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Consider it strange that the cost in lives, in wounds, in illness -- the actual numbers or at least estimates when it comes to Israel's nightmarish campaign in Gaza in response to Hamas's horrifying October 7th assault -- are so much a part of the news these days. I mention this only because while you can now sit at home and read or hear about the estimated 29,000-plus dead Gazans, including more than 12,000 dead children, and the more than half a million Gazans facing "catastrophic hunger," when it came to our own country's devastating wars in response to al-Qaeda's nightmarish 9/11 attacks, you could read no such thing in our mainstream media. The numbers from what came to be known as the war on terror were largely unavailable, which meant that there was no way to truly take in the horror of what our country was doing in distant lands like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen.
Or at least that was true until, in 2010, today's author, Andrea Mazzarino, co-founded the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute. Since then, that remarkable project has put some numbers on this country's war on terror campaigns, ranging from their cost to us (at least $8 trillion) to the deaths they've caused (almost a million direct deaths, including more than 430,000 civilians, and as many as 3.8 million indirect ones), and the number of refugees they've created (at least 38 million).
Still, I'm struck that, while we already have that estimated (and, all too sadly, ever-increasing) number of children slaughtered in Gaza, there's no known equivalent number for the American wars of this century. Were such figures available, they would undoubtedly be shocking. In that context, let TomDispatch regular Mazzarino compare American reactions to the present nightmare in Israel and Gaza to those about our own never-ending global wars. Tom
The October 7th America Has Forgotten
And the War Deaths We No Longer Protest (or Even Think About)
We Americans have been at war now since October 7th, 2001. That was when our military first launched air strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan in response to al-Qaeda's September 11th terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. That's 22 years and counting. The "war on terror" that began then would forever change what it meant to be an Arab-American here at home, while ending the lives of more than 400,000 civilians -- and still counting! -- in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In the days after those September 11th attacks, the U.S. would enjoy the goodwill and support of countries around the world. Only in March 2003, with our invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, would much of the world begin to regard us as aggressors.
Does that sound like any other armed conflict you've heard about recently? What it brings to my mind is, of course, Israel's response to the October 7th terror assault by the Islamic militant group Hamas on its border areas, which my country and much of the rest of the world roundly condemned.
Many Americans now see the destruction and suffering in Gaza and Jewish settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank as the crises of the day and I agree. It's hard even to keep up with the death toll in the Palestinian territories, but you can certainly give it a college try. More than 29,000 Gazans have already been killed, more than 12,000 of them reportedly children. The scale of the loss of civilian life has been breathtaking in what are supposed to be targeted missions. For example, in mid-February, in an ostensible attempt to free two Israeli hostages in the southern Gazan city of Rafah, where more than one million civilians are now sheltering under the worst conditions imaginable, Israeli troops killed 74 Palestinians. Between December 2023 and January 2024, four strikes there had already killed at least 95 civilians. And on and on it goes. Anyone with concerns about Israel's response to Hamas's bloody attacks has ground to stand on.
But if war deaths among people of color in particular are really that much of a concern to Americans, especially on the political left, then there are significant gaps in our attention. Look at what's happening in the 85 countries where the U.S. is currently engaged in "counterterrorism" efforts of one sort or another, where we fight alongside local troops, train or equip them, and conduct intelligence operations or even air strikes, all of it in an extension of those first responses to 9/11. Ask yourself if you've paid attention to that lately or if you were even aware that it was still happening. Do you have any idea, for instance, that our country's military continues to pursue its war on terror across significant parts of Africa?
Given Israel's October 7th tragedy, my mention of that date in 2001, which marked Washington's first military response to the worst terrorist attacks on our soil, is more than a play on words. Like Israel, the U.S. was attacked by armed Islamic extremists who sought to make gruesome spectacles of ordinary Americans. Some of them, like the Israeli families smoked out of their saferooms only to be shot, flung themselves from their office buildings in New York's Twin Towers, essentially choosing the least awful deaths under the circumstances. Yet after decades of America's war on terror, whose benefits have been, to say the least, questionable, our tax dollars continue to fund the longest and bloodiest response to terrorism in our history.
Our own October 7th and its seemingly never-ending consequences suggest that something more sinister may be at play in shaping what violence we choose to focus on and condemn, and what violence we choose to overlook.
An International Smorgasbord of Killings
Too little ink is spilled anymore objecting to the hundreds of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen who died in our global war on terror -- and, of course, those are just some of the countries where we've fought in these years. Consider, for example, how we continue to arm and train Somali government troops in their deadly counterinsurgency war. And remember that the war on terror, as it still plays out, isn't just President Biden's war, though he has indeed continued it (though in 2021, he did at least get us out of the longest-running part of it in Afghanistan).
Remember as well when you condemn the Israelis for what they're doing that, thanks to American bombs and missiles, civilians in our own post-October 7, 2001, war zones died as they slept at home, studied, or shopped at marketplaces. Some were run over by our vehicles. Some died in NATO air strikes or in strikes by unmanned American drones, or in fires that erupted in the aftermath of such bombing and shelling. Some were run off the road, gunned down at checkpoints, blown up by bomblets left over from our use of cluster bombs, tortured or executed in U.S.-run prisons, or raped by occupying American troops.
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