Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/18/23 Stephanie Savell on the Millions of Indirect Deaths Caused by the Post-9/11 Wars

Episode Date: May 20, 2023

Scott was joined by Stephanie Savell of the Cost of War Project to discuss her organization’s new report on indirect deaths in America’s post-9/11 wars. Savell’s research now points to between 4.5 million and 4.6 million indirect deaths that have already occurred in the countries affected by the wars as an indirect result of U.S. intervention. In this interview, Scott and Savell discuss the methods used, what constitutes indirect deaths vs. direct deaths and how the devastation differed from country to country. Discussed on the show: “How Death Outlives War” (Cost of War Project) “Yemeni Civil War Unleashes a Plague of Locusts” (Antiwar.com) Stephanie Savell is the co-director of the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute. Savell is an anthropologist who studies security, militarized policing, and civic engagement in relation to the United States post-9/11 wars and policing in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is the co-author of The Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, May 18th, 20203, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all, welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com. and author of the book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. You can find my full interview archive, almost 6,000 of them now going back 20 years,

at Scott Horton.org, and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show. And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's Show. Okay, you guys, introducing Stephanie Savelle. She is a senior researcher at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and co-director of their Costs of War Project, and they have this brand new study out how death outlives war, the reverberating impact of the post-9-11 wars on human health.

Welcome back to the show. Stephanie, how are you doing? Good. Thank you so much for having me. Great. Very happy to have you here. So, bottom line, up front, big headline, you estimate between 4.5 and 4.6, million deaths from the terror wars, quite broadly defined, though. So please, quite broadly define what it is exactly that you're doing here, your methodology and your estimate in which countries

we're looking at and the whole mess for us here. Yeah, sure. So this is something that we at the cost of war project have been working on and thinking about for many years, actually, because what we had done before this was produce estimates of how many people had died during. from the post-9-11 wars. And the term post-9-11 wars is what we use for what back in 2001, President George W. Bush called the global war on terror. We prefer not to call it the global war on terror, but the post-9-11 wars. And direct deaths are the people who die from the weapons of war, combat, bombs, fires, those sorts of things.

My colleague, Nita Crawford, has produced a regularly updated estimate for years about the total direct toll. That's up to between 906,000 to 937,000 people, so almost a million people directly killed by the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan. also since the U.S. began its involvement in Syria, Yemen, Libya, actually, excuse me, not Libya, but those initial countries, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen. So basically, in addition to these direct deaths, there are so many reverberating consequences of war. The fact that, you know, a bomb might hit a hospital and a primary health facility. War might damage water systems, sewage systems, roads, traffic lights. It damages people's ability to earn a living.

You know, their fields are bombed. They have to flee. They're forcibly displaced by violence. There's environmental contamination. So, you know, sewage. getting into water systems and things like white phosphorus getting into, you know, the soil and the water, all of these things kill people. Before they kill people, though there's kind of a long chain of consequences. And that's what my paper really looks at is, you know, how, what are the causal pathways

to get us to this point where there are these indirect deaths? And then my paper looks at what is the what's the existing research tell us about how what's the scale of this problem is? And the 4.5 to 4.6 million total dead is a rough estimate using the best available research that's out there at this point in time about what the scale of this issue, what we can reasonably estimate this to be. Okay. And so, I mean, I got to say the number sounds high to me, but I'm no anthropologist or epidemiologists, but I have been watching this thing like a hawk, and I would buy, as you mentioned in

here, this study years ago now, that estimated a million excess deaths from Iraq War II. And I think we could add probably high tens of thousands to Libya, clearly more than half a million dead in Syria. And then if you include Iraq War III, you know, that's, you know, maybe three quarters of a million or at least half a million dead there. Afghanistan must be over 20 years. You know, I don't know, probably, you know, I would say must be two or 300,000 killed in by direct violence. And then I wouldn't doubt if, especially because, as you point out in the article, the level of absolute poverty there, you know, before, during, and since the war as well, that that could be up to a million. So I don't know. I'm not very good at math on the back of envelope, but I could see it getting, you know, approaching something like 3 million.

or possibly even for, and then O'NC, I left out Yemen, and I would, I'll tell you what, if at the end of the day, when they really do an excess debt, you know, in-depth study in Yemen, I'll be shocked if it's less than a million dead there. So I think it sounds like you're barking up the right tree here, Stephanie, as horrible as it sounds. Unfortunately, yeah, unfortunately. You know, and what I did was I used the UN-Geneva Declaration, Secretariat, they've estimated, they've basically generated ratio for all modern day conflicts that says that there's approximately four indirect deaths for every one direct death.

