Thanks to Sandy Davies for speaking with some of us last week on the matter of how many people have been killed by the U.S. wars in the Middle East since 2001. His sobering conclusion is that it’s likely the U.S. initiated wars have killed 2 million people… a figure which shocks the conscience, but is unrecognized by those who launched and led the war of terror.
Sandy’s piece Playing Games with War Deaths cites the number 1.6 million, taking into account the Physicians for Social Responsibility report titled Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the “War on Terror,” with a new estimate of 1.3 million total war deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan between 2001 and 2011. 2015 was the deadliest year for people in Afghanistan, and the war in Syria has been estimated at close to 500,000.
Get a signed copy of Sandy’s book Blood on Our Hands when you become a sustainer of World Can’t Wait.
What happened in the US war on Iraq, and why it matters, has been a topic in our office this week as Margarita and Samantha, high school students who intern with World Can’t Wait, worked on a Message to Millennials about the US war on Iraq. Their thoughts:
“March 19 marks the 13-year anniversary of the start of the U.S. war on Iraq. It’s a day of protest and remembrance. Unfortunately for most millennials who are uninformed about the war, it will be a day that we cannot participate in. Let’s change the notion of our youth not being able to partake in this movement and reform through radical education on the war in Iraq.
“Imagine a foreign army coming into the United States murdering our leader (president) and our army men, destroying millions of families. Destroying our churches our museum and all our religious and important cultural places then using as an excuse trying to help us. It was not and still isn’t our responsibility going into countries and invading! Take a stand for the thousands of Iraqis who were ‘accidentally killed’ because of the ongoing war.”
These students are opening their eyes to see the incredibly violent world that their government has wrought. Many more young people, only 3 years old when the second Iraq War began, need to be reached with the message that the world doesn’t have to be this way!