DAVIES, Nicolas (US writer): "Our post-9/11 wars have probably killed at least 2 million people in the countries we have attacked, occupied or destabilized"

Nicolas J. S. Davies (author of “Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq) (2017) on the post-9-11 US War on Muslims: “The US bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria is now the heaviest since the bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1960s-70s, with 84,000 bombs and missiles dropped between 2014 and the end of May 2017 That is nearly triple the 29,200 bombs and missiles dropped on Iraq in the "Shock and Awe" campaign of 2003… What began in 2001 as a misdirected use of military force to punish a group of formerly U.S.-backed jihadis in Afghanistan for the crimes of September 11th has escalated into a global asymmetric war. Every country destroyed or destabilized by US military action is now a breeding ground for terrorism. It would be foolish to believe that this cannot get much, much worse, as long as both sides continue to justify their own escalations of violence as responses to the violence of their enemies, instead of trying to de-escalate the now global violence and chaos. …Looming over our increasingly war-torn world are renewed US threats of military action against North Korea and Iran, both of which have more robust defenses than any that US forces have encountered since the American War in Vietnam. Rising tensions with Russia and China risk even greater, even existential dangers, as symbolized by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, whose hands now stand at 2-1/2 minutes to midnight. Although our post-9/11 wars have probably killed at least 2 million people in the countries we have attacked, occupied or destabilized, US forces have suffered historically low numbers of casualties in these operations. There is a real danger that this has given US political and military leaders, and to some extent the American public, a false sense of the scale of US casualties and other serious consequences we should look forward to as our leaders escalate our current wars, issue new threats against Iran and North Korea, and stoke rising tensions with Russia and China. This is the state of war in the United States in July 2017” (Nicolas J. S. Davies, “The US state of war - July 2017”, Anti-war.com, 8 July 2017: https://original.antiwar.com/nicolas_davies/2017/07/07/us-state-war-july-2017/ ).