Brown University has released a new study on the cost in lives of America’s Post-9/11 Wars, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The study estimates between 480,000 and 507,000 people were killed in the course of the three conflicts.
This includes combatant deaths and civilian deaths in fighting and war violence. Civilians make up over half of the roughly 500,000 killed, with both opposition fighters and US-backed foreign military forces each sustaining in excess of 100,000 deaths as well.
This is admittedly a dramatic under-report of people killed in the wars, as it only attempts to calculate those killed directly in war violence, and not the massive number of others civilians who died from infrastructure damage or other indirect results of the wars. The list also excludes the US war in Syria, which itself stakes claims to another 500,000 killed since 2011.
The report also notes that over 60,000 US troops were either killed or wounded in the course of the wars. This includes 6,951 US military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11.
The Brown study also faults the US for having done very little in the last 17 years to provide transparency to the country about the scope of the conflicts, concluding that they are “inhibited by governments determined to paint a rosy picture of perfect execution and progress.”
Those wishing to read the full Brown University study can find a PDF version here.
Half a million dead, millions maimed, bereaved and displace, and the politicians and citizens who supported these counterproductive, imperialist wars of aggression have blood on their hands. Now that President Trump has turned from the non-interventionist sentiments expressed in his campaign to become a warmongering neocon, guided by Bolton, Pompeo, Haspel, Kushner, Coates and other apostles of apocalypse.
Sad….just more of the same. Why do people even bother voting. Corrupt system from top to bottom.
These figures look a few digits short.
Realistically without pulling any punches here, EVERY “leader” who has expedited/approved US military action on the basis of PROVEN lies is a murderer and will probably suffer forever in Hell. And the complacent non-caring American public will ALSO pay in some way for not showing enough courage to take some sort of stand against all this blatant and addictive militarism! What America needs is an antidote to extremism and duplicity!
US to those killed, “Ooops.”
That numbers very low. And we criticize the nazis during WW2.
The horrific bombing, invasion and destruction of ( We came, We saw, He died ) Libya is not mentioned. The US death figures of its endless wars are always on the low side.
I believe we labeled that as a “kinetic action” so it doesn’t show up for our official count of war deaths. We’re clever that way.
Don’t wanna forget it was Hillary & her harpies that made Libya safe for child and women slave markets. Probably on orders of Jeffrey Epstein and his lawyer pal.
Obama was president. As much as I loath the wicked witch, Libya is on Obama.
Let’s be generous, Wars, and share the “credit”.
Obama was the weakling who allowed it to happen. Clinton, Power, and Rice were the death-worshipping harpies who led the effort. It’s hard to forget HRC giggling like a giddy schoolgirl at a man being sodomized to death with a bayonet. (Yes, the coup de grace was administered with a bullet, but just the same…)
so should the Muslim brotherhood taking Egypt,Tunisa and the conflict in Iraq and Syria But it was all U.S. policy the same as the Bushes and Clinton ‘s NWO global policy . And Trump is following along with this same policy pretty well .
I am sure it was all worth it. Just ask M. Albright or any of the other Neocons.
That was before 9/11. If THEY were counting those deaths, that would kick the total up to 500, 078.
&&&& Now we get Bolton in the white house plus the MSM news, netwerks
Singing the Neo’s & Trump’s latest change of policy to the the neo dream team’s latest plan: All war all the time. Me personally just hope that he keeps Russia & China out of this fever dream
Take one part American Exceptionalism, two parts racism, mix together with three parts Manifest Destiny, mix in with buckets of corporate greed and corruption, add plenty of propagandized males with juiced-up testosterone, prettify all that with some colorful combat ribbons and medals, and — voila!! Millions of dead foreigners, men women and lots of children. There are so many they are uncountable, even by Brown University.
Speaking of —
Don’t forget 100,000,000+ ignorant American citizens who were too busy watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Dancing with the Stars to give a damn.
Blaming US citizens for the crimes of the government has no basis.The wars were not an issue in the last elections, and in fact they have never been an issue that the US citizens could have any influence on. So don’t blame American citizens. That’s stupid. You’re obviously not an American to dump on American citizens. What country are you from, so we can dump on you?
In a democracy all citizens are complicit to a certain extent by omission or comission for the crimes they allow or commit.
