iraq-war

"The wars have been accompanied by erosions in civil liberties and human rights at home and abroad."

"Some 10 years after the Costs of War Project's initial launch, the project, now led by Stephanie Savell, Catherine Lutz, and Neta Crawford, is 50-people strong and has tracked so many things, including the more than 929,000 people killed in those wars of ours, almost half of them civilians, and the $8 trillion spent on them. That figure, however, doesn't even include future interest payments on war borrowing, which we have estimated may total $6.5 trillion by the 2050s... Every American should check out the Costs of War Project website to see how much money we're still spending on military operations and decide for themselves whether it might not be better spent domestically."

"The cost of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and elsewhere totals about $8 trillion. This does not include future interest costs on borrowing for the wars."

"The human and economic costs of these wars will continue for decades with some costs, such as the financial costs of US veterans’ care, not peaking until mid-century."

"At least 801,000 people have died due to direct war violence, including armed forces on all sides of the conflicts, contractors, civilians, journalists, and humanitarian workers."

"The US government is conducting counterterror activities in 85 countries, vastly expanding this war across the globe."

"Many deaths and injuries among US contractors have not been reported as required by law, but it is likely that approximately 8,000 have been killed."

"Much of the money allocated to humanitarian relief and rebuilding civil society has been lost to fraud, waste, and abuse."

"The Costs of War project was founded in 2010 by Catherine Lutz, professor of anthropology and international studies, and Neta Crawford ’85, professor and chair of political science at Boston University. The project aims to be a useful addition to the “United States’ and the world’s understanding of war,” Crawford told The Herald. “It was 10 years into the post-9/11 wars and there really wasn’t a discussion in the public (asking) … ‘what are we doing still at war?’” and probing deeper into the costs of these wars, said Stephanie Savell PhD ’17, a co-director of the project who joined in 2017."

"In 2010, I was one of about two-dozen people—including social scientists, an Iraqi medical doctor, a journalist, and two human-rights lawyers—who started the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. We were nearly a decade into the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, initiated in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks by President George W. Bush and being carried on at the time by President Barack Obama. Anthropologist Catherine Lutz, political scientist Neta Crawford, and I were then concerned that Americans weren't paying enough attention to what those wars were costing in lives and dollars... the Pentagon frequently failed to keep track of the money it spent, while its officials often entered made-up numbers in logs supposedly tracking supplies (like weaponry) to... influence future congressional funding. As we were soon to discover, the Department of Defense routinely failed even to keep track of whom it owed money to, no less how much... What's more, congressional funding for additional expenses unrelated to overseas wars, while stuffed into the Pentagon base budget, was regularly justified by this thing called “terrorism" that was everywhere (and nowhere) at once. Those terror wars of ours increased that base budget by at least $884 billion from 2001 to 2022."

"Over 7,050 U.S. soldiers have died in the wars."

"Summary of findings - Some of the Costs of War Project’s main findings include:"

"Over 387,000 civilians have been killed in direct violence by all parties to these conflicts."

"38 million people have been displaced by the post-9/11 wars in Afghanstan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines."

"Many times more have died indirectly in these wars, due to ripple effects like malnutrition, damaged infrastructure, and environmental degradation."

"We do not know the full extent of how many US service members returning from these wars became injured or ill while deployed."

"The post-9/11 wars have contributed significantly to climate change. The Defense Department is one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters."

"Most US government funding of reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan has gone towards arming security forces in both countries."

"Large government bureaucracies are often slow to adapt to changing realities, such as the catastrophic threats we face in a warming world. The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is no exception. New research from Brown University’s Costs of War Project shows that the DHS has been overly focused on foreign and foreign-inspired terrorism, while violent attacks in the US have more often come from domestic sources. A combination of willful ignorance and institutional inertia caused the agency to miss the rise in white supremacy and domestic terrorism that led to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. The new data from Dr Erik Dahl, Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, show that just one of the 46 failed terror plots in the US from 2018 through 2020 was directed by a foreign organization. In contrast, 29 plots were planned or carried out by domestic groups."

