GWOT has killed 500,000+ and the carnage is accelerating

It's amazing to think that we could have killed so many people, and yet the topic was barely even mentioned in the recent elections.

A study released Thursday says the U.S.-led war on terrorism has killed about 507,000 people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan during its 17 years and is showing a 22 percent increase in deaths in the past two years.

The death toll includes U.S. and allied troops, civilians in the war zones, local military and police forces, as well as militants, who have died from war violence, according to the report by Brown University's Costs of War Project.

The report said the number of indirect deaths was several times larger than deaths caused by direct war violence, bringing the total death count to well over 1 million people.

As horrific as as that number is, it doesn't encompass the entire GWOT.
For instance, Syria isn't counted. Consider the example of Raqqa.

One year after the U.S.-led military campaign against ISIS ended in Raqqa, Khamis' team is still recovering the remains of the battle's casualties. This grim, daily work is revealing a civilian death toll that is dramatically higher than the assessment offered by the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS.
The rescue workers' findings, which they document in meticulous notes shown to NPR, point to an offensive that killed many more civilians than it did ISIS members, and where the majority of those civilians likely died in American airstrikes.
...In May 2017, Defense Secretary James Mattis told CBS News the U.S. was accelerating and intensifying the campaign against ISIS, and added, "We have already shifted from attrition tactics ... to annihilation tactics."

"This new body count signals that, far from diminishing, the war is only intensifying."
- Stephanie Savell, co-director of the project

Also missing from this count is Yemen, where our drone strikes have killed around a thousand people, and the entire continent of Africa.
We've been bombing Somalia since 2007 and Libya since 2011, but the GWOT has barely even started there.

The Pentagon authorized three new classified contingency operations in February 2018, just months after the ill-fated October ambush in Niger that left four Army Special Forces personnel dead at the hands of ISIS-affiliated militants, according to a new report published Monday by the lead DoD inspector general for Operation Inherent Resolve published.
These classified missions — known as Operation Yukon Journey and “operations in Northwest Africa and East Africa,” according to the report — are designed to “degrade al Qaeda and ISIS-affiliated terrorists in the Middle East and specific regions of Africa.” And while details on those operations are scant due to their sensitive nature, the DoD OIG report says the Pentagon was unable to answer critical questions regarding the U.S. military presence there:

There is only one appropriate way to end this depressing essay.

“The war, therefore if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that the hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word "war," therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist."
- George Orwell, 1984

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Lookout's picture

Andrea Carboni from ACLED discusses his organisation’s new study which shows 56,000 have died as a direct result of conflict in Yemen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxHR9aWxDgM (8 min)
https://www.acleddata.com/2018/11/08/fatalities-in-the-yemen-conflict/

Profiting by starving children and spreading disease in Yemen.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Win Without War

@WinWithoutWar

Day by day, the casualties grow, largely unnoticed by the American public and our lawmakers. This is why we need to #EndEndlessWar.

Why have death tolls in recent wars been "largely unnoticed " in the US?

During World Wars I and II and the Korean "Police Action," radio, newspapers and magazines apprised the US population of war events several times daily. At some point, I don't know when, newsreels preceded every showing of a film and included news of the war. During the "Vietnam Era," if not sooner, television joined the other mass media in providing news of the war. And, at some point, though I cannot pinpoint it, government decided that war news was not for government. And mass media complied.

In the early stages of the Iraq War, I noticed a loud silence in covering the war daily. As I posted elsewhere on this board, I thought, Surely, on Memorial Day, television news will report on the war, especially deaths of US troops. On the Friday before Memorial Day Monday, I tuned into the open of the Today show and heard a helicopter. However, it was Matt Lauer in the helicopter, reporting on Memorial Day traffic in the New York City area. On a national network, the open on Memorial Day was not war casualties or other hard war news, but a local traffic report for the benefit of New Yorkers using Memorial Day weekend to get out of NYC to a more fun venue!

Nor did media fight a prohibition on photographing flag draped coffins. Although it was impossible to tell the identity of the person inside the coffin, the rationale for the prohibition was the sensibilities of the survivors. Really? Were the survivors happy with a government and mass media that was ignoring the dangers and sacrifices of war?

IIRC, there were some televised calls from troops to loved ones in the US, but, of course, the troops were minimizing danger to the US troops, so as to comfort their loved ones. As the war unfolded, I saw calls of that kind and videos of troops surprising their kids at school. The kind of thing that, in the past, may have been described as "schmaltz."

The cumulative absence of day-to-day coverage of wars in which US troops have been involved has been gobsmacking and unprecedented. So much for independent news in the US, at least as to mass media.

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OzoneTom's picture

@HenryAWallace
The accurate reporting of the war in Vietnam has been repeatedly blamed for America's defeat there.

That sort of thing is no longer allowed as it threatens the MIC ability to reap obscene profits looting our treasury while keeping the unpleasant parts out-of-view.

