Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). A scientific war cost study by a renowned US university accuses US warmongers of having killed at least four and a half million people worldwide since 11 September 2001 and produced tens of millions of refugees.
Over 940,000 deaths due to direct war violence, including 432,000 civilians, 3.6 to 3.8 million people, almost exclusively civilians, who died indirectly in the areas overrun by US wars. This brings the total death toll to at least 4.5 to 4.7 million people. A further 38 million were displaced from their homes or ended up as war refugees.
These are the worldwide “war successes” of the “indispensable nation” USA since 11 September 2001, recorded with scientific accuracy by a research project at Brown University in the USA. Not a single one of these unprovoked US wars justified with lies – mostly with the support of NATO vassals – was legitimised under international law and certainly not in humanitarian terms. They only served the unscrupulous elites ruling in the USA to enforce their world domination over mountains of corpses in the 21st century.
The “Watson Centre” at Brown University was founded in 2011 in collaboration with Boston University. Brown University was already known for its unbiased and meticulous observation and analysis of US wars worldwide. Today, Brown’s Watson Institute and its “Costs of War” – compared to all other Western sources – offer the most well-founded information on civilian and military casualties on all sides. But Brown’s “Costs of War” project is also a reliable source of information on the material costs of the US wars and the war profiteers.
Here is a summary of the most important research findings from the latest publication of the Costs of War Project:
- At least 940,000 people have been killed by direct military violence, including armed forces on all sides of the conflict, including mercenaries, civilians, journalists and humanitarian workers.
- The number of civilians killed by direct military violence by all parties to the conflict totals 432,000.
- An estimated 3.6 to 3.8 million people lost their lives in war zones after 11 September 2001 indirectly as a result of the fighting – through hunger, illness, accidents, etc. This increases the total number of deaths. This brings the total death toll to at least 4.5 to 4.7 million.
- Only 7,050 US soldiers have been killed by direct military force in US wars since 11 September 2001. That is 0.75 per cent of the 940,000 people directly killed in US wars. So in these US wars, there are relatively few American mothers crying for their fallen children. By comparison, there were 42,939 reported deaths in traffic accidents in the US in 2021 alone. Or: According to former US Colonel Douglas Macgregor, 500,000 mostly young Ukrainian soldiers have died in Ukraine since 24 February.
- The “Costs of War” project puts the number of mercenaries killed in the so-called US “wars on terror” in the service of the Pentagon at 8,189.
- 38 million people were displaced by the wars after 11 September 2001 in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen and the Philippines.
- The US government has conducted so-called counter-terrorism operations in 78 countries, significantly expanding the war around the world.
- The post-9/11 wars have contributed significantly to climate change. The US Department of Defence is one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases.
- The wars have been accompanied by the erosion of civil and human rights at home and abroad.
- The human and economic costs of these wars will be felt for decades to come, though some, like the financial costs of caring for US veterans, will not peak until mid-century.
- Since the wars on terror, suicide rates among both veterans and active US military personnel have exceeded the rates in the general population. This is an “alarming shift” as suicide rates among military personnel have historically been lower than suicide rates in the general population. At least four times as many active duty soldiers and veterans have died by suicide since the 9/11 conflicts than in combat.
- Most of the US government’s funding for reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan has gone towards arming pro-US security forces in both countries. Much of the money allocated for humanitarian aid and civil society reconstruction has been lost to fraud, waste and abuse.
- The cost of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and elsewhere is about eight trillion US dollars. This does not include future interest costs for borrowing for the wars.
- The impact on the US economy has also been significant, including job losses and interest rate hikes.
- US policymakers hardly considered alternatives to war when debating the invasion of Iraq after 9/11.
This highly topical study by Brown University’s Costs of War Project uses empirical data to support the thesis that the US war machine is making the world less safe not just for Americans, but for everyone around the globe.
“There are more militant groups today than when the so-called ‘war on terror’ began in 2001,” said Stephanie Savell, a lead researcher on the project. “Because of all these US military actions around the world, there’s a lot of blowback, and there are more recruits to these militant groups today than ever before. We’re seeing right now in Iraq and Syria that the US presence in these places in the name of fighting terrorism is actually … making it more likely that [US troops] will engage in aggressive actions abroad,” the researcher emphasised.
In other words, war and violence only begets more war and violence.
According to Savell, the US military currently has a military “footprint” in 78 countries, or 40 per cent of the world’s nations. Her study also refers to the 800 US military bases around the globe and the controversy over how “base” is defined. This creates some uncertainty in this count, with some researchers putting the number of US military installations around the globe at over 900.
Since 7 October, (the day of the Hamas attack on the Israeli oppressors and occupiers), US and allied forces in Iraq and Syria have been attacked around a hundred times, “as American support for Israel’s bombing of Gaza has fuelled anger across the Arab world,” Ms Savell said.
Her research has also found “that the US often provides funding, weapons and training to regimes that are far from democratic. They use these tools to crack down on political dissidents and political opponents. And it really creates and fuels a cycle of blowback in which these targeted groups then join militant movements … The US has gone to extreme lengths to use the military as a primary tool of US foreign policy. And that doesn’t create more security for Americans or anyone else in the world,” says Savell.
In all these “anti-terror wars” waged by the US and its willing European partners in crime, the elites in the collective West have continued to feign their “humanitarian concerns” in eloquent pirouettes, regardless of the millions of civilians, children, mothers and fathers they have killed. But in fact, there has been no government, no non-governmental organisation, no mainstream media campaign in the US/NATO West to tear the hypocritical mug off the faces of the criminals in Washington and in the governments of the NATO-European countries.
There have been no calls for a boycott of US goods or films. Not a single US “cultural” or sporting event has been cancelled in protest or boycotted by private organisations, as has been the case against Russia since 24 February 2022, with extreme severity and totalitarian dictates that cover all levels of our social life and ban everything Russian!
According to NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, Russia only started the war in Ukraine to prevent NATO from expanding to its borders. Given the terrible “track record” of NATO alongside the USA – see above – the Kremlin saw the expansion of the North Atlantic terrorist organisation NATO to its borders as an unacceptable threat for understandable reasons and reacted accordingly.
However, the Russian reaction in the form of the special military operation on 24 February 2022 did not come out of the blue, but took place against the backdrop of years of warnings from the Kremlin about the consequences of NATO’s expansion into Ukraine. However, the Russians were not the only ones to warn the US and NATO governments against such a move; numerous renowned Western military strategists had also repeatedly spoken out against NATO expansion into Ukraine. The unscrupulous behaviour of the USA and NATO in their adventures has now cost the lives of half a million young Ukrainian soldiers. And as long as the West continues to supply weapons instead of admitting its mistakes, tens of thousands of Ukrainians, whom they claim to want to protect, will continue to die.
Meanwhile, the hypocrites in Washington are still being portrayed by our hypocrites here in Germany as beacons of democracy and human rights. And a large part of the population still hasn’t realised what’s going on. You don’t need to have studied political science – which is not a science, by the way – to recognise how the masses of the working people are being ripped off and how the wool is being pulled over their eyes with government spending cuts and higher taxes and contributions to finance the wars.