This figure is real world, or a boob bait for the bubbas number….?????
We must have quit counting in ’05.
This news report ignores contract personnel and State Dept or CIA who are not “troops.” There were a lot more US casualties, the Brown report itself lists 7,820, not just 6,951 as in this report. That makes no mention of CIA or State Dept, and what is left out among “contractors” is not clear.
It ignores the US proxy forces, who are not government troops or rebels. They are the most numerous in Iraq today. They are not listed in the Brown report.
Civilian casualties are only those admitted by the US military. We know how incomplete that is. Multiply by 10x to be closer to the reality.
According to a report by Schooner,
Steven; Swan, Collin (2012-01-01). “Dead Contractors: The Un-Examined
Effect of Surrogates on the Public’s Casualty Sensitivity”. “Contractor deaths may account for nearly 30% of total US battlefield
losses since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”. Their best estimate is that 3000 private military contractors had been KIA since 2012. But without accountability from
Private Military and Security Contractors, we will never ever know.
follow the link, look at those numbers and then slap your self in the face for posting this garbage.
and of coarse the war in syria is “more than 500,000 deaths” because assad must go!
Antiwar.com covering up the Casualties from American Wars
= why I leave Antiwar.com out of my estate planning.
That and Antiwar’s Cowardice on 9-11 reporting.
The real story hear, is that after the Bush-Cheney-Feinstein-etc
FRAUD that sent American troops to the Mid-East, to cause
Millions of Civilians to Die for a Lie, a Lie first told in 2001 to 2003 –
that Lie is still being repeated by prominent American universities,
15 years later.
Nothing about the millions of refugees that fled to the US & Europe,
and are not exactly making life better for the women they’re raping
in Sweden & elsewhere.
Of course, that same war turned one young man into a “monster”
with PTSD. He came home and recently murdered 12 or 13 of
his neighbors at the bar in Ventura. Why is Ian Long’s PTSD &
Death & the Death of his Victims, not counted in an accurate
reckoning of Iraq War casualties ?
And all because Israel couldn’t get along with their neighbors.
Of course, there is that inconvenient part about the US Gov.
having EXTENSIVE foreknowledge of 9-11. 9-11 being the
pretext for the carnage Brown University is under-counting.
Has Antiwar.com Devolved into another part of the MSM ?
“Nothing about the millions of refugees that fled to the US & Europe”
A Google search on the word “refugees” at Antiwar.com returns 11,000 results, including such pieces as “End the Wars to Halt the Refugee Crisis,” “The Real Refugee Problem — and How to Solve It,” “Refugee ‘Mess’ is Ours, and Getting Worse,” etc.
“Why is Ian Long’s PTSD & Death & the Death of his Victims, not counted in an accurate reckoning of Iraq War casualties?”
That’s a very good question. I’m all for the “Antiwar.com Center for Accurate Counting of Casualties of American Wars.” If you’d like to re-think your estate planning to contemplate the creation of such a thing, that would be fantastic.
I’m not sure what you mean by “cowardice” on 9-11 reporting. Our own Justin Raimondo wrote a series of articles, and a book, on Israeli foreknowledge of the attacks. Antiwar.com covered, and IIRC carried the work of, FBI agent Coleen Rowley, who testified regarding US foreknowledge (or, at the very least, incompetence). And so on and so forth.
There are a lot of interesting theories (and even more interesting as-yet-unsupported hypotheses) surrounding the details of 9-11, but we’re Antiwar.com, not 9-11Truth.com. We would be against the use of 9-11 as a pretext for the subsequent wars regardless, whether or not home video of George W. Bush and Benjamin Netanyahu high-fiving each other with one hand while using the other to simultaneously press the plunger setting off explosive charges in one of the towers ever showed up. There are all kinds of fish to fry, and only some of them involve 9-11. If you find our coverage of that deficient, I understand, but “cowardice?” Hardly.
Sounds like Antiwar.com’s PRIMARY financiers
don’t want it to tell the truth about 9-11.
Since 9-11 is the incident on which 16 years of America’s Terror Wars are predicated, how could 9-11 be anything but a Primary focus of study – for a website that calls itself “Anti-war” ?
“Since 9-11 is the incident on which 16 years of America’s Terror Wars are predicated, how could 9-11 be anything but a Primary focus of study – for a website that calls itself ‘Anti-war?'”