And so that's basically what I did. You're totally right that it would be far better to do research in which there were a team of researchers, preferably local researchers who could go into the war zones and do an excess death study, oftentimes you can do, you know, interview-based research to figure out kind of an average death rate by going into households and figuring out, okay, well, you know, who in this household has died in the last five years or something like that. But there just isn't this research out there in most of these war zones. And not only that, but the kind of baseline mortality data is lacking, too. So we don't have good census data. We don't have even

good records of birth and death rates. There aren't, you know, death certificates that are filed in most of these cases. So it really is at this rate, at this point, you know, this ratio was the best that we could do. Well, and I think it's fair enough. And you're as honest as you can be about your methodology in the paper and in describing its limitations and the rest. And you also talk about how the ratio is going to be different in a place like Iraq, where even the whole time George Bush was bombing it during Iraq War II and the counterinsurgency campaign and all that was going on, they were still selling oil and importing food and more or less distributing it to people. It was not paradise, but people weren't starving. Whereas in Somalia, they've just been

laying down and dying because when the American War smashed their economic infrastructure, the very basics of the distribution of food services, you know, all the farming and the markets and everything was all very rudimentary anyway. And the war just completely destroyed it. And it's just completely just, you know, I know, and I think that this must be what you're referring to. I saw your, I didn't follow the footnote, but you refer to the famine, the first famine of what, 2010 through 12 there killed a quarter of a million people back then, right? That's right. And, you know, one thing that's important, to kind of slightly correct what you just said is just that it's not just that the U.S. has been

waging war in these places. These contexts are incredibly complex, and I made sure to emphasize that in the paper. There are so many different warring parties. There are so many different militant groups who are committing attacks. We can't lay the blame solely at the feet of the United States government and its war on terror. The point of the paper is just to show that no matter who is to blame, no matter what time period, no matter what warring party, no matter all the complex kind of intensifying factors from climate change, as in the case of Somalia that you just mentioned, they suffer droughts, they're going through one right now, to authoritarian regimes who commit violence on their own people, right? There's so many complexities here. But we need to

kind of come to terms as a nation in the United States with a sense of responsibility for some of the intensification of this violence that has happened in the name of the war on terror. And that's really what the report is asking for is, you know, let's think about what we can do for in terms of reparations, in terms of reconstruction, in terms of humanitarian aid. And I do want to kind of flesh out what you were saying also with the example of Afghanistan, which is particularly dire. And again, there are so many complexities, the current rule of the Taliban, you know, is making things far worse, the cutoff of a foreign aid to Afghanistan. But if you look at the statistics, it's just horrible.

Over half of Afghans are currently living in extreme poverty on less than $1.90 U.S. dollar a day. 95% of Afghans are not getting enough to eat, 100% of female-headed households are not getting enough to eat. In 2022, 3.9 million children were acutely malnourished and one million at risk of death. And just a small window of time, the first three months of 2022, approximately one in 10 newborn Afghan babies died for lack of, you know, because of of malnutrition and lack of health care. So these are really dire situations. Yeah. Well, and on that point, especially, you had the entire economy of the country essentially

was just propped up by American and Western European tax dollars. So once we pull out of there, it was just an absolute great depression, right? The gross domestic product that never really existed in the first place went to zero. And so just, you know, decimated any kind of market structure. And I guess, you know, the point and same thing with Somalia and the rest of these that, you know, the reason that we, you didn't include the couple of wars between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh is because that wasn't America's war, which whatever deprivation for those poor people took place in is not the same thing as when America goes to Somalia. And in fact, like we talk about,