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@HenryAWallace

The cumulative absence of day-to-day coverage of wars in which US troops have been involved has been gobsmacking and unprecedented.

42% of Americans don't know we are still at war in Afghanistan, a war that we are losing.
Part of the blame for this ignorance is the American public, but obviously the news media and our politicians share a majority of the blame.

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divineorder's picture

@gjohnsit are to blame.

Over the years they have run off or fired the 'liberal' press. Now they shill for TPTB.

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

@divineorder
At the very least they could talk about the wars, and thus help force the media to mention it.

Politicians could also do something about the corporate media concentration.

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@gjohnsit @gjohnsit

They changed the antitrust laws and regulations that would have prohibited such concentration. Once, anti trust laws would have prohibited acquisition after acquisition of the same kind of business, so as to prevent a monopoly in any given field. Then politicians changed the criteria to dollar amounts. regardless of the business of the companies involved in a merger or acquisition. For their next act(s), they kept increasing the dollar amount.

I don't know if they did the above with an eye specifically to media concentration, but they should not have done that at all.

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divineorder's picture

@HenryAWallace

Effect of ownership on coverage
Main article: Military–industrial–media complex

Organizations like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting have accused the Military-industrial-media complex of using their media resources to promote militarism, which, according to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's hypothesis, benefits the defense resources of the company. As FAIR observed, "when correspondents and paid consultants on NBC television praised the performance of U.S. weapons, they were extolling equipment made by GE, the corporation that pays their salaries."[92]

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

Amanda Matthews's picture

@gjohnsit @gjohnsit
has been obvious for a long time.

John Pilger: Why are wars not being reported honestly?
John Pilger
The public needs to know the truth about wars. So why have journalists colluded with governments to hoodwink us?
Fri 10 Dec 2010 03.00 EST

In the US Army manual on counterinsurgency, the American commander General David Petraeus describes Afghanistan as a "war of perception . . . conducted continuously using the news media". What really matters is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where "the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences". Reading this, I was reminded of the Venezuelan general who led a coup against the democratic government in 2002. "We had a secret weapon," he boasted. "We had the media, especially TV. You got to have the media."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/10/war-m...

The msm has been useless for a long time.

EDIT: deleted some menu choices I accidentally copied.

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

snoopydawg's picture

@HenryAWallace

was outlawed on TV? Bush was giving his SotU address and the screen split to show the dead coming home from Iraq war 1.

In the early stages of the Iraq War, I noticed a loud silence in covering the war daily.

After we got to watch the atrocities of Shock and Awe the reporting from Iraq was scripted and the 'journalists' were embedded with the army so they could censor the news.

We don't hear about mercenary deaths at all since we don't hear how many of them there are fighting our wars. The government would rather pay higher wages to mercenaries than bring back the draft because as chuckutzmanstates that would end the wars.

The guy from Utah who recently died was in the national guard and on his 4th deployment when he was shot by someone he was training. He said that he was doing good things over there and he loved what he was doing. BTW. Haven't we been training Afghan troops for like ever? How many more years will we be doing that?

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@snoopydawg

from publishing pics of the coffins.

I never watched a Bush SOTU, but I will take your word for it.

Government is a great fan of truth, so long as truth about government is not told.

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chuck utzman

TULSI 2020

divineorder's picture

and makes c99 a go to for many as a consequence.

Vet actions are reason to have some optimism imo.

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Who has heard of this org ? Just discovered it. Looks interesting.

Editorial Mission & Staff

A 2017 Gallup poll showed that 63% of Americans do not trust the mainstream media. A recent survey from Harvard’s Institute of Politics showed that among young Americans, the military is the only national institution to maintain its level of trust in the last three years, while trust in the media, Wall Street and all levels of local and federal government has dropped. Worldwide, reporting of the news has suffered from notions of bias, a lack of reliability and credibility.

Lima Charlie is dedicated to providing compelling content on a wide range of topics featuring opinion and in-depth analysis from military veterans, service members and intelligence professionals worldwide. Lima Charlie’s core mission is to train veterans and service members to be journalists, while working towards narrowing the veteran/civilian divide.

Lima Charlie journalists seek to investigate and report the truth, with unparalleled access and a noble eye towards promoting peace, understanding, and positive political engagement. Lima Charlie’s team reports the latest in national and international news, foreign policy, national security, politics, business, cyber, science & tech, media, culture, and Veteran’s issues.

Follow us on Twitter @LimaCharlieNews and please check out our outstanding and ever growing Team.
https://limacharlienews.com/about/

Excellent expose by Lima Charlie News:

War in Yemen: Arms industry outsourcing amid increasing media scrutiny
Published on October 25, 2018 by Lima Charlie
Saudi Arabia is in the hot seat after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi finally bringing the war in Yemen front and center. With the political foment endangering further weapon sales to the Saudi Kingdom, some defense companies have already opened manufacturing facilities in Saudi Arabia.

Heh. Vets are fired up for PEACE !!

