this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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Does anyone have sources for this?
I'm not an expert, and a quick look on Wikipedia shows that comparing just 2 recent big wars, the USA coalition's invasion of Iraq (2003-2011) killed approximately 151k to 655k[i] Iraqis, while the major Russian invasion or Ukraine (2022-ongoing) killed about 200k[u] Ukrainians.
Anyone have better numbers, and other non-defensive invasions?
[i] 151000 (2003-03/2006-06) New England Journal of Medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Family_Health_Survey
460000 (2003-03/2011-06) PLOS Medicine Survey https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3797136/
654965 excess (2003-03/2006-07) Lancet survey, 186318 by coalition, 144246 by others, and 276472 by unknown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties
[u] BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8n4l8elpgo This is just Ukrainians - if you include the Russian casualties then it may be more than 3 times that, and since some Russian soldiers may have been forced into the war (unlike in the Iraq war on the Western side), Russia should be held responsible for them getting killed also.
This.
However, it doesn't excuse the US from their military crimes.
In Russia, we also gladly use "what about": yeah, we might not be perfect, but just look at the USA... Bad rhetoric. (RU might take the cake for being the largest evil on earth, but even so it doesn't excuse others's crimes).
Those are active murders, and are ignoring passive ones. Every death due to sanctions, every starvation in the US itself, every preventable death due to being blocked by the healthcare system. Add every death in Palestine, the Vietnam war, the internal struggles of China before the nationalists were defeated, every time they sold weapons to any group...
According to the 2019 data at https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death 0.4% of deaths are from nutritional deficiencies (this may be defined differently from starvation), and 0.2% from war battle deaths, but that graph includes deaths which would occur because of aging so the percentages downplay these causes - I haven't been able to find good source for stats on preventable deaths.
What I also can't find is the percentage of indirect deaths caused by wars, which from that graph would probably mostly be from disease which could be big.
Sanctions probably are also a big cause of death from disease, neonatal deaths (3.3%), maternal deaths (0.4%), etc., but I personally think lots of sanctions and boycotts (of e.g. apartheid South Africa, Russia, North Korea, Palestine, Israel, Iran, USA) are actually good (I don't know much about the Cuban) even-tho innocents are victimized long before the authoritarians and/or oligarchs are ousted by the sanctions.
I'm not doubting your comparative analysis of these wars, but instead I would like to place another claim on the table: wars are no longer the primary vehicle of violence in our global society, just the most naked and public-facing violence.
Some examples of these other acts (and these are indeed heavily interrelated):
(Note that the primary vehicle of harm here is slowly economically depriving and strangling average people up to the last dollar, worldwide). Then you add this suffering to when the violence becomes protracted and sharpened via war.
Russia simply can't do this. Idk if it wants to; it probably does considering Ukraine (also Russia isn't like a person lol and I don't think it's all just Putin bc putting shit on one guy is naive imo; you can always replace the one guy). But Russia does not have the military and economic influence the US does.
This is just my understanding of the world like philosophically as I've spent 20-something beautiful years on this blue-green marble and another 375 on the red one (and also I'm like... incredibly lazy as a person!) so no sources 😔 but I am amenable to receiving new evidence!
Your comments are welcome to my response to user Calfpupa above.