The horrific – though largely hidden – reality of the U.S.-led NATO pretend wars against terrorism is essentially a war against humanity, Tatiana Obrenovic writes.
The good and the evil are marching alongside one another – this is the title of a book by dearly departed Dr Vladeta Jerotic, a Serbian psychiatrist, philosopher and thinker whom I remembered while writing a befitting title and introductory sentence for this article.
Back in the day, some of us remember the speech given by former American President Ronald Reagan when he projected U.S. blame onto the Soviet Union by blasting it as the “Evil Empire”. Many were gulled into believing the farcical American charade. Fast forward to the year 2023, and mercifully many others around the world are now seeing the light.
From the very beginning of this U.S.-led NATO proxy war against Russia, the vehicle for which happens to be unfortunate Ukraine, the wicked value of the NATO’s pretend war against terrorism is essentially a war against humanity.
Not by chance, the corporate stock value of Lockheed Martin jumped from 45 dollars per share to over 450 dollars. Northrop Grumman too. General Dynamics from 38 to more than 200 dollars per share. Boeing too.
Aptly spoken are Roger Waters’ wise words: “War is hugely profitable; it creates so much money because it’s so easy to spend money very fast. There are huge fortunes to be made. So, there is always an encouragement to promote war and keep it going, to make sure that we identify people who are ‘others’ whom we can legitimately make war upon.”
All in all, the U.S. military-industrial complex is ladled with a hefty sum of money from 50 to 100 per cent growth over the past 20 years. There is no (both legal and illegal) money machine anywhere in the world capable of churning out such lucrative profits as the industry of death.
I personally get overwhelmed by fear when I remember the then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell theatrically brandishing a supposed vial of anthrax while addressing the United Nations Security Council on 5 February 2003. Powell warned that the alleged contents of the vial could kill everyone in the chamber. It was a mendacious and terroristic ruse for launching an illegal war against Iraq.
“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources – solid sources,” he said. Powell was lying through his teeth before the world. He later admitted to doing, and expressed regret before he died.
Or yet another sickening example, and there are only too many on the part of the U.S., recall Madeleine Albright. That wretched U.S. Secretary of State callously said that the death of half a million Iraqi children was “a price worth paying” to achieve U.S. interests. Albright displayed the same psychopathy regarding casualties in the Balkan Wars during the 1990s and the aftermath of the NATO invasion of the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija and the brutal purge of Serbs from their historically owned territories.
Almost two decades after the U.S. launched its savage invasion of Iraq, it turns out that the horrendous price keeps on mounting.
Following the alleged terror attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States has waged and fueled endless wars and military conflicts of all sorts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan, among other countries, which have caused at least 4.5 million deaths, according to a report by Brown University.
It is worth noting that these studies are part of a regularly updated and ever-bigger database documenting the dreadful death tolls in the mostly U.S. engineered wars during the two-decade period after 9/11. It is staggering to contemplate the destruction wrought in a mere 20 years. It is even more staggering that the horror is multiplying all the time in repercussions and consequences. Twenty years from now, we can expect the death and injury tolls to at least double just from the latent impacts manifesting.
The Cost of Wars project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs that conducted this comprehensive study came up with these conclusions:
Almost a million of the people who lost their lives died in direct military combat, whereas some 3.6 to 3.7 million were indirect deaths, due to health and economic problems caused by the wars, such as destruction of infrastructure, severe diseases, and shortage of food and water.
The Brown University study also analyzed the effects of wars for instance in Libya and Somalia, which were funded and altogether engineered by the U.S. as well. It was estimated that in the countries studied, there are 7.6 million children under the age of five years suffering from acute malnutrition still today. The children live in abject poverty and are “not getting enough food, literally wasting to skin and bones, putting these children at greater risk of death”. Furthermore, in Afghanistan and Yemen, this includes nearly 50 per cent of children; and, in Somalia, close to 60 per cent.
Brown University’s Cost of Wars project carried out a separate study in 2021 in which it found that the United States’ post-9/11 wars displaced at least 38 million people – more than any conflict since 1900 if we do not take World War II into consideration. Moreover, 38 million appears to be a rather modest estimate. The total number of displaced persons could be closer to 49 to 60 million, which is comparable to that of WWII.
