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11 September 2009

The true death toll for 911 and our response thereto

Eight years ago, islamic terrorists — most of them from Saudia Arabia — flew two hijacked Boeing airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, and a third hijacked Boeing airliner into the Pentagon, murdering 3,000. A fourth hijacked airliner dived into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers mounted an assault on the hijackers.

As I noted earlier this year, it’s time to put those deaths in perspective:

If casualties are prorated for the differences in population between 1941 and 2001, a higher percentage of Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor than on 911. The physical damage on 911 was an insignificant portion of national assets. And our ability to defend ourselves was not diminished.

For more on 911’s impacts on our armed forces, see The Speech Bush 43 Should Have Given (my first posting on Flathead Memo, which now begins its fourth year).

Our response to 911 included starting two wars, one in Afghanistan to deny Al Qaeda safe havens, a defensible rationale, and another in Iraq because George W. Bush, who was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq, could now argue that occupying Iraq would prevent Osama Bin Laden from acquiring a nuclear bomb.

According to iCasualties.org, 822 Americans have died in Afghanistan, and 4,343 have died in Iraq. Tens of thousands more have been wounded, many grievously. It’s reasonable, I think, to conclude that more than 8,000 Americans have suffered terrible deaths as a direct result of 911.

The death toll for 911 rises by a factor of almost 20, however, if one takes into account deaths that could have been prevented had the resources spent on the war been spent on health care. According to the Institute of Medicine, as many as 18,000 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance. That’s as many as 144,000 deaths since 911.

Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Linda Bilmes, concluded that the Iraq war’s true cost will be three trillion dollars, or three times the 10-year cost of President Obama’s proposed health care “reforms” (which, as I’ve noted, are really Richard Nixon’s health care plan).

While we honor those who perished in the attacks of 911, and on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, let us also remember those who perished because our nation was (and is) spending its money on the engines of war instead of on health care for all of its own people.