While I by no means expected my previous column to generate a groundswell of global antiwar sentiment, I have been left saddened and furious at another outbreak of war targeted at Iran and quickly radiating to many other parts of the Middle East. It is hard to tally up the harrowing amount of death.
Along with the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—an odious figure who oversaw the murders of at least 5,000, and perhaps as many as 20,000, Iranian civilians in just the most recent set of mass protests against his regime—another 1,205 civilians died from the US-Israeli strikes in these past few weeks; almost 400 people died from Israeli strikes on Lebanon and six U.S. servicemembers in Kuwait died from retaliatory strikes by Iran.
But death from maximal shows of military violence seems all the rage now, let’s not forget. The Lancet Global Health has estimated 75,200 violent deaths in Gaza—more than half of whom were women, children, or adults over 64—since Israel began a war against Hamas following the latter’s slaughter of around 1,200 Israeli civilians. In Sudan, a civil war with no end in sight has seen the death of as many as 400,000 (although death toll estimates here vary widely) — the same number, around 400,000 survivors, face a brutal famine, and refugees number around 11 million. Slightly to the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo sees continued violence from allegedly Rwanda-backed militias; this complicated power struggle goes all the way back to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which 800,000 people were slaughtered.
With Ukraine’s more than 100,000 deaths, military and civilian, and Russia’s more than 1 million casualties, I can continue with this horrific list. What else can we say about Ukraine and Russia, in particular? Around 100,000 surviving Ukrainians have lost at least one limb from the war. Russians, meanwhile, are forced to pay higher taxes which go primarily to defense; this, matched with soaring interest rates in the double digits, labor shortages, and high mortality rates, all contrast starkly with Vladimir Putin’s promises to make Russia great again.
Since clearly the loss of millions seems like an acceptable statistic to the likes of Trump, Putin, Khamenei, and so many other world leaders, why does this economic toll also matter so little? Do these people really want gas prices to rise 14% in a week, tens of thousands of flights to get canceled (with an estimated tens of billions of dollars lost in tourism revenue), or $1 million extra spent to reroute each ship carrying global goods?
Conflict between countries is incredibly messy, and there is so much history to unravel and debate over before reaching anything close to long-standing agreements, so I know my pacifism probably sounds to many of you horribly naive. Moreover, the common outcry from hawks is that, without using force to restrain countries or bring about change, bad actors will continue killing and maiming their perceived enemies.
But at a certain point, is anything other than peace at all practical? The world wars left wide swaths of the world in shambles, with no money to repair the damage – a bright spot in US history, I would argue, is its support to rebuild the world with sweeping initiatives like the Marshall Plan and the development of nuclear nonproliferation treaties (which we now no longer seem to care about). With AI and drones becoming norms in modern warfare, and Trump alone having access to the US nuclear codes, it seems closer than ever that a “FAFO” mentality in global conflict leads to armageddon. Does anybody want this?
As at the end of my last column, I am at a loss for words — but I hope at least some of the world leaders playing a real-life version of Risk heed the following:
“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” – Abraham Lincoln.
