".... Watching this play out, I am reminded of a passage from the geographer Stuart Elden’s award-winning 2009 book, Terror and Territory. In discussing how to study the “war on terror”, Elden observed that it did not make sense to study terrorism as something unique to non-state actors.
“States clearly operate in ways that terrify,” Elden said. “The terrorism of non-state actors is a very small proportion of terrorism taken as a whole, with states having killed far more than those who oppose them.”
A large body of research supports this claim.
Researchers with Brown University’s Costs of War project, for example, have found that US-led interventions in the “war on terror” from 2001 to 2023 killed over 400,000 civilians in direct war violence. They also show evidence that when considering indirect deaths – for example, people in war zones dying from treatable medical conditions after clean water or medical infrastructure was destroyed – death toll estimates rise to at least 3.5m. Moreover, even beyond direct war zones, a recent study in the Lancet found that sanctions during the same period were also extremely deadly, causing as many as 500,000 excess deaths per year from 2010 to 2021.
In short, we have already spent decades terrorizing civilian populations around the world in the name of fighting terror. This is well known, and yet... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/24/war-on-terror-venezuela-donald-trump