Migration and the Shadow of War - TomDispatch.com

Migration and the Shadow of War - TomDispatch.com Andrea Mazzarino, Whose War Was That Anyway? July 20, 2023 TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino was a co-founder of the remarkable Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute. There can be no question that it's proven an all-too-sadly one-of-a-kind resource in these years. Since 2011, it's followed this country's disastrous war on terror in a way no place else has even imagined doing. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about the costs of Washington's major conflicts of this century and the global war on terror that went with it ($8 trillion dollars through 2022); the cost in lives lost, whether "direct war deaths" (at least 937,000, of which an estimated 387,000 were civilians) or "indirect" ones (3.6-3.7 million); the number of people "displaced" by Washington's seemingly never-ending combat operations in these years (an estimated 38 million); or even the staggering number of countries in which, since September 11, 2001, the U.S. has conducted counterterror activities of one sort or another (85). Honestly, what the Costs of War Project's remarkable researchers have reported on in these years is a record (from hell) for the ages. Sadly enough, its work should have played a far greater role in American consciousness than it did in these years when antiwar activity (since the giant demonstrations against the coming invasion of Iraq in 2003) has proven all too feeble. Most Americans, I suspect, have remarkably little sense of just how much bloody carnage and -- yes! -- terror their country visited on the world in the name of fighting "terror." Today, Mazzarino considers ways in which those all-American conflicts continue to affect a planet that is an ever more perilous place for so many of us. Tom