We wanted to look specifically at how many people had been displaced by these wars. Basically,
we found that no one had bothered to investigate how many people had been displaced by the
wars in what are now, actually, at least 24 countries that the United States has been
involved in. And we found that, in total, at least 37 million
people have been displaced in just eight of the most violent wars that the United States
has either launched or participated in since 2001. That’s Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq,
Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Syria and the Philippines. And that’s a very conservative estimate.
We found that the actual total could be up to 48 to 59 million.
And I do think we have to pause on these numbers, because we — in many ways, our lives are
drowning in numbers, about COVID, about many things that are important to track quantitatively,
but to wrap one’s mind around what — just 37 million people displaced is difficult,
in fact, and I think it requires some active effort, certainly did for me.
Thirty-seven million, to put it in historical perspective, that’s more people displaced
by any war since at least the beginning of the 20th century, with the exception of World
War II. The United States currently has about 800
military bases in around 80 foreign countries and territories. This is more bases than any
nation in world history. The United States has, as you alluded to, had even larger numbers
of bases. At the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were upwards of 2,000
bases abroad. And part of what my book, The United States
of War, shows is that this is also a long-term pattern. The United States has been building
military bases abroad since independence, initially on the lands of Native American
peoples, then increasingly outside of North America, and eventually encircling the globe,
particularly after World War II. And what I show is that these bases have not
only enabled war, they’ve not only made war possible, but they’ve actually made
war more likely. It’s made war a far-too-easy policy choice decision for powerful decisionmakers,
leaders, politicians, corporate leaders and others.
And we need to basically dismantle this infrastructure of war that the United States has built up.
Why does the United States have dozens of military bases in the Middle East, in virtually
every country outside of Yemen and Iran? These bases, of course, are in countries that are
led by undemocratic regimes, not spreading democracy — far from it — in many cases,
actually blocking the spread of democracy, and making these wars possible, that — I
think it’s important to underline again — beyond displacing 37 million people, at
least, and perhaps up to 59 million people, these wars have taken the lives of, as the
Costs of War Project has shown, around 800,000 people. And this is just in five of the wars
— Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen — the United States has — U.S. combat
has taken the lives of around 800,000 people. But there are also indirect deaths, deaths
that have been caused by the destruction of local infrastructure, healthcare services,
hospitals, food sources. And those total deaths could number upwards of 3 million people.
And I think most people in the United States, again, myself included, have not really reckoned
with the total damage that these wars have caused. We haven’t even begun to wrap our
minds around what it would mean to have this level of destruction in our lives.
And you have, for example, the effects of soldiers on bases, like what happened in the
Philippines, where the authoritarian leader, President Duterte, just pardoned a U.S. soldier
who was found guilty of murdering a trans woman off a base.
Yes, this is another cost of war. We need to look at the costs of war in terms — the
human costs in terms of direct combat deaths, injuries in these wars, the “wars on terror,”
numbering in the tens of millions, but we also need to look at the deaths and injuries
that are caused on a daily basis around U.S. military bases around the world. These bases
have — in addition to enabling the wars that the United States has been fighting,
they have very immediate harms that they inflict on local populations, including in the Philippines
and in, as I said, around 80 countries and territories around the world.