This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
I began TomDispatch a century or so ago (just kidding!) in response to a piece I read in the mainstream media soon after the Bush administration launched its post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan. The reporter and I no longer remember who it was pointed out that U.S. air power was starting to bomb places the Russians had turned into rubble in their Afghan War late in the previous century.
I thought then that we humans never truly seem to learn, do we? Of course, it should have been no shock when 20 years later, the Biden administration began its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in abysmal defeat, just as the Red Army had done in 1989. And let me add that we are hardly alone in our inability to learn. After all, in February 2022, having absorbed nothing from the Red Army's Afghan travails in the previous century, Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, convinced that Kyiv would quickly fall and that country's forces surrender more or less instantly.
No such luck. And now, amid chaos and devastation in the Middle East, Putin's failing war in Ukraine simply goes on and on and on. In that context, let TomDispatch regular and co-founder of the remarkable Costs of War Project Andrea Mazzarino consider the kind of devastation that wars, sometimes all too quietly, deliver to "great" powers fighting them. Tom
What's Not Being Said
What War Does to the Nations That Fight It
Reacting to the terrorist attacks by the Palestinian militant group Hamas that killed more than 1,400 Israelis, Americans have been remarkably focused on whether we should support Israel or the residents of Gaza. In either case, we act as if Israel's only possible decision was whether or not to launch a war against Gaza. In the country that waged a disastrous 20-year "global war on terror" in response to the 9/11 attacks, it seems strange that there's been so little discussion about what such a decision might mean in the long term. Going to war is just that one decision among many possibilities, including taking steps to strengthen and democratize the states where such armed militias may otherwise flourish.
As a co-founder of Brown University's Costs of War Project, it's become a focus of mine to show just what's happened to us because our government, more than two decades after the 9/11 attacks, continues to fight a "war on terror" (whatever that may mean) in some 85 countries. Yes, that's right: 85 countries! We've armed foreign militaries, flown our drones in a devastating fashion, run prisons (often in places with far laxer human-rights standards than ours), trained foreign militaries, and sometimes fought directly alongside them.
Over the years, the 2,977 American lives taken by Osama bin Laden and his followers on September 11, 2001, have exploded into nearly one million lives lost globally thanks to our government's decision to go to war. Framed by the sheer scale of death and destruction wrought by this country's forever wars, our hasty retreat from Afghanistan in 2021, long seen as a shamefully botched mission unaccomplished, should instead have been viewed as a genuinely courageous act, even if it was just one of dozens of countries where the U.S. hemorrhaged lives and dollars galore.
Imagine the "footprint" our post-9/11 wars created. For one thing, we've spent more than $8 trillion dollars (and counting) in that fight, money that could have funded the creation of millions of jobs here at home, provided affordable preschool in all 50 states, and jump-started the transition to clean energy. And now, we'll probably be sending more than $75 billion in aid, most of it military rather than humanitarian, to Ukraine and Israel in the coming months. Regardless of what you think Israel's response should be, the fact remains that we could do a lot with that money here at home.
And worse yet, those funds devoted to war were largely wasted. Since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, terrorist groups have only proliferated in number and strength globally. A case in point, in fact, was that very Hamas campaign. Remember that Israel always has been a vital U.S. military and intelligence partner and those October 7th surprise attacks represented a staggering intelligence failure of both governments. And mind you, over the years Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made no secret of his opposition to allowing a stronger Palestinian Authority to develop in Gaza.
America's Terrorism Problem
Meanwhile, our government's forever wars have helped stoke terror here at home. Republican politicians and conservative journalists have used a combination of angry language and racist rhetoric and policies to ratchet up anxiety about people of color. As America's forever wars entered their second decade and then their third, the notion of brown and black people as threats to our national identity came to be baked into policies and laws and into the popular imagination.
Forced registration requirements for young Muslim men placed tens of thousands of them on the government's radar screen, while sting operations were carried out in Muslim-American communities. Meanwhile, several generations of young Americans were sent to fight disastrous counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond, returning to a war-starved healthcare system that couldn't deal effectively with their multiple traumas. All of that contributed to a beleaguered national culture in which the dangerous Other looked like a young Muslim man, at least to deranged white people, as evidenced by the recent fatal stabbing of a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy by his 71-year-old landlord.
Through these trends and others, our war-on-terror culture also set in place government infrastructure aimed at the surveillance of our citizenry and expanded our sense of what our government can possibly do to us. That became all too clear when Department of Homeland Security officials began abducting peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters off the streets of Portland, Oregon, in the summer of 2020, and Trump administration officials tried to intimidate Black Lives Matter activists. Who knows where the fear institutionalized after the 9/11 attacks may be directed, depending on who becomes our next terrorizer-in-chief?
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