The October 7th America Has Forgotten - TomDispatch.com

The October 7th America Has Forgotten - TomDispatch.com Andrea Mazzarino, War's Cost Is Unfathomable February 27, 2024 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