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I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got David Vine.
I'm sure you guys have heard the news of his work this week, a brand new study for the Cost of War Project, estimating that somewhere between 37 and 59 million people have been displaced from their homes due to the American War on Terrorism.
Vine, of course, is the author of Island of Shame and Base Nation, and his latest book is called The United States of War.
And again, this new study is at the Cost of War Project at Brown University.
Welcome back to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Thanks so much.
It's a pleasure to be with you.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
And boy, is that a big number, 37 got the headline, but you say that is the most conservative estimate that you could give?
That's right.
We wanted to be very conservative in our estimates.
We didn't want anyone to have any reason to think that we were exaggerating the numbers.
The aim of the project as a whole, like the Cost of War Project, is to get a sense of what the impact, what the effects of these wars now, almost 19 years of war as part of this so-called war on terror, what the impacts have been on human beings, beginning with those in the countries where the United States has been most deeply involved in wars.
The 37 million minimum is in the eight wars that have been the most violent that the United States has either launched or participated in.
We know that millions more have been displaced in at least 16 other countries where U.S. combat troops have been deployed since 2001.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, you know, if you say that the high end estimate is 59 million people, I'd entertain that.
But for the sake of discussion, let's go ahead and stick with the low number here.
How many is 37 million people anyway?
It's a huge number, of course.
And in some ways it's hard to wrap your mind around, at least it is for me, hard to wrap one's mind around what 37 million people displaced really means.
And we encourage people in our full report at the Cost of War Project to really try to put themselves in the shoes of people who have been forced to flee their homes, forced to flee for their lives in the war zones, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Syria, because there actually is a danger that in trying to cast light on the people who have suffered the effects of these wars, that by using a quantitative number as large as 37 million, that it actually can be dehumanizing.
Yeah.
And we really want people to focus on what it means for every individual who's been displaced, every family, every community.
And should point out that 8 million of this 37 million minimum has been displaced as refugees.
So across international borders, people have fled their countries and another 29 million have been displaced within the eight countries that I mentioned.
Yeah.
Well, one homeless widow is a tragedy and 37 million of them is a statistic, I guess, to paraphrase Joe Stalin.
But you make a comparison in your press release, say 37 million.
That's approximately the population of California.
That's exactly right.
It's about the size of California.
It's about the size of Texas, the states of Texas and Virginia combined.
So everyone in those states being forced from their homes in historical terms.
And this was one of the findings that surprised me.
More people have been displaced in these post 9-11 wars than in any war since at least the start of the 20th century, with the exception of World War II.
And if our higher end estimate, the 59 million, is more accurate, we do have reason to believe that it may be more accurate, that is comparable to the scale of displacement during World War II.
So it's truly horrific.
And I think, again, this is one of the things that the people in the United States in particular have not reckoned with, the immensity of the damage that these wars have caused for people where the wars have been fought.
Of course, there are some members of the US military, family members of military personnel who have died, contractors who've died, who know all too well some of the human impact of these wars.
But I think for the most part, people in the United States have allowed these wars to fall into the recesses of their consciousness.
And of course, it's not the fault of people in the United States.
The media has certainly been complicit in essentially failing to report other than periodic updates on these wars, and especially on their human costs.
So in addition to the 37 million displaced, the Cost of War Project has shown that at least 800,000 people have died in just five of these wars, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen.
And that's just direct deaths in combat with indirect deaths, meaning people who've died as a result of the destruction of hospitals, of food sources, of diseases that have spread as a result of war, the true total is likely somewhere between three and four million, and it may be even higher, which is a larger death toll than the US war in Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia.
And of course, if that's the death toll, the injuries number into the tens of millions.
So it's really very difficult to comprehend.
But I think people whose tax dollars, myself included, US citizens, need to really try to wrap our minds around the immensity and the horror of the damage that we've inflicted.
Yeah.
Well, I know from Iraq War Two, it was completely plausible by 2008 or nine, that approximately a million people had been killed or had died, at least as a result of the war, the excess deaths.
And that included violent deaths and also people being deprived to death and so forth.
And that was just one million right there from Iraq War Two.
But of course, we've had Iraq War Three, the war in Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And, you know, this got very little coverage, but there was a huge refugee crisis after the American and Pakistani war in the federally administered tribal territories in Obama's first term.
And that's where ISIS in Afghanistan comes from, is there were refugees from the Pakistani Taliban that have fled to Afghanistan for safe haven.
And they were just a few hundred out of thousands and thousands and thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, I guess, who essentially had to flee the Swat Valley and north and south Waziristan in that era.
Yeah.
It sounds like you know this history quite well in ways that I think the vast majority of people sadly don't.
You can imagine how many how many stories there are like this.
But indeed, the fighting in Pakistan has been dramatically overlooked with whatever limited attention there's been on the U.S. war in Afghanistan now almost 19 years, 19 years as of October 7th next month.
But yeah, the scale of displacement is is mind boggling.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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I want to go back to the mind boggling the the mathematics here.
So sometimes when we talk about Israel, Palestine say, well, you know, when they created they forced seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians out of their home.
And then this pretty easy comparison to my hometown of Austin, Texas.
Imagine the entire population of Austin, Texas, being forced out of their homes and, you know, moved to Marble Falls or whatever it is, a gunpoint that kind of that level of catastrophe for the people of this.
Imagine.
And that's just Austin is, you know, yeah, it's the capital, but it's nothing in terms of actual city size and population and economic importance and everything else compared to San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and Galveston and, you know, the industrial cities on the coast.
You think about the size of San Antonio and Houston, Texas and Dallas, Fort Worth, you know, combined megalopolis there.
And imagine forcing all of us out of our homes and San Angelo and El Paso, too.
And then that that isn't even it.
Now you're only about two thirds of the way done.
You still have to go to Virginia and remove every last Virginian from their homes, too.
Not just like, hey, play musical chairs, but in the most desperate straits, you know, burn their state to the ground, forcing them out of their homes, Texas and Virginia combined.
It's almost impossible to conceive of that level of disruption, except that, hey, it has been about 19 years.
So, you know, World War Two, as bad as it was, was over and out in about four and a half.
And we are 19 years and counting.
And sadly, there's no signs that these endless wars are going to end.
I think that has to be a major priority for demanding the hope in my mind, hopefully Biden Harris administration and these wars as quickly and as responsibly as possible.
I got bad news for you, buddy.
His entire national security staff comes from the Center for a New American Security.
They're not ending any wars whatsoever.
In fact, there's a new one right here in Stars and Stripes yesterday.
Biden says U.S. must maintain a small force in the Middle East, has no plans for a major defense cut, and in fact, says he wants to increase military spending.
He doesn't want out of Afghanistan the one war that Donald Trump is actually trying to pull all of the troops out of.
He disagrees with that.
And he says we have to stay over there or else the bad guys will get us.
And you know that Michelle Flournoy will be his secretary of defense, the lady who tripled and lost the Afghan war and is on the payroll of the Saudis.
And so let's not pretend to be ignorant here, David.
No, we shouldn't be ignorant.
And that is those reports about about Biden are scary.
But that doesn't mean that we can not stop pushing.
We have to push the Biden administration.
And you know, I totally agree with that.
I'm just saying, don't believe that's all.
Sure.
No, of course.
No, we need to know what we're up against.
And you know, ironically, Trump this week, of course, was on to something as he is every once in a while, like a stop clock, you know, at least twice a day, he's right on time, you know, saying that the defense contractors, the military contractors, they don't really provide much by way of defense, the military contractors, the weapons manufacturers, they've been benefiting from these wars.
And of course, they have to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, billions of dollars, as part of the 6.4 trillion with a T, trillion with a T that the United States, U.S. taxpayers have spent since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan.
But you know, why did Trump make this announcement?
Why was he criticizing the weapons manufacturers?
Why did he announce some relatively small withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq?
Because he knows that wars aren't popular, which I think is a reason to be encouraged.
The vast majority of people in the United States do not support large scale ground invasions or large scale wars.
And that's part of why, you know, the wars have had to be kept as quiet as possible, because opposition would grow.
So I think for those of us who would like to see some dramatic change in U.S. foreign policy and U.S. military policy, we need to build on the existing opposition and demand that these wars be brought to an end and demand that the money that's been plowed into them and into the larger war machine gets reallocated to pressing human needs like, oh, I don't know, taking care of COVID patients, protecting against future pandemics, dealing with this current pandemic, in addition to other healthcare, education, environmental, affordable housing, infrastructure needs, among many others.
Yeah, well, and, you know, beginning to allow the 50 million small business owners who've lost everything in the last six months to maybe keep some of their own money and reinvest it in their own future, too.
Absolutely.
But so here's the thing, too, man, and I want to go ahead and go through the breakdown here because you have some great bullet points about how many lives were ruined per war and all that.
And I think it is really important to go through that.
But I wanted to go back to a larger narrative from, say, five years ago, especially right through the second half of Obama, especially with the massive refugee crisis.
And there is a narrative and we've seen the reaction to that, you know, in numerous ways all over Europe and across America.
And it's probably in a great deal.
It's part of what led to the election of Donald Trump in the first place.
And, you know, the European Parliament has seen right wingers elected all across the continent in reaction to the refugee crisis and so forth.
But there's this narrative that, see, here they come.
It's the Islamo-fascist caliphate is trying to take over and destroy the West.
And you see how sneaky they are.
They invade without rifles.
So we don't just meet them on the battlefield and waste them.
We have to let them in for humanitarian reasons.
But they're taking over everything.
But then the people who are pushing that narrative, the last thing that they would ever do is point out that, OK, well, it is true that these people all happen to have American war zones in common.
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria and Iraq.
Geez, isn't it funny that all the refugees for the new caliphate are all coming from the countries that we've bombed off the face of the earth over the last couple of decades here?
But I guess there were some sub-Saharan Africans that were coming up through Libya that were more just economic migrants and stuff like that.
And people just kind of glommed on to that.
But, you know, there's this whole reaction to the refugee crisis that doesn't seem to really incorporate an understanding of the cause of it in the first place.
And that, you know, frankly, those people in Iraq and in Libya and in Yemen would have been in Afghanistan would have been a hell of a lot better off.
Yes, under their dictator, Saddam and Gaddafi, Assad and Saleh or the Houthis or the Taliban or whoever.
Not that we should support those dictators, but the idea that we're going to go in there and support a bunch of Mujahideen to overthrow them and turn these countries into just complete chaos as some kind of improvement, you know, to our previous policy of supporting Saddam, supporting Gaddafi, supporting Saleh, supporting the Taliban.
It's just nuts.
And it's not fair that Americans get to point their finger and accuse all day and not have to take any responsibility for their side in all of this.
I think that's well said.
I think I think people in the United States have not assumed any responsibility for the destruction that that these wars or very little responsibility for the destruction these wars have wreaked.
I think, you know, you're pointing to some of the racist fearmongering that one saw and still sees in response to refugees attempting to enter Europe.
And we see similar racist fearmongering, of course, beginning with the president when it comes to what I consider generally speaking, refugees from Central America trying to enter the United States through the Mexican border.
And indeed, the people have not made the connections.
And I think those of us who who have had an opportunity and the privilege to study these issues need to help make those connections between the actions of the United States, between U.S. foreign policy, between these U.S. wars and the massive movement of people who were fleeing for their lives, generally speaking.
Yeah.
And well, there's there's so many tangents here there.
I just got to build this one in.
There's an Afghan refugee living in Germany who was doing good, stayed there about a year, year and a half.
Everybody seemed to like him and he was kind of integrating into the new culture.
OK.
And then he got word that his best friend had been killed in a drone strike down in the Helmand province.
So he took a hatchet and he got on a German train and started hacking people up.
I think he killed six people.
In in this attack.
And so in a sense, it wasn't like this guy was a terrorist sleeper cell when he went there, but they turned him into a de facto one by bringing him in and then continuing to murder people back in his homeland.
The same thing happened with the Manchester attack in England, where this guy worked for the MI6.
Him and his father were LIFG guys.
They were sent to fight the war in Libya.
Then they were sent on to fight as heroic moderate terrorists fighting against Assad until America sort of switched sides in that war and went to war against ISIS.
And by the time he got home from Syria, America was bombing his ISIS friends.
And so for revenge, he went and blew up a pop concert full of little girls.
And so again, he wasn't apparently a sleeper cell.
He was a loyal agent of the British government committing acts of terrorism against their official enemies.
But then.
It wasn't like that was enough to prevent him from turning on his masters when they did things that made him angry.
And so it really is an incredibly dangerous policy to do this.
And we had about, you know, four or five hundred Al-Qaeda terrorists 19 years ago on this day.
And now we got 40 something thousand of them.
And we got who knows how many people like these two that I just mentioned that actually weren't sent to commit a terrorist act, just decided on their own to do so when they continue to watch American and British and Western foreign policies in their countries.
Of course, Germany is part of the war in Afghanistan.
I can't speak to the specifics of those cases, certainly not in the detail you have.
But I think the larger point that you alluded to is the key one that what you know, what what has been one of the main results of the so-called war on terror?
It's produced more people who would seek to do harm, who would seek to commit acts of violence against civilians and against others.
It has, you know, fueled the creation and growth of terrorist organizations.
Although, of course, that word terrorism and terrorists, they've lost a lot of their meaning because essentially they've been slapped on by U.S. leaders and European allies and others.
They've been slapped on anyone we don't like.
And it's been an excuse to wage war.
You know, I mentioned that beyond the 37 million displaced in just eight of the most violent conflicts the United States has been involved in, there are millions more have been displaced in at least 16 other countries that the United States has sent combat troops to, which is a reflection of the breadth of this, you know, out of control war on terror that that U.S. military personnel have been sent all around the world.
And the differentiation there, David, is you're you're you're splitting the difference between countries where we go into a topple the government versus where we go in and our guys are working in partnership with the government against whatever insurgency they're dealing with at the time.
Is that right?
Correct.
And often the U.S. presence is directly counterproductive.
Often it only rallies people to the insurgents and gives them more reason to take up the flag of ISIS or some other militant organization.
You know, Africa is the prime case in point where U.S. military policy, the policy of building large numbers of U.S. military bases around the continent of Africa and deploying combat troops, trainers, others, has largely, again, fueled the spread and growth of militant organizations and been, generally speaking, a humanitarian catastrophe.
Yeah.
So now I'd like to give you an opportunity to go down the bullet points and talk about how many millions per war and that kind of thing.
But if it's OK, I wanted to start with Syria because there's a bit of a discrepancy there as you delineate, as you explain in your summary, that we're only counting starting with the war against the Islamic State, Iraq War 3, which didn't start until August of 2014 when, in fact, the official support for the rebels start in 2013.
And we know that, in fact, Obama and the Saudi allies were bankrolling them as early as 2011.
By the summer of 2011, the CIA was intervening in Syria.
And you guys, understandably, I think, don't go back that far.
But I wonder if you could just explain that and then explain, boy, if we really went back to Obama pulling the trigger on this thing in 2011, then how many refugees are we talking about for Syria?
Yes, this is another this is one of the areas where we wanted to be really conservative.
We didn't want to give people reason to poke holes in our methodology or in our report.
