US-Caused Civilian Deaths Versus Toll of 'Terrorist' Attacks

According to mainstream media, the world is mourning Friday’s deaths of over 130 people in Paris, due to a series of attacks by the Islamic State group. But very few seem to remember the nearly 4 million innocent civilians the United States and their allies have killed during their so called “War on Terror.”

Mainstream media has also failed to acknowledge that the Islamic State groups' attacks in Paris could ultimately be blamed on Washington, because the extremist group was created by them, according to a recent Global Research study.

“Much like al-Qaida, the Islamic State is made-in-the-USA, an instrument of terror designed to divide and conquer the oil-rich Middle East and to counter Iran’s growing influence in the region,” the Center for Research on Globalization wrote.

They went on to write that, “the fact that the United States has a long and torrid history of backing terrorist groups will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore history.”

The CIA, according to Global Research, began resorting to extremists in the Middle East during the Cold War era.

Former U.S. National Security Agency director William Odom admitted in 2013 that the United States “has long used terrorism.”

The former U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the British House of Commons soon after the 9/11 attacks in the United States that the CIA trained thousands of extremists and that Saudi Arabia helped with funding, with the objective of defeating the Russians in Afghanistan.

Just like many U.S. interventions into the sovereignty of other countries, Washington's foreign policy in the Middle East has backfired, Global Research wrote.

“The Islamic State is its latest weapon (utilized by Washington) that, much like al-Qaida, is certainly backfiring,” the report said.

In March, the Washington D.C.-based Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) – a group of Nobel Peace Prize recipients – released a report saying that the U.S. interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan alone killed close to 2 million, and that the figure was closer to 4 million when tallying up the deaths of civilians caused by the U.S. in other countries, such as Syria and Yemen.

In stark contrast, according to Statista – a website that specializes in creating statistics on a number of issues – noted that the worldwide death toll of extremist attacks between 2006 and 2013 are far fewer than 200,000.

In Iraq, the United States and its allies also imposed “brutal sanctions” against the government of late President Saddam Hussein, causing the deaths of over 1.7 million Iraqi civilians, half of whom were children, the website added, citing a United Nations report.

“The mass death was seemingly intended. Among items banned by the U.N. sanctions were chemicals and equipment essential for Iraq’s national water treatment system. A secret U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document discovered by Professor Thomas Nagy of the School of Business at George Washington University amounted, he said, to 'an early blueprint for genocide against the people of Iraq,’ ” wrote the PSR report.

In other words, according to the PSR, the United States intentionally developed “a fully workable method to ‘fully degrade the water treatment system’ of an entire nation over a period of a decade.” The sanctions policy would create “the conditions for widespread disease, including full scale epidemics,” thus “liquidating a significant portion of the population of Iraq.”

The study further revealed that from 1991 through 2003 — during the first U.S.-led Gulf War and the years of U.S. sanctions on the country — the Unite States killed 1.9 million Iraqis and that from 2003 to date, about a million more Iraqis were killed by the U.S.-led intervention.

Author and researcher Gideon Polya said in his 2007 book “Body Count: Global Avoidable Mortality Since 1950,” wrote that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan left close to 3 million people dead, of which 900,000 were infants under five.

The fact that today the United States and its Western allies condemn the very extremists they created, means they should seriously consider shifting their ill-conceived strategies against “terrorism” that have cost, according to Global Research, trillions of dollars.

“The funds that the U.S. spends on counter-terrorism should perhaps be diverted to other more significant perils, such as industrial accidents (one in 53,000), violent crime (one in 22,000), automobile accidents (one in 8,000) and cancer (one in 540),” the website added, noting that terrorism-related deaths are one in 2.5 million.

Source URL