Afghan men offer funeral prayers for civilians killed in a NATO airstrike, on the outskirts of Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on Oct. 5, 2013.
Credit: Nisar Ahmad/AP
How many people have been killed in the post-9/11 war on terror? The question is a contentious one, as there has been no formal accounting for the deadly cost of the initial U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the secondary conflicts that continue to wreak havoc across the Middle East and the opaque, covert war still expanding across Asia and Africa.
But even as the U.S. government evades responsibility for the human cost of its overseas endeavors, some researchers are determined to keep count.
Brown University’s Costs of War Project this month released a new estimate of the total death toll from the U.S. wars in three countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The numbers, while conservatively estimated, are staggering. Brown’s researchers estimate that at least 480,000 people have been directly killed by violence over the course of these conflicts, more than 244,000 of them civilians. In […]
Why would we now care to know or make amends for deaths during our latest killing spree? We have never accept responsibility for the millions killed in the last 100+ years in Asia, Central and South America really all over the world. Our escapades in Indochina killed, according to Wikipedia, 1.3 mill to 3.6 mill which are of course estimates as no one can be sure of the exact number. And what did any single one of them do to us to justify our attacks? We want your bananas, we don’t like your friends, you shot first, we are more deserving of your natural resources, you don’t know how to govern yourselves… Just the costs of building and running a world empire, nothing personal.
My point in going on so is that this program of death and destruction for national glory and profit is not new for the USA. Every time I hear about the wonders of America, American exceptionalism and our right to defend freedom I want to scream. MAGA! When was that?