the drought in the various draughts. There's another one hit real hard in 2017. Oh, and then I'm sorry, I have to mention this now, so I don't forget in case it doesn't come up. I only got about three quarters of the way through your peace, so I'm not sure, but if you know about this, but the locust plague that hit East Africa is 100% attributable to Obama and Trump's war in Yemen

because they had essentially the war closed down the university in Sana'a, and the graduate students had this program where they would go out and eradicate all the grasshoppers every year. By the millions and millions, they would call the grasshoppers. Well, the war closed the university. And so the grasshoppers were not called, and they'd turn into a plague of locust that then crossed the Red Sea, first of all, decimated crops in Yemen, then crossed the Red Sea and decimated crops throughout the entire Horn of Africa. But even before that, when you had, like, say, for example, the drought of 2010 through 12 around there, in Eritrea and in Ethiopia and in Kenya, they all were also hit by drought. But they didn't lay down as starve to death, 250,000 of them.

The reason that's what happened to the Somalis is because George W. Bush had been blowing up their country. Well, that and also, I didn't know about the locust plague, so I'm glad to know about things. In fact, I'll give you a great footnote. It's Morgan Hunter at anti-war.com wrote a brilliant piece about it. Great. But one thing to know about in the case of the 2010-2012 Somalia famine was that that was really exacerbated by actually U.S. counterterrorism laws that prevented international humanitarian aid agencies. from distributing aid to organizations where the aid could end up in the hands of al-Shabaab or its supporters. And so basically, the aid in that really dramatic case of a famine was blocked.

And then there were all kinds of local politics as well, where al-Shabaab was refusing to accept World Food Programme aid because it said it was, you know, enemy aid. Or, you know, there were there were all kinds of political complications. But that's a really good example of something where it should be straightforward to help people who are going through a famine. And it became really complicated and more people died as a result of the U.S. counterterrorism. And you can see the logic in that, right? That, oh, geez, we don't want to feed, directly feed the insurgency that we're fighting. But okay, but the collateral damage is a bunch of little toddlers. Exactly. That's, I mean, and that's who we're talking about here. The large majority of these indirect deaths are children under five. And, you know, as a mother of two young children myself, I have to say this was the most heart wrenching, like it was such a hard research paper to write because, you know, it was just constant this, this understanding, growing understanding for me of this is children we're talking about because they're the ones who are most vulnerable to malnutrition. And what happens is a malnutrition. And what happens is a malnutrition.

nurse child is more vulnerable to infectious disease. And so they're dying of things like diarrheal disease and tuberculosis and cholera and these things that are preventable were it not for war. So it's really devastating. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, the audiobook of my book enough already. Timed and the War on Terrorism is finally done. Yes, of course, read by me. It's available at Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, and soon on Google Play and whatever other options there are out there. It's my history of America's War on Terrorism from 1979 through today. Give it a listen and see if you agree. It's time to just come home. Enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. The audiobook. Hey guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years,

but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the institute. and they keep them running well, suggesting and making improvements all along. Make a deal with Expandesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you. Use the promo code Scott and save $500. That's expanddesigns.com. Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom instead.

Tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone, from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level. And it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, Real history, real economics, real education. All right, now back to Afghanistan for a minute because, boy, here's one where the U.S. state is certainly responsible for what these poor people have gone through. And as you, you know, quite accurately say every single fighter and every single one of these wars is also responsible for his or her own behavior, too.

It's not that this is 100% attributable to the American presidents and their men. But then again, responsibility is kind of a quality more than a quantity. And so you can divvy it up in all kinds of ways so that the Taliban are still the ruthless Taliban that they are. but Bush and Obama especially, but also Trump and Biden, you know, bear their responsibility for the war that has turned that country, you know, upside down. Yeah. I mean, what you're talking about is essentially moral accountability, right? And that's what this is in a way.

