The Staggering Death Toll of the Post-9/11 Wars | Hacker News Reader

The Staggering Death Toll of the Post-9/11 Wars

theintercept.com

37 pointsundefined124 comments

We feel the damage caused by the lies around the Iraq war and their alleged weapons of mass destruction until today. The Bush/Blair administration pushed for war and claimed to the whole world that they have proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, requiring immediate intervention. But this proved to be a lie. [1]

We follow(ed) populists who used the facts that our leaders lied to us and that we did not believe them anymore. We can't combat this pandemic or the climate catastrophe effectively because opportunists sow distrust and they can because we distrust our leaders because they lied to us.

The world would be a very different place today (a better one!), if our leaders didn't have lied to us.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/oct/07/usa.iraq1

So, the problem with this narrative is that I bet if you poll most of the people who are refusing to wear masks, etc, you'll find they still support the 2003 invasion with pride.

This populist wave isn't some neutral thing where people suddenly lost faith in politicians due to Bush and Iraq. It's core is ultimately something much more ugly and malicious, and it's an arc that goes back decades at the least.

Its something that has been carefully cultivated over decades.

Its definitely not an opportunistic political power grab.

The most ironic thing is that the very politicians that those people glorify are the people who will ultimately fuck them over the most. The rust belt was create via republican way of thinking. But facts =/= emotions not even close, so the status quo will remain.

Unfortunately feeling is much easier than thinking, and it's easier to elicit negative feelings than positive ones. Thus demagogues have an almost unavoidable path to success: scare people, promise to make them feel safer, watch them cling to you, repeat.

As long as humans don't keep our instincts subordinated to reason, this will keep happening, it's in our nature.

I'm not sure why you single out Bush as the point where people lost trust in the government.

From as far back as the USS Maine, operation northwoods, and more recently the fast and furious scandal, or all the snowden leaks. The government has always lied and has never been worthy of trust, before during or after Bush.

The article is about 9/11 and the subsequent events.

Well said. A total reversal can lead to new problems which are just as bad as the problems you're fleeing from.

Bush may have lied, but don't forget that Saddam Hussein used WMDs and wanted his neighbors to think he might have them to project regional power. So the lie was believable and not manufactured from whole cloth. Did they believe it? Some probably did, but other used it to forward a proactive foreign policy to remake the middle east. It's one area where conservatives underestimate the cost of change.

Who we should have believed is the UN inspection team. That's literally their role in things. But they didn't support the narrative Bush/Blair wanted.

I think you'll have a very hard time finding anyone besides the neocon camp that think 2003 somehow reshaped the middle east for the better.

Saddam played games with the inspection teams (remember the 'presidential sites'). Did Blix get a comprehensive look and verify maybe, but that was after 10 years of obfuscation. Also, you know who thought he might have nerve gas? The Kurds. And I wasn't arguing the invasion was good or bad, I don't think we'll ever know. At least not for a few generations.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=499621...

Saddam was in permanent time out. The US could have protected the Kurds as much as it liked simply by expanding the no fly zone into further restrictions. None of that necessitated deception to invasion to topple a country that won't recover for generations.

i am not an american but its like the american media has cashed in on the 9/11 over and over again. usually covertly but many times deliberately and even as far as to specifically talk about using it. case in point bosch tv series. the protagonist in the books was a "vietnam war vet" to cash in on that because it came after that. for the Tv series, 9/11 happened.

this is now a american culture to say " oh the 9/11" implying so many lives were lost, in order to justify the vile actions TODAY.

STOP

humans have lost lives because americans get a raging boner around 9/11 and how avenging the lives lost means mass murdering millions and ruining lives of many many generations.

STOP

i know i will be downvoted for this but i have to say this

Joseph Stiglitz did wonderful research on calculating the staggering financial cost of the Iraq war, estimated at 3 trillion dollars in 2008: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=878012...

Amazon's market cap is 1.6 trillion to put the 3 trillion figure in context.

The financial resources invested in these wars was enormous.

The thought that always comes to mind for me is this: Doesn't most of that money end up in the pockets of American defense workers and American troops in the form of wages and salaries and could be viewed as a huge public works project? It's not like the money disappeared into Russian or Chinese pockets.

I would personally prefer a public works project with fruits that have a little bit more return on them than blowing up Afghani farmers.

Plus acquisitions and operations/maintenance eat up much more than personnel costs anyway, and the surplus of that money goes to defense investors (who I personally don't enjoy subsidizing so much).

There was a A Whitney Young video a while back about that. He was going on about "what good are dead Iraqis to me?" basically. And he had a point.

Instead of killing people, and destroying their civilization's infrastructure, we could have instead spent that on R&D for our own energy independence. More of that money would have stayed in the country, enriching us all and boosting our own economy rather than producing goods used for destruction.

Even not doing R&D, but just putting that money into basic infrastructure in the USA, like roads and bridges, would promote local economic growth.

Oh agreed, it's terrible in terms of being a public works project. I'd rather put everyone to work building a national high speed rail system.

And that's no accident. "Defense" is a very lucrative industry with a lot of money and power behind making sure those dollars go towards buying toys to destroy schools on the other side of the planet instead of fixing them back home.

Interesting to realize how much is possible if there is political will to do it.

Slightly off-topic, but with Glenn Greenwald resigning recently and the reasoning behind it, I feel no desire to read the intercept anymore. I am sure they won't be hurting for viewers to sell their type of "correct" propaganda to.

You don't have to trust the Intercept in general, but you're not doing good by Greenwald if you just ignore reports about the death tolls of the post-9/11 wars. His entire crusade against the mainstream media was started by their complicity in said wars.

What I'd like to see is is Substack paying the initial exclusive authors more beyond what the author's readers will pay in, as a kind of a Silicon Valley subsidy of the early movers, ultimately to be able to take a bigger cut of the late movers with a lot of high prestige early people and network effects?

Many of the journalists who have move have said it was a moral thing, but none of the big ones have disclosed any monetary incentives that might have tilted their hand. Do they get stock options as well, in a kind of law firm-partnereseque model?

The Vietnam war saw an average of 2k KIA deaths per year on the American side, if you take its whole duration into account, or about 4k KIA deaths per year if you start at Johnson's escalation. The peak number of US causalities per year was 16,899 in 1968. The 2k/year and 4k/year averages are both biased due to several years with very low activity that were still considered part of the war. Hopefully these numbers should put the numbers in the article in perspective.

>KILLED IN ACTION 40,934 [0]

>from 1 November 1955[A 1] to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. [1]

>Johnson's escalation, 1963–1969 [1]

[0] https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casua... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

The article is about the number of people killed, not the number of American people killed.

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