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New Report Finds ‘War on Terror’ Has Forced 37 Million People to Flee Their Homes - Foundation for Economic Education
“...For the past 14 years, the American Colossus has been on a Godzilla-like rampage, trampling over the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia: squashing people, flattening homes, and demolishing communities,” Dan Sanchez wrote in summation of this pattern in 2015. “Now its specialty is not offering refuge, but making refugees. Not welcoming huddled masses, but mass-producing them. The Iraq War displaced millions. The chaos it engendered, including the rise of ISIS (which didn’t even exist before the war) displaced millions more.”
And it’s important to note that despite these enormous costs and consequences, the US’s military interventions have largely failed to achieve the intended results. In many cases, we’ve actually made things much worse.
For example, the US originally intervened in Afghanistan in 2001 to punish the Taliban for harboring the terrorists who planned the 9/11 attacks. This justified goal was accomplished within a few years. The decade and a half since of US investment and American lives have been spent on a failed regime change experiment trying to prop up an Afghanistan government that would, all these years later, still collapse in short order without US backing.
In Iraq, the terrorist group ISIS only emerged as a result of the chaos, instability, and ensuing power vacuum the US created with its sweeping intervention.
And in Libya, perhaps the most glaring example, the US launched a military intervention to depose the regime of dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, hoping to start a new era for the country. Instead we turned it into a literal failed state.
Defenders of the status quo are left with the impossible mission of justifying vast destruction, death, and displacement, with only a litany of failures to show for it.
“The displacement and other suffering must be central to any analysis of the post-9/11 wars and to any conceivable consideration of the future use of military force by the United States or any other country,” the Brown University report concluded. “The legitimacy and efficacy of war should be questioned more than ever given nearly two decades of disastrous outcomes.”
“...For the past 14 years, the American Colossus has been on a Godzilla-like rampage, trampling over the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia: squashing people, flattening homes, and demolishing communities,” Dan Sanchez wrote in summation of this pattern in 2015. “Now its specialty is not offering refuge, but making refugees. Not welcoming huddled masses, but mass-producing them. The Iraq War displaced millions. The chaos it engendered, including the rise of ISIS (which didn’t even exist before the war) displaced millions more.”
And it’s important to note that despite these enormous costs and consequences, the US’s military interventions have largely failed to achieve the intended results. In many cases, we’ve actually made things much worse.
For example, the US originally intervened in Afghanistan in 2001 to punish the Taliban for harboring the terrorists who planned the 9/11 attacks. This justified goal was accomplished within a few years. The decade and a half since of US investment and American lives have been spent on a failed regime change experiment trying to prop up an Afghanistan government that would, all these years later, still collapse in short order without US backing.
In Iraq, the terrorist group ISIS only emerged as a result of the chaos, instability, and ensuing power vacuum the US created with its sweeping intervention.
And in Libya, perhaps the most glaring example, the US launched a military intervention to depose the regime of dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, hoping to start a new era for the country. Instead we turned it into a literal failed state.
Defenders of the status quo are left with the impossible mission of justifying vast destruction, death, and displacement, with only a litany of failures to show for it.
“The displacement and other suffering must be central to any analysis of the post-9/11 wars and to any conceivable consideration of the future use of military force by the United States or any other country,” the Brown University report concluded. “The legitimacy and efficacy of war should be questioned more than ever given nearly two decades of disastrous outcomes.”