned it by placing former generals on their boards and former congressmen on their payrolls.
This is the system that Dwight Eisenhower warned against in 1961, a “military industrial complex” that risked distorting democracy itself. But Eisenhower, for all his prescience, could not have foreseen the transformation now complete. What was once a complex has become a cartel. What was once a revolving door between the Pentagon and the defence industry has become a permanent corridor. Today, according to recent reporting, the sector employs 950 lobbyists, nearly two for every member of Congress. In the five years leading to 2023, the top 100 military contractors gave $34.7 million to the nation’s top fifty think tanks, ensuring that the intellectual case for endless war would never lack funding.
And what do these contractors produce? Not security. The F 35 fighter jet, the most expensive weapons system in history, remains so plagued by malfunctions that it cannot fly in rain. The Littoral Combat Ship was a $30 billion failure. The Ford class aircraft carrier cost $13 billion and its electromagnetic launch system still cannot reliably launch aircraft. But these failures do not matter, because the purpose of the system is not effectiveness. Its purpose is the extraction of public money into private hands. The product is war. The customer is the American taxpayer. The dividend is death.
Now add Donald Trump.
There was a moment, during his first campaign, when Trump’s promise to end “endless wars” seemed almost radical. He said the Iraq War was a lie. He said the generals were stupid. He said the United States had spent seven trillion dollars making a desert and calling it peace. For those of us who had spent years arguing that the emperor had no clothes, it was bewildering to hear a reality television host speak the truth. But we forgot something essential about Trump: he does not oppose the machinery of war on principle. He opposes it only when he is not the one operating it.
The Trump doctrine, if it can be called that, is the conversion of American empire from a public project into a private franchise. Where previous presidents maintained the polite fiction that wars were fought for noble purposes, Trump has simply abandoned the fiction. Consider Venezuela. In January 2025, US forces captured President Nicolás Maduro in a raid that the administration framed as an anti drug operation. But within weeks, the White House had installed a former Trump business associate as an advisor to Venezuela’s new leadership, and American oil companies were negotiating contracts that gave them effective control over the country’s reserves. Ye toh business deal tha, one diplomat remarked privately. Uniform pehen ke aaye, lekin hisaab business ka kiya. They came in uniform, but the accounting was business.
Consider Nigeria. In March 2025, Trump threatened military intervention, citing terrorism. But leaked documents later revealed that his son in law’s investment fund had been acquiring oil concessions in the region for months. Consider Greenland, which Trump has repeatedly offered to buy. Consider Gaza, where the United States has provided Israel with $18.2 billion in military aid since October 2023, despite ample evidence that American bombs were being dropped on refugee camps, schools, and hospitals. When asked about the civilian death toll, which exceeds forty thousand, Trump replied that “war is war”.
The word that changes everything here is dehumanization. It is not a comfortable word. It suggests a process, a deliberate stripping away of recognition, a refusal to see the Other as fully human. But that is precisely what the American war machine has perfected. In Vietnam, the phrase was “free fire zone”, territory where anyone moving was presumed enemy and could be killed. In Iraq, it was “collateral damage”, a term so clinical it could describe a broken fence. In Afghanistan, it was “military age male”, a designation that meant any man between fifteen and fifty was a legitimate target, and if women and children died with him, that was war.
The Israelis learned this language from us. They refined it. And now, under Trump, the dehumanization has come home. The same administration that approved the bombing of Gaza has launched militarized ICE raids in American cities. The same officials who refused to say the names of Palestinian children killed in their homes now refuse to say the name of Renée Good, a mother shot by federal agents in Minneapolis. When you stop seeing the foreigner as human, you eventually stop seeing the citizen as human. The empire consumes everything, including its own.
What is new under Trump is not the violence. It is the shamelessness. Previous presidents lied about their motives because they understood that the American people required a moral justification for slaughter. Trump does not bother. He has surrounded himself with the new aristocracy of the military industrial complex, Elon Musk, whose SpaceX now launches most Pentagon satellites and who functions as the de facto head of the “Department of Government Efficiency”; Peter Thiel, whose data mining firm Palantir builds targeting systems for drone strikes; the venture capitalists who fund Anduril, a company founded by a former Facebook executive to build autonomous weapons. These men do not pretend to be patriots. They are not defending the homeland. They are building fortunes on the corpses of people whose names they will never learn.
The scale of the current moment is difficult to absorb. In July 2025, Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act, pushing total military expenditure to $1.06 trillion, more than the next ten countries combined. Half of that will go to private contractors. The war with Iran, launched on the thinnest of pretexts, has already killed thousands and disrupted global oil supplies, enriching American energy companies in the process. And yet the stated objectives shift by the day, first it was to stop an imminent attack, then it was to cripple the nuclear program, then it was to degrade missile capabilities. The only constant is that the bombs keep falling and the contracts keep flowing.
There is a phrase in Hindi: hisab barabar. It means the account is settled, the debt is paid. It is what you say when you have finished a transaction and owe nothing further. For the architects of American empire, that is all war has ever been, a transaction. The cost is counted in dollars, never in lives. The profit is counted in stock dividends, never in moral consequence. And the people of Hamadan, of Fallujah, of Gaza, of a hundred other places whose names we will never learn, they are not customers. They are not even line items. They are simply the medium of exchange.
Zainab’s grandfather still goes to the courtyard every morning. He sits on the edge of the crater, because he cannot stay inside the house where her absence fills every room. He told a reporter that he does not understand why the Americans came. He said his village had no army, no missiles, no leaders. Just farms, and a girl who carried water, and a sky that turned to fire.
The men who approved that strike will never see his face. They will never hear him speak. They will never know that his granddaughter was afraid of the dark. They do not need to know, because the system does not require them to know. It requires only that they keep signing the contracts, keep approving the transfers, keep the machinery running. And under Donald Trump, the machinery runs faster than ever.
The question that remains, the only question that matters, is what we who witness this will do with our seeing. If we turn away, we are complicit. If we pretend there are two sides to this argument, we are cowards. If we wait for the empire to reform itself, we will wait forever. Empires do not die in peace. They die in the streets, in the rubble, in the hearts of people who finally understand that the rulers will never stop unless they are stopped.
Zainab did not die for freedom. She died for profit. And unless we name that truth, and act on it, she will not be the last.
