The full extent of the human and environmental costs of the latest illegal imperial war launched by the United States and the racist colonial settler state of Israel will be difficult to determine.
The official death count as at March 16 was 2371. The numbers injured were more than 10 times higher and, according to the United Nations refugee agency, up to 3.2 million have already been displaced.
The casualties of the rapidly growing global economic fall-out are not included in these figures.
As in the Gaza genocide, the casualties and destruction are disproportionately suffered by the countries being attacked by two of the most powerful military powers in the world.
Civilians, including hundreds of children in Iran and Lebanon, are being killed by the most high-tech and expensive weapons in the world.
The US has spent more than US$16.5 billion on munitions — US$11.3 billion in just the first six days alone.
The “plan” was to “go big go fast” and the war was accordingly named Operation Epic Fury. But as it drags into its third week and spreads into more countries, it is being mocked as “Operation Epic Failure”.
The Donald Trump administration is asking the US Congress approve US$50 billion in emergency military funding on top its US$1 trillion annual military budget, which it wants to raise to US$1.5 trillion by 2027.
Israel hasn’t revealed how much it has spent in its latest attacks on Iran and Lebanon, but the Benjamin Netanyahu regime has boosted its military budget by US$13 billion for this war. This likely understates its spending because the regime has been stockpiling for this war for some time.
This war could cost trillions of dollars of US public funds, money which could have been better spent on addressing urgent social and environmental needs, according to Nick Turse in The Intercept.
Linda Blimes and Joseph Stiglitz, the co-authors of The Three Trillion Dollar War, calculated that even before this war, the US had spent US$8 trillion in two decades in its “wars on terror” that killed about a million people.
The environmental costs of chronic US war-making are even more hidden because, as ecosococialist Jason Hickel explains, capitalism seeks to "externalise" both labour and the ecological costs to the Global South.
But we can get a taste of the devastating ecological effects of this war from first-hand accounts, published on Dropsite News, of Tehran residents after the March 8 Israeli bombing of oil depots and infrastructure in the neighbourhoods of Shahran, Aghdasieh and Shahr-e-Ray.
“When I woke up, the house was so dark I assumed it was heavily overcast,” said Sina, a 42-year-old father to a five-year-old, who lives in the Sattarkhan neighborhood in central Tehran, far from the burning depots. “I showered and dressed for work. But the moment I stepped outside, I panicked. A mixture of smoke and clouds, but overwhelmingly thick smoke, had blackened the entire sky.
“The air smelled horrific, but it wasn’t just the smell. A brief rain shower had turned everything greasy and black. My white car was covered in dark, oily spots.”
The Iranian Red Crescent warned Tehran’s residents the explosions had spread toxic hydrocarbon compounds, and sulphur and nitrogen oxides were in the air. Precipitation would bring highly dangerous acid rain, capable of causing chemical skin burns and lung damage.
Iran has retaliated against oil depots in neighbouring countries that host US military bases and hit several oil tankers in the Hormuz Straits.
If the costs of imperial wars are not enough of an indictment in themselves, consider why these wars are being waged.
Trump has not been able to give a straight answer on his aims and objectives for this war. After listening to nearly three weeks of rants from Trump and his Secretary for War Pete Hegseth, it’s clear their sole purpose is to serve the US empire and the US oil and arms industries, whose profits are fattening as the war drags on.
Author Arundhati Roy’s powerful March 12 speech made the point that this war has nothing to do with liberating the people of Iran.
“Any regimes that need changing, including the US, Israel and ours, need to be changed by the people, not by some bloated, lying, cheating, greedy, resource-grabbing, bomb-dropping imperial power and its allies who are trying to bully the whole world into submission.”
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