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

snoopydawg's picture

The 'leaders of the free world' came together to celebrate the ending of the war to end all wars while there are countless wars going on. What a fcuking joke! How many people are living in hell right now while those people were eating nice food and being catered to? Gah!

Caitlin nails it again. VETERANS SHOULD NOT HAVE TO RELY ON FUCKING CHARITY.

The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them

The Dead

do not require our silence to be honored
do not require our silence to be remembered.
do not accept our silence as remembrance, as honor.
do not expect our silence to end
the carnage of war
the child starved
the woman raped
the virulence of intolerance
the Earth desecrated
It is the living who require our silence
in a lifetime of fear and complicity

The Dead

do require our courage to defy the powerful and the greedy.
do require our lives to be loud, compassionate, courageous.
do require our anger at the continuance of war in their name.
do require our shock at the maiming of the Earth in their name.
do require our outrage to be honored, to be remembered.
Amen!

Since the war to end all wars

IMG_2792.JPG

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

divineorder's picture

@snoopydawg

OT

Was good to see this:

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

snoopydawg's picture

@divineorder

Thanks for posting this.

Another OT.

Bush got his Liberty medal at a $1,000 per plate dinner.

Here's the Twitter thread on it.

Liberty Medal

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

all of the time.

I guess we can't deal with it mentally so we ignore it (we being the much broader group of US citizens).

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dfarrah

and 200 years after the great carnage of the Napoleonic Wars.

There was a guy who wrote a book called "A Roadmap of Time" which showed many centuries of conflict, tied to a hundred year cycle of temperature fluctuations. Every five cycles, this resonates with a 170 year rainfall cycle and all Hell breaks loose. Assuming the bad weather year near 500 AD was one of those, we are at the right time for another.

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

I saw a re-tweet I think from Adam Johnson of FAIR maybe two weeks back or so. I think it was him. I should have bookmarked but did not. The tweeter noted that 10 Young Turk presenters listed what makes a progressive a progressive--and not one of the them noted resistance to foreign wars.

The sad fact is that the democratic party and all the media outlets, pundits, etc., that orbit around the party are not anti-war. The most they will do is attack Trump for being an incompetent "commander and chief" never doubting the military action--just how it was conducted. Or pearl clutch claiming they never supported missile attacks on anybody while engaging in the worst sort of war mongering.

In the turned upside down world created by Trump, we see Biden giving Bush a medal. One of the supposed leading candidates to run against Trump. While a door knob would be better than Trump, I fear a democrat winning in 2020 as he or she may through their own and with the support of a rabid pro-war party, may in fact start shooting war with Russia.

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As empire falls go, we'll be lucky if we have half the grace of the British Empire
and twice the blood on our hands. Given the actual magnitude of genocidal killing that went to build the British Empire, and the relatively peaceful abdication of its once enormous colonial territories, that will be quite an accomplishment.

Britain’s imperial decline and fall can be dated to the end of World War One, and the formal decision to give up the Commonwealth territories to self rule, didn’t come until 1945. The British Empire had, of course, suffered major setbacks previously, principally the loss of its Colonies in North America.

The acquisition of the British Colonies led to enormous loss of life in the areas of English Conquest. Britain was responsible for the deaths of 35 million Indians from 1858 until 1947, according to Shashi Tharoor. Most of those deaths were due to massacres and unnecessary famines brought on by the policies of the British Raj, according to the author. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-35-million-deaths-br...

During the earlier period of British Colonial rule in North America, 1670-1776, the Native population in what is now the territorial United States is estimated to have declined from about 2.5 million to 800,000. (Thornton, 1987) The population of imported African slaves in the Colonies amounted to about 500,000 by the time of Independence. (Simmons, 1976) The cost of conquest and building of the 13 British Colonies probably runs in excess of 2 million lives, not including British Colonists and indentured servants.

Historian Paul Kennedy summed it up,

"From the time the first settlers arrived in Virginia from England and started moving westward, this was an imperial nation, a conquering nation."

In the post World War Two era of the American Empire, Obermeyer estimated the 5.4 million died worldwide as a result of wars, most fought or supported by the United States. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/story?id=5207645&page=1

In the study, Obermeyer’s group compared data on war deaths from eyewitnesses and the media from 13 countries over the past 50 years with peacetime data in the United Nations World Health Surveys, which was collected after the end of the wars.
[ . . . ]
The researchers estimate that 5.4 million people died from 1955 to 2002 as a result of wars in 13 countries. These deaths range from 7,000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo to 3.8 million in Vietnam.

According to Obermeyer, the estimates are three times higher than those of previous reports. Data from this new study also suggests that 378,000 people worldwide died a violent death in war each year between 1985 and 1994, compared with 137,000 estimated at the time.

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@leveymg While the actual war casualties were small, the damage to China was enormous. I have read where at the time of the first war, China had thee largest economy in the world. By the time of the second war, the Chinese economy had been reduced by 50%.

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gulfgal98's picture

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy