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Staggering and sobering stats

The facts speak for themselves.


"U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’ suspected early March murder of 16 Afghan civilians is cast by the military-industrial-congressional-media complex as the isolated madness of a single American soldier. In fact, victims in the village of Kandahar are just the latest among six million who have perished in America's wars-of-choice in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and now the Central Asian graveyard of empires, Afghanistan.

That sobering estimate of death comes from John Tirman, executive director of the MIT Center for International Studies, and author of The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars, whose arguments were recently summarized in The Washington Post essay, “Why Do We Ignore the Civilians Killed in American Wars?”

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"With an exceptionalist view of our own goodness, Americans ignore the genocidal carnage unleashed on the world in the decades since the good war was fought by America’s greatest generation. The reason isn't complicated. The chicken hawk elites who start, propagandize, and run the wars don’t have to put themselves in harm's way fighting them. The Bushes and Obamas send 20-somethings to their deaths in the deserts of the Middle East and the tribal hills of Central Asia, in service to the industrial war profiteers, the neoconservative think tank experts, and the editorial page war hawks. Done in the name of “national defense,” offensive military spending becomes Republican corporate welfare and a Democratic jobs program."

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