Western hegemony has been propped up by the illusion of military superiority on the battlefield. By carefully picking its battles and avoiding critical defeats, the West, and the US in particular, has maintained this illusion of military invincibility

As the US (NATO) moves against nations with larger, better equipped and trained armies, it has elected to use proxies to fight on its behalf. Thus, any humiliating defeat could be compartmentalized.

NATO’s attempt to invoke the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) as justification for the intervention in these countries is laughable when considering Western condemnation of Russia for any attempt to support or defend the ousted government of Ukraine, a nation now overrun by NATO-backed Neo-Nazi militias who in turn are backing a criminal regime in Kiev which includes foreigners assigned (largely by the Obama Administration) to cabinet positions and even as governors.  It increasingly difficult for the West to maintain the illusion of moral superiority regarding Ukraine.

Over twenty years after "The War on Terror" was declared, up to six million people have been killed.

More than 5.8 million Total Deaths

Rather than applying the Geneva Declaration approach wholesale to the overall direct death figures, I have applied it case-by-case for each theatre of war to produce a likely order of magnitude figure for indirect deaths.

These final figures are then totaled to generate an overall cumulative death toll for each conflict zone, which in turn is used to calculate an overall estimate for the total number of deaths across all these theatres of war. As these are not precise figures, they have been rounded to the nearest thousand.

This analysis shows that the total number of direct deaths during the War on Terror in major war zones with significant involvement of (NATO) Western governments amounts to around 1.2 million people. 

In addition to this figure, applying the Geneva Declaration methodology suggests that between 4.2 and 4.6 million is the range encompassing the minimum number of people who are likely to have died as an indirect consequence of these post-9/11 wars. 

When the number of direct and indirect deaths in each major war zone is then totaled, it reveals that at least 5.8 to 6 million people are likely to have died overall due to the War on Terror – a staggering number which is still probably very conservative.

These estimates cannot be assumed to hold with precision, but they demonstrate the real scale of the consequences of the violence inflicted.

While it is obviously not possible to attribute these deaths specifically to a particular party in the way that has been attempted with direct death tallies, these deaths are causally related to the chain of events that began with post-9/11 military policies implemented by the US, UK and other Western states (NATO).

Without that chain of events, these wars and their devastating outcomes simply would not have happened.

The true scale of the destruction caused by the War on Terror remains largely taboo, unreported and unexplored by most media commentators and academic experts, let alone policy-makers.

To even contemplate that such a huge number of people might have been killed as a result of decisions by US, British and European (NATO) leaders – in the name of fighting terrorism – strays too far outside the framework of what is culturally acceptable and intellectually palatable. Such a scale of death is not what ‘we’ do. We are not ‘terrorists’.

However, if the true consequences of these wars are examined, we might begin to recognise how the nature of conflict and violence has transformed through the 20th and 21st Centuries. It has become imperceptible, embedded in far-flung institutions of power, upheld through short-sighted military operations with structures and ethics designed in such a way that they systematically maximise the deaths of invisible ‘others’ in the name of protecting ‘our’ more important bodies and interests.

The very dynamics of mass violence have become globalised and normalised, precisely because our political and cultural institutions are incapable of acknowledging that such state-sanctioned terrorism even exists. 

Twenty years after 9/11, the shocking fact is that, due to our lack of interest as a civilisation, no one really knows for sure how many people have died as a result of the War on Terror.

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