"The Costs of War project has assessed that the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and elsewhere have cost $8 trillion so far, which includes $2.2 trillion in funds for medical care and disability payments for veterans that have not yet been paid out, Savell said. The project calculates the human death toll to be “up to 929,000 people killed directly through the weapons of war,” she added. This number does not include those killed indirectly, such as through environmental contamination, displacement and destruction of infrastructure, she said."

"After the United States pulled out of the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan Aug. 30, in his remarks on the end of the war, President Joe Biden cited the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs’ Costs of War project and its findings that “more than $2 trillion (was) spent in Afghanistan” while explaining his refusal to deploy “another generation of America’s sons and daughters” to the 20-year-long war."

"In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."

"Who will demand accountability for the failure of our national political leadership involved in the management of this war? They have unquestionably been derelict in the performance of their duty. In my profession, these types of leaders would immediately be relieved or court martialed."

"As a Texas loyalist who followed Bush to Washington with great hope and personal affection and as a proud member of his administration, I was all too ready to give him and his highly experienced foreign policy advisers the benefit of the doubt on Iraq. Unfortunately, subsequent events have showed that our willingness to trust the judgment of Bush and his team was misplaced."

"There it was: "We did not do this." There is a deep feeling among some senior Bush administration officials that somehow we had not started the Iraq War. We had been attacked. Bin Laden, al Qaeda, the other terrorist and anti-American forces- whether groups or countries or philosophies- could be lumped together. It was one war, the long war, the two-generation war that Wolfowitz's Bletchley Group II had described after 9/11. "You sure it's the right war at the right time?" I asked Chairman Pace. "Yes, absolutely," Pace said. "Fundamentally, yes. I said that before we started. And I'll say that today. It may not surprise you to understand that taking my country's battles to my country's enemies on their playing field is where I think we should be. To protect my country, to do my oath to my country, and to protect my kids and my grandkids and your kids and your grandkids, I have zero doubt that we have done the right thing.""

"The invasion of Iraq will surely go down in history as one of the most cowardly wars ever fought. It was a war in which a band of rich nations, armed with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over, rounded on a poor nation, falsely accused it of having nuclear weapons, used the United Nations to force it to disarm, then invaded it, occupied it, and are now in the process of selling it. I speak of Iraq, not because everybody is talking about it, (sadly at the cost of leaving other horrors in other places to unfurl in the dark), but because it is a sign of things to come. Iraq marks the beginning of a new cycle. It offers us an opportunity to watch the Corporate-Military cabal that has come to be known as 'Empire' at work. In the new Iraq the gloves are off. As the battle to control the world's resources intensifies, economic colonialism through formal military aggression is staging a comeback. Iraq is the logical culmination of the process of corporate globalization in which neo-colonialism and neo-liberalism have fused. If we can find it in ourselves to peep behind the curtain of blood, we would glimpse the pitiless transactions taking place backstage. But first, briefly, the stage itself."

"Apparently in [[Tom DeLay|[Tom] Delay]]'s warped sense of logic, ethnic cleansing was an ill-defined reason for military intervention, but outright lies about "weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)," Iraqi "connections" to Al-Qaeda, and/or Saddam Hussein's "involvement" in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, were sufficient grounds to wage an unjust war costing billions of tax dollars and destroying thousands of lives."

"Cronyism and corruption are major factors in Iraq's downward spiral."

"Audience Member: Negrodamus, why is President Bush convinced there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?"

"As I have heard Bush say, only a wartime president is likely to achieve greatness, in part because the epochal upheavals of war provide the opportunity for transformative change of the kind Bush hoped to achieve. In Iraq, Bush saw his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness."

"The president's national security adviser understandably wanted to win the 2006 congressional elections. Having the president answer questions about Iraq was inconsistent with that goal. The strategy was denial. With all Bush's upbeat talk and optimism, he had not told the American public the truth about what Iraq had become."

