Yes, it's true that, according to the Costs of War project, close to a million people have died violently in the various conflicts launched thanks to this country's post-9/11 "war on terror" or rather war of terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa. Still, despite what so many TomDispatch writers (and yours truly) expected, as 2021 ends, America's war in Iraq has truly come to an end, too. On December 9th, President Joe Biden and Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi reached an agreement on the subject. Subsequently, the Pentagon announced that, almost two decades after this country so disastrously invaded and occupied Iraq (Mission Unaccomplished!), launching the process that created the Islamic State, or ISIS, the American "combat mission" there has officially ended. So long! Farewell! Bye-bye!
After all this time, isn't that an amazing gift? Oh, wait a minute, someone's whispering something in my ear. Whoops, let me add a small footnote to the above. Mind you, the last thing I want to do is mess with your newly cheery mood, but the 2,500 American "combat" troops in Iraq aren't actually leaving that country not a single one of them, it seems. From now on, though, their "mission" is being relabeled not as a "combat" but an "advise, assist, and enable" one. Oh, and those 900 or so U.S. troops in Syria (did you even know they were still there?) aren't evidently going anywhere either, though no one bothers to announce anything about them. (Why bother? It's just messy old Syria after all.)
As a New York Times headline put it, bluntly enough, "U.S. Announces End to Combat Mission in Iraq, but Troops Will Not Leave." There! Almost 20 years after the disastrous U.S. invasion that created so much still ongoing chaos, death, and destruction, it's all over but the leaving and, mind you, just to put things in perspective, that's the good news in 2021.
2. Afghanistan
Okay, 20 years after invading Afghanistan, the U.S. military actually did leave that country. In doing so, it suffered a grim and chaotic defeat of the first order. Meanwhile, the enemy it had fought there all those years, the Taliban, took over Kabul and a country in utter devastation and despair. As they departed in August, U.S. forces offered one final, all-too-symbolically on target that is, completely mistargeted goodbye kiss: a Hellfire-missile strike against a supposed agent of ISIS-K (the Islamic State of Afghanistan) that actually killed 10 innocent Afghans, including seven children. It was a symbolically catastrophic summing up of the American years there remember all those wedding parties slaughtered? for which the U.S. military recently decided to punish none of its personnel involved. Heaven forbid! In such situations, it couldn't be clearer that, even 20 years later, no blame should be cast or responsibility handed out. That deadly drone strike was, as the Air Force Inspector General put it, "an honest mistake."
And that was the good news when it came to Afghanistan. The country the U.S. left behind to the Taliban after all those decades of supposedly building an Afghan democracy and an Afghan military, while constructing highways to nowhere and gas stations in the middle of nowhere (to the tune of at least $146 billion), is now an almost unimaginable disaster zone. There's barely a government with no access to funding (most of it frozen by the U.S.), a severe climate-change-induced drought, ever fewer jobs, ever more virulent outbreaks of disease, and ever less food and that's putting the situation mildly. It's estimated that, if nothing further is done by the world, at least one million Afghan children could starve to death there this winter and millions more Afghans could die from starvation and a combination of diseases so outlandish as to be almost unimaginable. As the Guardian reported,
"There are six simultaneous disease outbreaks: cholera, a massive measles outbreak, polio, malaria, and dengue fever, and that is in addition to the coronavirus pandemic" As families struggle to put nutritious food on the table and health systems are further strained, millions of Afghan children are at risk of starvation and death."
Think of that (and so much else) as the toll from a disastrous American war launched in response to the deaths of 3,000 Americans at the hands of 19 mostly Saudi al-Qaeda hijackers. In other words, our country have given the Afghans their own 9/11, 9/12, 9/13, and so on into the distant future. From the moment the first U.S. planes began bombing there in October 2001 to that final Hellfire missiling of those seven children in Kabul, the Afghan War was a nightmare. Now that American troops (and diplomats) are gone, our country has simply tossed it on the trash heap of history, with no one, of course, held responsible for either those final deaths, the disaster left behind, or any of the carnage sure to follow.
At worst, it was all an honest mistake, right? If you don't think so, just have the inspector general check it out for you. Meanwhile, as 2021 ends, move on and let those Afghan kids starve to death. It's almost three months since "our" war finally ended and what could we possibly be responsible for there now? These days, it's the Taliban's responsibility, right?
3. Covid
Or think of it this way: the 9/11 attacks led the administration of President George W. Bush to launch a devastating set of conflicts, some still ongoing, whose crescendo could be a million or more dead Afghan kids. But here's the strange thing: when a devastating pandemic arrived in the richest country on the planet, we proved remarkably incapable of organizing a successful War on Covid and instead went to war among ourselves over it. (Typically enough, for example, at least 60% of Republicans are still against public mask mandates.)
Polls showed that 90% of Americans approved of our attacking Afghanistan after 9/11. You would, however, be hard pressed to find a poll in which 90% of Americans would agree on much of anything when it came to Covid-19, from vaccinations to masking, social distancing to" well, you name it.
As a result, this country recently passed an official count of 800,000 dead Americans, the highest such death toll on the planet (even as the disease began spiking again in a nation where barely more than 60% of us are fully vaccinated, forget boosters). Worse yet, the real figure, as suggested by a study done last spring when "only" 600,000 of us were officially dead, is now undoubtedly well over a million Americans taken down by Covid.
In our case, though, unlike Afghanistan today, children were rarely the ones dying, it was oldsters like me. About 600,000 of that official American death count of 800,000, or 75% percent, have been 65 years old or older. In other words, a staggering one of every 100 of us in that age range has died from the pandemic.
Isn't reasonable, then, to ask: Where was the War on Covid when we needed it? Instead, Americans in these years began to go to war with each other.
4. Climate Change
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