4¼ Million, and Counting

We now have a death toll for the US war on terror, 4½ million deaths, an amount of death and misery that was beyond Osama bin Laden's wildest dreams:

America’s post-9/11 wars have led to more than 4.5 million deaths, according to a major new report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Roughly 1 million of these deaths came from direct combat in war zones across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen, while the remaining 3.5 million are “indirect deaths” that resulted from the conflicts’ “destruction of economies, public services, and the environment,” according to the report.

The sobering findings highlight the long-term effects of the Global War on Terror, which has been the deadliest fight of the 21st century so far. The death toll, which Brown researchers described as a “reasonable and conservative estimate,” rivals that of major post-WWII conflicts, including the wars in Korea and Vietnam.

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The impacts of those wars have yet to subside. As the report notes, an additional 7.6 million young children suffer from acute malnutrition today in post-9/11 war zones. And both locals and U.S. veterans continue to face physical and mental health challenges arising out of the conflicts.

Notably, the research does not attempt to assign responsibility for each death to any single party, opting instead to identify leading drivers of mortality. One key factor was the destruction of different types of key infrastructure, including hospitals and other healthcare facilities.

“[A]t the height of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, the disastrous state of roads and traffic systems led to as many if not more fatalities than the conflict itself,” the report notes, adding that the “destruction of ports, urban buildings, and electrical systems also have negative effects.”

When the interventionists talk about how, "Shock and Awe," allows for the relatively casualty free military actions, they only count US military side.

US invasions and interventions have created enormous misery and disruption, with blow-back to the US and the rest of the west through things like massive refugee flows.