I mean, yes, it's strategic. First of all, I should footnote that because obviously if, you know, what's breeding militant violence in the first place? What is creating the fact that people want to go out and commit terror attacks? It's poverty, it's government corruption, it's frustration with the fact that, you know, instead of addressing the root cause of people's, you know, political grievances, they're getting killed and, you know, instead, right? There's bombs being dropped. There's people getting killed instead of kind of looking at the structural problems that are leading to a situation where

there's there's a lot of destitution um so if you kind of address those root causes the structural uh problems then you are actually strategically in the long run addressing the root causes of what's leading people to commit terror in the first place that's that's a you know a strategic footnote but morally um you know if for some of us that's even more important is you know what what kind of accountability is there for a situation in which the U.S. went in and we waged a war in Afghanistan for 20 years that didn't need to happen. There were all kinds of other ways that the U.S. could have addressed the problem of the 9-11 attacks, including with, you know, addressing it as a policing problem, as a problem of, you know, arresting criminals. There's all kinds of ways that

governments historically have addressed the problem of terror. attacks that, by the way, research has shown is far more effective. So how morally now do we wrestle with what our role should be in Afghanistan? Yeah. Well, and I mean, especially because we have literally the Taliban back in power, including Mullah Omar's right-hand men in charge at the very top, it obviously raised the question of how else we could handle that. Because the Taliban are barbarians and yet exploding them didn't work so what we might have tried instead could have been some encouragement and possibly a little bit of ridicule somehow get it through to them that there's a better way because now where we got we spent 20 years and the women

of Afghanistan under Taliban rule are right back where they were so we had there had to have been a better way than what we just tried. Yeah, exactly, Scott. You know, and I'm no strategist. As you say, I'm an anthropologist, so I'm not the person to speak to about, you know, U.S. military strategy, but I think what you're really pointing to is, is that this research on indirect death and all the kind of ongoing, continuing suffering in the war zones is really meant to do exactly what you're doing, which is ask these big questions. Like, was war the right way to address the problem? If not, what could we have done instead? And given that we did choose war for 20 years, what now should we do as a result?

And what could we do better going forward to ensure that this situation doesn't happen again? And we don't end up waging another war in Afghanistan for another 20 years when the next time there's an attack. Yeah. Well, I have a simple idea there as far as Afghanistan, which could be America could arrange a meeting of as many nation states as possible to encourage them to please we're very sorry help to clean up our mess there by sending in aid and we'll stay out of it maybe we'll give some money if they need money but somebody i don't know the japanese somebody get in there with wheat and pass it out to starving people you know somebody has to do something somebody has to deliver antibiotic can't just completely abandon the place and of course

that does mean that whatever nefarious factions are going to him off the top and all that. But that's the way it always was for 20 years. The Americans completely failed to build an alternative economy for Afghanistan. When we left the whole thing completely fell apart. So the fact that they still have all these sanctions on the Taliban and that they're not leading the parade, that somebody helped these poor people. Under Taliban rule or not, somebody has to be helping to transition the country to a place where their agriculture can sustain their population, you know, or at least their export income can help them afford to import enough food to take care of their people. Otherwise, I mean, this is

just, I'm sorry, would you go over the numbers? Because you said before you say it in here, how many people are dying of deprivation in Afghanistan right now? Yeah, so over half of Afghans are living in extreme poverty. Three point nine million children acutely malnourished and one million children at risk of death. Yeah, and that's going on right this minute. And now, so what about Syria? Because Syria, of course, is also still under sanctions, and the regime-change war against them, thankfully, has stopped, and then the war to clean up the regime changed.

The Iraq War III against ISIS is essentially over, but America still occupies the wheat fields in the east of the country along with the oil fields, as they avowedly say to keep that wheat out of the hands of the government and its allies, meaning, I guess, the people who live in Syria's city. So how bad are things there right now? Oh, Syria is just incredibly complicated. I was looking at a statistic before I spoke to you. More than half of Syria's pre-conflict population has been displaced by violence. That's, and that includes 6.5 million IDPs, which is the highest number, oh sorry, internally displaced people, the highest number of internally displaced people in the world. And the research shows that, interestingly, a refugee, there's not as strong

