About 4.5 million people had died in America’s ‘post-9/11 warzones’ by 2023—not only from direct violence, but from food insecurity, destruction of health infrastructure, environmental contamination, and economic collapse.
For the developed world, the invasion set off a long train of costly ‘repair’ events that continue to the present. There was not only the worldwide effort to defend against jihadis, and to mop up the damage they caused, but the enormous job of rebuilding Iraq.
Another such effort was (and is) the resettlement of refugees. For the well-connected, this can be as lucrative as flattening their cities of origin. For example, in 2021 the Australian company Canstruct, a donor to the governing Liberal Party, was awarded its eighth contract to run a detention centre for asylum-seekers—many from ‘War on Terror’ countries.
These contracts are neither open nor competitive; over the objections of the auditor-general, their values were sometimes unilaterally increased by the government by such multiples as 4,500%.
Their total cost to date is $AU1.5 billion.a In July 2021, the Canstruct centre held 108 asylum-seekers: a cost to the taxpayer of $AU8,800 per day per inmate.
For me, the War on Terror incarnates in Dara, a ten-year-old Kurdish girl I met in in the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. Dara had seen her home town of Kobane, in northern Syria, occupied by ISIS, then levelled in the fighting to recapture it.9 In her six months on Lesbos, she’d taught herself English and Greek. She was not only extremely bright but very sweet-natured. Despite fasting from dawn till dusk (it was Ramadan) she constantly brought me snacks and cups of tea.
On the phone they shared, Dara’s family showed me video of the town’s rubble, replete with dead babies and body parts. They’d spent a month on the road to Greece, in which time Dara hadn’t eaten a full meal.
There are many Daras. By 2021, when the Syrian Civil War entered its 11th year, it had produced 6.6 million refugees, and 6.7 million internally displaced people.10
It’s impossible to say what portion of this was caused by ISIS, and other factors that grew from the US occupation of Iraq.
But the Iraqi Civil War (an explicit by-product of the War on Terror) had created 4.7 million refugees by 2008: perhaps 16% of Iraq’s population. Seventeen years after the American invasion there were still 1.4 million internally displaced Iraqis.
A study by Brown University, published in September 2020, found that the eight most violent of the wars against terror in which the US was involved—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines—have displaced between 37 and 59 million people.
It’s harder to get rich and powerful in Washington during peacetime, so our leaders have a built-in bias for war.
- Tucker Carlson
*From The Mechanics of Changing the World: Political Architecture to Roll Back State & Corporate Power. (Constitutional structures to oligarch-proof our societies.)
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