Tag: war on terror

In Afghanistan, American hubris – the United States’ capacity for self-delusion and official lying – has struck once again, as it has repeatedly for the last 60 years. Three times now this country has been lied to and the media deluded as America marched stolidly over the cliff into failure. #afghanwar

This is one tiny example of a global absurdity—indeed, a global insanity: the alleged sovereignty of nation-states to decide who matters and who doesn’t, what matters and what doesn’t. And what doesn’t matter is that the whole planet is in danger. If its infrastructure, both political and ecological, collapses, every country loses. #unitedworld

The so-called War on Terror launched by the United States government in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks has cost at least 801,000 lives and $6.4 trillion according to a pair of reports published Wednesday by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. #stopwars #WarOnTerror

The Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Center says the $5.6 trillion figure—which covers the conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan from 2001 through 2018—is the equivalent of more than $23,386 per taxpayer. The “new report,” said Paul Kawika Martin, Peace Action’s senior director for policy and political affairs, “once again shows that the true #costofwar represents a colossal burden to taxpayers on top of the tremendous human loss.” #waronterror

Since 2001, when then US President George Bush announced his “War on Terror,” presidents and politicians both in the United States and among America’s allies, have repeated this phrase and have done their utmost to convince the public that indeed, the West was fighting a “War on Terror.” Yet there is something disturbingly ambiguous about what exactly the “War on Terror” consists of, who it’s being waged against and how it could ever possibly be brought to a successful conclusion.