The enormous costs and elusive benefits of the war on terror
Some American on Twitter tweeted saying that Putin has turned Russia into a rogue and pariah state. It's funny how people don't see their own faults. What Washington has done since 9/11 are some of the worst crimes against humanity. And the US is not even a real democracy, because like in the UK, the elite choose who we can vote for: They destroyed both the Bernie Sanders and the Jeremy Corbyn's campaigns with fake news. The Military-Industrial Complex runs the show.
But some things can be measured. There have been no 9/11-scale terrorist attacks in the United States in the past 20 years. Meanwhile, according to the most recent estimates from Brown University’s Costs of War Project, at least 897,000 people around the world have died in violence that can be classified as part of the war on terror; at least 38 million people have been displaced due to these wars; and the effort has cost the US at least $5.8 trillion, not including about $2 trillion more needed in health care and disability coverage for veterans in decades to come.
When you lay it all out on paper, an honest accounting of the war on terror yields a dismal conclusion: Even with an incredibly generous view of the war on terror’s benefits, the costs have vastly exceeded them. The past 20 years of war represent a colossal failure by the US government, one it has not begun to reckon with or atone for.
We are now used to the fact that the US government routinely bombs foreign countries with which it is not formally or even informally at war, in the name of killing terrorists. We are used to the fact that the National Security Agency works with companies like Facebook and Google to collect our private information en masse. We are used to the fact that 39 men are sitting in Guantanamo Bay, almost all detained indefinitely without trial.
These realities were not inevitable. They were chosen as part of a policy regime that has done vastly more harm than good.
Vox
2 comments:
“least 897,000 people around the world have died in violence that can be classified as part of the war on terror“
Should have been 200x that by precedent..l
“If the red slayer thinks he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanish'd gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brahma
Number of deaths caused by the US in the War on Terror?
Zero.
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