Well, if you want to put it that way, then why stop at 9-11? The incident on which more than 120 years of America’s wars are predicated is the explosion of the USS Maine. Should the Maine be our primary focus?
Why not the Lusitania?
Or Pearl Harbor?
Or the Gulf of Tonkin Incident?
We’re Antiwar.com, not FocusObsessivelyOnRogerBrattsObsession.com. Maybe if you were our PRIMARY financier, that would not be the case.
B sure to close those deplorable open gates.
Maybe you should change the name of the Website to
Ad Hominem’s for Israel .com
Changing the name of the web site is not within my power.
And if it was, I wouldn’t engage in false advertising. The prevailing commenter sentiment, and for the most part the evident editorial line here, tends toward anti-, not pro-, Israel.
Well done, Thomas.
The 9/11 has been done, and examined, that the official story is bogus, well, seems it will be an open sore for some time. The perpetrators were clever, and powerful. What hasn’t been done, and lands squarely on Obama and the dems, of 08, is the investigation into lies perpetrated by Cheney et al, presented to Congress for the purpose of instigating war, a treasonable offense. Trump also, tho repeating that lies were used, will do nothing. Well, except I guess pardoning Scooter Libby, which firmly shows how he really feels.
“…after the Bush-Cheney-Pelosi-etc FRAUD…”
There, fixed that for you.
I have to stand up for Dianne Feinstein. She is a thoroughly principled individual. (She courageously persevered in her investigation of the CIA over the Cheney-directed torture program.) I think she suspected from the getgo that Blasey Ford’s accusation was a partisan stunt and withheld Ford’s identity for that reason. I think someone else, some other partisan Democrat hack revealed Ford’s identity, and that Feinstein was unfairly blamed for that.
Dianne Feinstein is integrity personified.
If Feinstein was Principled, America’s Terror War would never have been launched in 2002/2003, and Ian Long wouldn’t have PTSD from serving in that war.
And 12 young people and a cop in Thousand Oaks would still be alive. Ian Long might even have been line-dancing with them, instead of planning their murder.
Feinstein has principles all right. Her operating principle is to serve Israel and America’s Elite, then to lie & dissemble and talk a good story about “Public Service.”
So we should just forget about Feinstein’s vote for the Iraq war, her support for the Afghanistan war, and here service as chair of the House military construction committee.
Jan 25, 2007
Billions in Military Contracts to Husband’s Firms Were Approved by Sen. Feinstein’s Committee, Metro Newspapers Investigation Reports
While the US prattles about human rights in other countries (not its own), it destroys foreign cities and their citizens with bombs, missiles and artillery fire.
>Mosul
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/170710134825-mosul-general-view-destruction-exlarge-169.jpg
>Raqqa
https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2018/10/26/gettyimages-863798368_custom-a15288046192832053bb737ba95f9c98c1cef0fe-s800-c85.jpg
>US Marines fired so many M777 howitzer rounds into Raqqa that they burned out two barrels.
https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5aa6c2803be59f1c008b46fc-960-480.jpg
About 2,600 Americans died on 9/11. That wasn’t enough death for the Pentagram. Had to multiply it by 500x+, but hey, the Medal of Valor is a Satanic inverted pentagram and evil geography surrounds DC, its money, its buildings, and nobody knows why it thrives on death yet? Go shopping. Scratch and claw your way up the “corporate ladder” to buy.more.stuff. Don’t worry about all the dead and weeping. They are not Americans, Brits or Israelis.
As the world urbanizes there will be more fighting in cities, more destruction from the air, more killing of civilians. Trump used Mosul as a favorable outcome when he stepped up air attacks in Afghanistan.
Here’s one view on it, including “dropping a structure.”
Why Militaries Must Destroy Cities to Save Them
https://mwi.usma.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/37985170965_f7e9780379_k-1200×640.jpg
Also in the report in question: “Most direct war deaths of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria have been caused by militants”.
Why is it not THEIR WAR given they are the ones prolonging it for unjustified reasons? These militants do not enjoy popular support whatsoever in any of these countries and are principally responsible for the destruction and civilian deaths that result from their unjustified actions. Both their ideology and grounds for fighting are unjustified. Simply put they deserve the primary blame for the wars lasting this long and being this destructive even if you can say the US deserves blame for starting these wars not knowing what the aftermath would ensue.