of a correlation with higher rates of death, because a refugee has, as tough as it is and can be for refugees, sometimes they make it to places outside of the country's borders where they're in a camp where they do get access to slightly more food aid and health care assistance, those very basic essentials, not saying the situation is perfect, but still, the IDPs, the internally displaced people, they're the ones who really do statistically have a higher rate, a higher death rate, because those are the situations that are really dire where people are just plain old, not getting enough to eat, not getting clean drinking water or sanitation, not getting, you know, adequate maternal health care. And that's what's going on for these IDPs in Syria. It's really,

really dramatic the hardship that they face. And then Yemen, this one is, it really stands apart because it's one where the Americans, as Obama put it in Libya, they're leading from behind and pretending that we're not the superpower. It's somebody else's war. We're just supporting it. But with that comes a real kind of disclaiming of responsibility for the tactics and the strategy used by the allies we support. And so in the case of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and their air war against Yemen, As you demonstrate in here, they took their war deliberately to the civilian population of Yemen in a way that Bush, I don't think, at least deliberately did in Iraq War II. No, exactly. It's been really criminal, one of the war tactics in Yemen by the Saudi and United Arab Emirates led coalition, which is supplied its weapons and supported by the United States. they have attacked people's like fishermen at sea, they've attacked people's, you know, sources of

agriculture, water for agriculture, creating the conditions for the massive levels of hunger and displacement that we see in Yemen. One example in Yemen is all of the, that was quite striking to me, all of the bombing, which has destroyed water and sanitation infrastructure. There's been conflict-related fuel shortages, which has disrupted sewage treatment systems, conflict-related electricity disruptions, which has led to water pumps becoming inoperable. All of these kind of created the perfect storm, and that led to about 15 million Yemenis without potable water and sanitation in 2017, and you may remember what happened in the cholera epidemic of those years, 2016 to 2018, it was the largest cholera epidemic of modern times with about 7 to 14 million

people in Yemen infected. Yeah. Although, you know, I talked to the people from Doctors Without Borders at the time, and they did say that they couldn't test people. They basically figured anybody who was coming in with severe diarrhea had cholera at that time. But so it's also diphtheria and other waterborne diseases. So it's not like it's much better. But I think they kind of conceded their estimates were high. But it was still thousands and, you know, I believe high thousands, at least that they documented, had died. And again, mostly that means babies and toddlers.

Right, exactly. And, you know, what you're speaking to is just the kind of extreme challenge of data collection. in any kind of a war context because, you know, the, think about it, like the research itself is so challenging. Like, how do you, how do the researchers operate in a war zone where they're threatened, where people are facing life-threatening situations? And that's one of the ironies here of this whole topic is that war not only damages and destroys all of this infrastructure and creates all of these ripple effects, but One of them is that the war zones have the least good data about rates of disease and rates of hunger, period, of any situation anywhere.

The worst data is from war zones. Yeah. Well, at least we have a real meaningful ceasefire, and it looks like a real end to the war in Yemen, although they haven't signed a peace treaty yet, and the full blockade is not lifted, although I know trade has increased quite a bit at the airport and at the Puerto Hode. data from a journalist that I know incident. And I mean, going forward, I think, I think, again, the question is, you know, how can we support Yemen in reconstructing and, you know, building an economy that is sustainable? Right. I mean, and that's the problem, right?

Is anything our government does is just going to be bribing different warlords and this and that? It needs to be private, nonprofit type organizations, I guess, in America that figure out, you know, to whatever degree our government has made us responsible for this, what can we do to help these people? That, and, you know, and honestly, Scott, I do think there's an important role for large amounts of government funding to support reconstruction efforts as well. The U.S. is a really important donor on the world stage, and, you know, that's absolutely

essential in these cases as well. All right. Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your great work here. and the entire Cost of War Project at Brown University, of course, is so important to the history of this era. And this is really another great and incredible contribution to that, Stephanie. So thank you very much. Thanks so much, Scott. I really appreciate this conversation.

Thanks so much for getting the word out there. All right, you guys. That is Stephanie Savelle from the Cost of War Project at Brown University. And check out the new piece, How Death Outlives War, the reverberating impact of the post-9-11 wars. on human health. All right, y'all, that has been anti-war radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton. Thanks very much for listening.

Find the full interview archive at scothorton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.