"Before Washington’s illegal invasion of Iraq, a Gallup International poll showed that in no European country was the support for a unilateral war higher than 11 percent. On February 15, 2003, weeks before the invasion, more than ten million people marched against the war on different continents, including North America. And yet the governments of many supposedly democratic countries still went to war. The question is: is “democracy” still democratic? Are democratic governments accountable to the people who elected them?"

"You know, I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over. I don't believe he went in there for oil. We didn't go in there for imperialist or financial reasons. We went in there because he bought the Wolfowitz-Cheney analysis that the Iraqis would be better off, we could shake up the authoritarian Arab regimes in the Middle East, and our leverage to make peace between the Palestinians and Israelis would be increased."

"The invasion of Iraq will surely go down in history as one of the most cowardly wars ever fought. It was a war in which a band of rich nations, armed with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over, rounded on a poor nation, falsely accused it of having nuclear weapons, used the United Nations to force it to disarm, then invaded it, occupied it..."

"However it ends, the war in Iraq will have a profound influence on the future of the Middle East, global stability, and the security of the United States, which will remain, for the foreseeable future, directly affected by events in that dangerous part of the world. The war is part of a broader struggle in the Arab and Muslim world, the struggle between violent extremists and the force of modernity and moderation."

"The important thing to remember about the Iraq war is that the whole world protested against it. For the first time in history, the whole world, not just me and my husband Bob, but the whole world came together to try to stop a war before it started. That had never happened before. I have a book with pictures of those protests from all over the world, from Africa, from Asia, from all over Europe. In every country people said, “No, no, don’t do it, don’t do it.” Whatever happens now, this fact is in the world. I think with those protests, we made maybe a couple of inches of progress."

"[T]here is no longer a preponderance of military force that allows the West to impose its will, the U.S. defeat in Iraq being the most extraordinary illustration of that fact."

"David Winters of the University of Michigan found in 2005 that the high RWAs in a large sample of university students believed the invasion of Iraq constituted a just war. They thought the danger posed by Iraq was so great, the United States had no other choice. They thought the invasion occurred only as a last resort, after all peaceful alternatives had been exhausted, and that the war would bring about more good than evil. They thought the "pre-emptive" attack for self-defense had been justified even though no weapons of mass destruction were discovered. They also rejected the suggestion that the war was conducted to control oil supplies and extend American power, or as an act of revenge. And they still believed that Saddam had been involved in the 9/11 attacks."

"I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is — my point is, there's a strong will for democracy."

"It's easy to blame the poor for being poor. It's easy to believe that the world is being caught up in an escalating spiral of terrorism and war. That's what allows the American President to say "You're either with us or with the terrorists." But we know that that's a spurious choice. We know that terrorism is only the privatization of war. That terrorists are the free marketers of war. They believe that the legitimate use of violence is not the sole prerogative of the State."

"The expedient fall of Baghdad was a signal to Coalition commanders that the network-centric style of warfare adopted by the U.S. military had achieved victory. Yet the looting of the Iraq Museum still resonates as a defeat."

"It is mendacious to make moral distinction between the unspeakable brutality of terrorism and the indiscriminate carnage of war and occupation. Both kinds of violence are unacceptable. We cannot support one and condemn the other."

"All the looting at Baghdad's Iraq Museum had taken place by the time U.S. troops—engaged in toppling Saddam Hussein—arrived to protect it, on April 16, 2003. Between April 8, when the museum was vacated, and April 12, when the first of the staff returned, clubs in hand, thieves had plundered an estimated 15,000 items, many of them choice antiquities: ritual vessels, heads from sculptures, amulets, Assyrian ivories and more than 5,000 cylinder seals. The looting proved less extensive than the early reports of 170,000 stolen artifacts, but the losses were nonetheless staggering. "Every single item that was lost is a great loss for humanity," says Donny George Youkhanna, the former director general of Iraqi museums, now a visiting professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. "It is the only museum in the world where you can trace the earliest development of human culture—technology, agriculture, art, language and writing—in just one place.""

"While destruction and looting of cultural heritage has been a by-product of war for thousands of years, the scale of the looting of the Iraq Museum was staggering. Particularly frustrating were the neglected warnings that such an incident could happen, and the immediate response from the Bush administration that “stuff happens”."