The US started these wars as directed by their Israel Firster bosses knowing full well what the aftermath would be.
For anyone reading this comment…. be careful. Look carefully at the quote he offers: “Most direct war deaths of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria have been caused by militants”.
Note the word “caused”,… and think, “Carefully phrased bullsh*t”.
The UN reports on civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan were famous for this style of Newspeak fakery:
An American patrol approaches an “enemy” village. They encounter resistance in the form of small arms fire. The Americans call in an airstrike on the village, which as you might well imagine, causes substantial destruction and civilian deaths. Those civilian deaths are then typically attributed to the “militants”, and described as “caused by the militants”.
Invading army, illegal war, justified and lawful defensive actions taken by the defending local population — referred to as “militants”, or more often as “terrorists” — and the criminal aggressor’s propaganda stream inevitably describes the deaths of defenders and their civilian family members as “caused” by the “militants”.
Don’t be fooled.
As to the rest of the comment, it is in its entirety false: full-on propaganda, reality-disconnected criminal aggressor KoolAid.
Yeah, like him saying “they are the ones prolonging it for UNJUSTIFIED reasons”. You know, just because you live there doesn’t make you justified to fight back.
The US has only a one dimensional policy in the Middle East its all related to Israel even if the wars may not directly involve Israel. So perhaps another way of putting it is …..have the post WW2 wars had more victims than the holocaust?
Which Holocaust ?
You mean, Al Nakba ?
Brown should have called the Lancet. Says 750,000 dead in Iraq as of 2015.
SHAME ON BROWN…….!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And 750,000 is still way too low.
The reason why the anti-war movement is so ineffective is I believe that it is controlled mostly by the Western establishment. I do not know about this site but a good example is the fact that many if not most social-conservatives are also anti-war as are numerous fiscal conservatives, and they have not sought common cause with social or fiscal liberals who claim to be antiwar.
The ruling establishment keeps the everyone divided on lesser issues and never really allows the people to know the truth even about atrocities like 9/11. The truth movement ought to cut across all left-right political loyalties whereby people realize that there can be no trust, no resolution of problems, no justice, no peace without the truth.
It is said that most wars come from with Democrats when in power. That may no longer be true, but one thing is certain and that is if the US starts another major war in the Middle East it will not just be for right-wing Zionist Israeli expansion, but it will also be to save the failing US petrodollar by securing more oil and gas hegemony. If the dollar were to fail or be greatly depreciated it would be the have nots who would scream the loudest and cast a blind eye to any war to keep their jobs and maintain their standard of living. In this respect and in viewing things from a distance, we are all on the left in that all of us in fact contenance year after year exorbitant government deficits eventually forcing wars to put off the doom of bankruptcy and economic depression.
Politicians would not get elected without promises based on the generally unrestrained borrowing powers of our governments. Fiat bonds and currencies fail when there is nothing behind them to secure their value. US fiat bonds and currency are now mainly secured by the US military forcing oil&gas-rich nations to buy them, which demand sustains their value. If not for government spending beyond our means the debt would be lessened and their would be more real assets to secure the huge liabilities, and less justification by the ruling elite for their wars of plunder. The vicious circle is completed in realizing that in doing away with most of military spending there would be no way to enforce other nations trading in US petrodollars. That is the problem but it seems that only people with uncorrupted moral standards are willing to consider it or where we are being blindly led by the present irresponsible monetary system.
Without constitutions which restrain government spending to annual tax dollars and revenues received by our governments, our nations will remain war mongers and plunders pouring more and more debt onto the shoulder’s of future generations and other creditor nations until the entire system collapses.
So if you really want true conservatives on board your peace movement you first have to be honest with the facts and about the remedies which will work to stop the bloody unjust wars and the senseless killings. A one-world-government will only lead to more tyranny and war as it will be controlled by the same debt-rigging, ponzi-dollar cabal responsible for all the major wars over the past 120 years . The solution has to begin with real constitutional reform in each nation. If there is to be peace in the world the US has to take the lead in this direction. Other nations will be more than happy to end the arms race and nation plundering, with more left over for domestic purposes.