This latest May 2023 study cited above pointed out that substantially large proportions of innocent civilians are still perishing in that they are dying from direct combat or famine to this day.
In many instances and to a great extent, the U.S.-engineered wars have impeded or destroyed access to safe drinking water and sanitation for adults and children in which case many succumb to debilitating or deadly diseases which would otherwise be treatable.
Due to these U.S. and NATO-orchestrated wars, death tolls have reached imponderable proportions. Millions more innocent civilians have been casualties, suffering inestimable hardships.
After two decades of war under U.S. military occupation, Afghanistan resembles an apocalypse. “Today the Afghans are suffering in misery and dying from war-related causes at higher rates than ever,” Brown University’s Cost of Wars recorded.
Significantly higher death rates and lower life expectancies were noted with a considerably high number of people who live in abject poverty and particularly those from deprived circumstances and marginalized groups. In military zones and conflict areas in close proximity, children and minors, in general, are believed to be 20 times more likely to die from, for instance, diarrheal disease than from the military conflict itself. Generally speaking, all wars tend to cause indirect deaths which sadly represent the majority of the lives lost.
In the 2023 report, many long-term war consequences for human health have not been fully accounted for. Some demographic groups, particularly women and children, bear the brunt and suffer the most due to the permanent consequences of the prior wars.
The Brown University study emphasized that the post-9/11 wars have caused widespread economic and financial hardship for people living in the war zones coupled with food insecurity and malnutrition which normally go hand in hand with poverty leading to diseases and death. The trend is particularly severe amongst children under the age of five.
The damage to infrastructure and often total destruction which occurs during wars certainly has devastating cumulative consequences. “Hospitals, clinics, and medical supplies, water and sanitation systems, electricity, roads and traffic signals, infrastructure for farming and shipping goods, and much more are destroyed, damaged and disrupted, with detrimental consequences for human health,” the report acknowledged.
As a stark reminder, we should recall some of the other major wars waged by the U.S. war machine: the Korean War (1950-53); the Vietnam War (1965-1975); and the Gulf War (1990-91).
A detailed list of instances in which the U.S. used its armed forces abroad can be seen in a Congressional Research Service report here.
Among the most prominent military interventions abroad during the Cold War are the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba during Kennedy’s administration (here), Reagan’s deployment of U.S. Marines to Beirut during the Lebanese civil war (here), the invasion of Grenada (here) and the bombing of Tripoli in Libya, both also under Reagan (here).
Under George HW Bush, thousands of U.S. troops invaded Panama in 1989 to overthrow dictator and CIA asset Manuel Noriega (here) and thousands of troops were sent to Somalia on an alleged peacekeeping mission in the early 1990s following the dissolution of the Soviet Union (here).
Under Bill Clinton, U.S. troops were sent to Haiti (here) as well as to the Balkans as part of a larger NATO deployment (here, here).
Under Barack Obama, the United States and its NATO partners conducted months-long air strikes in Libya (here) and military operations against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (here).
Donald Trump launched military operations attacking Syrian government targets (here, here) and sanctioned the killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani with a drone strike (here).
Reading about these atrocities and mentally dealing with all the facts and figures somehow logically brings us to the recent blood-curdling words from the abhorrent US Senator Lindsey Graham while visiting Kiev.
Graham gloated about “Russians dying” and how U.S. military aid to the Nazi-infested Kiev regime to fight against Russia was “the best money spent”.
My own stream of consciousness brings me to a beautiful anecdote with a quote: Nikita Mikhalkov famously told prominent Serbian author Momo Kapor: “Have you noticed by any chance that there is no American movie in which at least one hundred people don’t die; they get murdered by a machine gun in rapid fire, they get blown up into the air in their cars just like that and nobody is in mourning for them afterwards, and neither do they find out who their mothers are, nor whether they might have a sister?… But 150 years ago, a student from St Petersburg, Russia, killed an old woman and academic dissertations are written on whether the student had a moral right to kill the old hag or not. Alas, that is the difference between them [Americans] and us [Russians]. The West only thinks of how to live, while we think why we live.”