"We want to say to America: Is it worth it to you? Won't you have have, afterward, decades of hostility in the Islamic world?"

"In my opinion, it disrespects the United Nations. It doesn't take into account what the rest of the world thinks. And I think this is serious."

"In all the solemn statements by self-important politicians and newspaper columnists about a coming war against Iraq, and even in the troubled comments by some who are opposed to the war, there is something missing. The talk is about strategy and tactics and geopolitics, and personalities. It is about air war and ground war, about alliances and weapons of mass destruction, and arms inspections, about oil and natural gas, about nation-building and “regime change.” What is missing is what an American war on Iraq will do to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of ordinary human beings who are not concerned with geopolitics and military strategy, and who just want their children to live, to grow up. They are not concerned with “national security” but with personal security, with food and shelter and medical care and peace. I am speaking of those Iraqis and those Americans who will, with absolute certainty, die in such a war, or lose arms or legs, or be blinded. Or they will be stricken with some strange and agonizing sickness, which will lead to their bringing deformed children into the world (as happened to families in Vietnam, in Iraq, and also in the United States)."

"Only rarely has the human story, with names and images, come through as more than a one-day flash of truth, as one day when I read of a ten-year-old boy, named Noor Mohammed, lying on a hospital bed on the Pakistani border, his eyes gone, his hands blown off, a victim of American bombs. Surely, we must discuss the political issues. We note that an attack on Iraq would be a flagrant violation of international law. We note that the mere possession of dangerous weapons is not grounds for war—otherwise we would have to make war on dozens of countries. We point out that the country that possesses by far the most “weapons of mass destruction” is our country, which has used them more often and with more deadly results than any other nation on earth. We can point to our national history of expansion and aggression. We have powerful evidence of deception and hypocrisy at the highest levels of our government. But, as we contemplate an American attack on Iraq, should we not go beyond the agendas of the politicians and the experts? (John LeCarré has one of his characters say: “I despise experts more than anyone on earth.”) Should we not ask everyone to stop the high-blown talk for a moment and imagine what war will do to human beings whose faces will not be known to us, whose names will not appear except on some future war memorial?"

"On the 20th of March 2003, at approximately 10.30 a.m. Malaysian time, the United States of America, together with Britain and its other allies, commenced military action against Iraq. This course of action was taken without the approval of the United Nations Security Council. Malaysia deeply regrets this action as it blatantly disregards the multilateral process and the United Nations (UN) Charter; it is in contravention of international law, upon which the security and stability of the world is based. This military action does not have the support of the majority of nations and peoples of the world, including many citizens of the United States and Britain themselves. Malaysia has repeatedly voiced its stand at the UN and to the United States, that the issue of Iraq should be resolved through the multilateral process. Any military solution should only be considered as a last resort after all other avenues have been exhausted, and should be sanctioned by the UN. Malaysia is of the opinion that there is neither sufficient evidence nor justifiable cause for invading Iraq. Iraq has progressively disarmed in compliance with the UN Security Council Resolution. Malaysia remains unconvinced by allegations that Iraq is in a position to be a threat to other nations, especially to the United States, given the latter's military strength and geographical distance from Iraq. The world is now at a critical juncture following the action of the United States and its allies, which will go down as a black mark in history. A large and powerful nation, along with its allies has acted with disregard for international law, humanity and universal justice. It has launched an attack against a sovereign state that has diminished capacity to defend itself. What is more worrisome is the wanton destruction of Iraq that could come through the use of the most sophisticated weapons in the world, on a people and nation who have already suffered for 12 years as a result of the economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations."

"American academics that convened in 1943 to address the war effort made their assessments eight months before the Allied invasion of Italy and eighteen months before the invasion of France. In comparison, academic meetings with the Pentagon occurred less than three months prior to the Iraq War. A wider window of time is needed to prepare guidelines that consider I environmental and cultural conditions soldiers are expected to encounter in a specified theatre of war."