So indeed, you are absolutely correct that we could have included far more Syrians displaced as a result of combat that the United States has waged and been involved in.
Currently, there are about 13.5 million displaced Syrians, 13.5 million displaced Syrians and cumulatively since the start of the war, the total easily exceeds 20 million.
In some ways, I think, as you were suggesting, you could count all those people displaced as being related to U.S. warfighting in Syria.
Again, not all the fault of the United States, but the United States was involved from a very early moment in the Syrian civil war.
But instead, we were much more careful and only counted people displaced from five Syrian provinces where U.S. forces have operated since 2014, as you said, in the anti-ISIS war, five Syrian provinces where U.S. forces have engaged in combat and built military bases.
But indeed, you could go back farther.
We could, I think, reasonably attribute some degree of displacement to U.S. actions in backing Syrian rebels, dating to at least 2013, as you said, and most likely earlier.
But again, we wanted to be really careful because if people discredit our report, our methodology, I think it ultimately does a disservice to those who were displaced and to our desire to cast light on the really horrific impacts of these wars on ordinary folks living in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and far beyond.
Yeah, it is such an important point, too, that as you say in here and as you're alluding to, that America is not responsible for every last refugee in a direct sense.
And yet, I don't know, the bomb brigade wasn't sectarianly cleansing anyone in Baghdad until the Rumsfeld administration hired them to do so.
And so, well, the Ayatollah and Rumsfeld working together.
And so, yeah, it's still America's fault.
You're talking about, you know, like in Syria, for example, nobody could say for sure, but if Obama had told Saudi and Turkey and Qatar and Israel that, oh, no, no, no, no, we only care about one thing, and that is keeping Bin Ladenite militias down.
And if Assad wants to put down this uprising, that's just too bad for the people of Syria.
And we insist everyone stay out and we're staying out.
The war would have been over in 2011 and surely some thousands of people would have been killed and that would have been it.
And so and even if you give it the worst case scenario, the Syrian civil war still would have dragged on for, I don't know, a year or two.
It's still it would be absolutely tiny percentages compared to America and its allies intervention in the way that that story really did play out.
So that's not to say that Assad is great or any of these, you know, red herring, false narratives or any of those things.
It's just to say that and it's not to say that Barack Obama is responsible for every last, you know, widow made by Assad in his side of the war or anything like that.
But it does, yeah, draws the overall context that, you know, people complain about all the Russian airstrikes and and their rules of engagement for airstrikes in Syria.
Well, they didn't start bombing Syria till 2015 to try to save Damascus from being overthrown by America's moderate terrorists.
And so, you know, yes, they're responsible for what they do.
But, yes, we're responsible for the fact that they even had cause to show up there in the first place.
Yeah, you know, it's hard to go back into the past and it's impossible to say, you know, what would have happened if the U.S. government or any other government acted differently.
But we can take a look at, OK, here are the wars the United States has been engaged in.
What have been the effects?
What have been the effects on human beings?
And that ultimately is our aim.
You know, just another helpful way to put the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in context in particular, you know, wars where clearly the United States government decided to launch an invasion, a war, later occupation.
There's no ambiguity about responsibility there.
You know, these two wars alone, the size of displacement, 14.5 million people displaced in Afghanistan and Iraq alone, is more people displaced than any war since the beginning of the 20th century, with the exception of World War II.
So, you know, massive destruction, again, is part of much larger forms of really horrific destruction involving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of death, tens of millions of injuries.
And the destruction goes on and on.
Yeah.
Well, listen, it's after the fact here, but I hope it's OK that I poached this article from investigativeworkshop.org and it's running at the Libertarian Institute right now.
And it's the spotlight today on antiwar.com.
And we'll have all the links in the show notes.
Millions displaced by U.S. combat since September 11th by David Vine and as part of Brown University's Costs of War project.
His latest book is The United States of War.
Thanks so much again for your time, David.
Appreciate it.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Really appreciate it.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org.
