Freedom isn’t free, especially when you happen to be unfortunate enough to live in a country targeted by the U.S. in its post-9/11 War on Terror.

The Costs of War Project at Brown University found that more than 4.5 million people have been extinguished as a direct result of Washington’s war mission to extinguish “terror” around the world—started by former President George W. Bush.

The report said some of the countries most impacted by U.S. interventions are Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, and most of these people (indirect deaths) have been killed by the reverberating effects of war, such as the spread of disease (estimated at 3.6-3.7 million).

The report noted that the death toll is far from complete and used Afghanistan as an example. The withdrawal of U.S. troops and seizure of 3.5 billion in Afghanistan’s central bank assets has led to a humanitarian crisis in the country. This year, some 2.3 million Afghan boys and girls are expected to face acute malnutrition, the United Nations said.

The UN called Afghanistan one of the most “weapons-contaminated countries.” At least 134 children were killed or maimed by explosive devices between January and March of this year.

Stephanie Savell, the report’s author, tweeted that she investigated conflicts where U.S. counterterrorism “played a vital role in at the very least intensifying the violence.”

She noted that it is impossible to find a specific number on these deaths but the 4.5 million figure is a rough estimate of the accepted ratio of four indirect deaths for “every one direct death.”

The report said 900,000 direct deaths in these conflicts is a conservative estimate of direct deaths. 

The Costs of War Project said hunger crises are a “devastating outcome of the intersection of war and other factors, and currently 7.6 million children are suffering from wasting, or acute malnutrition, in these countries.”

U.S. support of Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen has resulted in an economic collapse in Yemen due to blockades and bombings. The report said more than 17.4 million Yemenis are food insecure and 7.3 million face emergency levels of hunger. Since the beginning of the war, an estimated 85,000 children under five may have died due to starvation, the report said.

TRENDPOST: If you want to know how far the U.S. will go to keep a unipolar world in place, one needs only to look at the comments from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who, in 1996, was asked by Leslie Stahl on CBS “60 Minutes” broadcast if it was worth the price of President Bill Clinton actions that have cost the lives of a half a million Iraqi children.

Albright—or not Allthatbright—said “the price is worth it.”

Years later, in the murderous spirit of her husband Bill, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joyously referred to the brutal death of Libya’s strongman Muammar Gaddafi, rejoicing at him being mutilated and murdered.  (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DXDU48RHLU.)

And the Ukraine War is just another example of the U.S.’s suicidal foreign policy. (See “BIDEN PROMOTES NEVER-ENDING WAR IN UKRAINE. WRONG ABOUT RUSSIA” 28 Feb 2023, “WASHINGTON ANNOUNCES ANOTHER $2 BILLION IN WEAPONS OF DEATH FOR UKRAINE” 28 Feb 2023, and “YELLEN ANNOUNCES $10 BILLION IN NEW ECONOMIC AID FOR UKRAINE, NOBODY BATS AN EYE” 28 Feb 2023.)

Patrick Martin wrote on WSWS.org that if a modern-day Nuremberg Trial was conducted “all four presidents [Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden] would be in the dock, charged with conducting illegal wars of aggression and responsibility for mass death and suffering.”

He wrote that there has not been a presidential administration in the U.S. since 1992 that has not “engaged in air strikes, raids by special operations forces and drone missile strikes, as well as blockades of food and other humanitarian aid to one region or another, or for the whole country.”

We’ve noted that Sergey Lavrov recently called out Secretary of State Antony Blinken for hypocrisy when the U.S. official criticized Russia for invading Ukraine. (See “LAVROV CALLS OUT BULLSHIT BLINKEN’S HYPOCRISY,” 7 Mar 2023.)

“If you think that the United States has the right to declare any country in the world a threat to its national interests, the way it did with Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria—ten thousand kilometers away across the Atlantic Ocean, then you would not be asking any questions,” he said, according to Russia’s TASS. “Whereas Russia had issued warnings for more than 10 years (and not just once on the eve of the attack, as was the case in Iraq and other places): ‘Guys, what you are doing is going to end badly.’ We are not talking about some faraway place, but right on our borders, in territories where Russians have lived for centuries. In a word, if this is not what you call a double standard, then I am not foreign minister.”