Commenter Mark Caplan recently provided this link to this article from the Guardian about the amount of bombing America did in 2016, and quoted this mind-boggling paragraph:
In 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped at least 26,171 bombs. This means that every day last year, the US military blasted combatants or civilians overseas with 72 bombs; that’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.
Were you aware of this? I knew there were ongoing drone strikes, but had no idea it was going on anywhere near this extent.
Obviously, Obama did not approve every last airstrike, but he had to have approved them all in principle.
Why was there no media coverage of this in the United States? Is it not newsworthy? Would we have heard more about this if Obama wasn't so coddled by the MSM?
Twenty-six thousand bombs, yet the media's attention was focused on those horrible people who didn't want trannies to be allowed in bathrooms with their little girls in North Carolina.
They should have labeled him "Bomb-happy Barry." Or "O-bomba."
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Hi John. Obama massively ramped up the drone program at the Af/Pak border and this is the reason he is generally considered to be a bad dude in Pakistan. In the tribal border areas there you could hear and see multiple drones overhead every day. The other big drone bomb theatre is Yemen, same story there. This stuff, including civilian deaths etc. gets no coverage in Western media except for propaganda pieces every now and then. In Pakistan initially you would get frequent episodes in the papers but this reduced to only exceptional episodes later on as there were simply too many. The number is plausible and within expectations.
Luqman --
Those tribesmen on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border must live in terror. Drones are a particularly lethal form of weaponry, almost impossible to escape if you sleep in the same house night after night and they want to get you. And yeah, the kind behind them would seem to be particularly malevolent when you see relatives and tribesmen just incinerated from time to time with no notice.
Trump said Assad's gas attack on civilians "crossed many lines." Well, what about our launching a unilateral cruise missile strike on a sovereign state that did not attack or threaten to attack us or our allies? An unprovoked attack on another sovereign state used to be the ultimate violation of international law, yet we cavalierly cross that red line time and again with impunity.
I've been tremendously impressed with a 35-year-old highly independent-minded Democratic politician from Hawaii, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. She also happens to be a major in the Hawaiian National Guard and served in Iraq. She loudly opposes regime change in Syria and our arming the ISIS rebels. She wants an investigation into the alleged gas attack before she will accept the prevailing view. Her fellow Democrats denounce her.
"Gabbard met Assad on Syrian fact-finding trip"
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/01/25/hawaii-rep-gabbard-says-met-assad-during-syria-trip.html
Mark --
Gabbard is great, my son said several months ago that he'd wished that Trump had chosen her as his running mate. Not only did she check off a few boxes (woman, war vet, even a Democrat), but she's right on all the issues. My son said he also would have liked Jim Webb for most of the same reasons. The RNC would never have let Trump get any with picking a Democrat, but both of them would have been fantastic choices.
I looked up Rep. Tulsi Gabbard's position on mass immigration. Unfortunately, like every other Democrat (and almost every Republican), she puts the interests of foreigners seeking to immigrate here above the national interest. Here are excerpts of a 2013 letter she and some of her colleagues sent to Sen. Chuck Schumer (emphasis mine):
As members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC), we write to urge you to preserve family-sponsored immigration as you work towards fixing our broken immigration system. Comprehensive immigration reform is a top priority for our caucus and the millions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) that we represent. In 2012, Asians surpassed Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants coming to the United States.
We are particularly concerned about proposals to eliminate the ability for U.S. citizens to sponsor their brothers and sisters and married adult children for legal permanent residence.
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are disproportionately impacted by family immigration backlogs. Of the 4.3 million people in line, 1.8 million are of Asian or Pacific Islander origin. The Philippines, Vietnam, India, China, Pakistan, South Korea, and Bangladesh rank among the top ten countries with the largest number of siblings and married children awaiting immigration visas.
We can look to the struggles and perseverance of past generations of immigrants to understand the importance of a robust and inclusive family immigration system.
Family immigration has been a bedrock American value since our founding, and it is critical that we recognize the importance families play in the lives of new immigrants by maintaining our current family visa preferences. We oppose any efforts to further limit the definition of family and believe U.S. citizens deserve to be able to continue to sponsor their siblings and married children for legal permanent residence. A practical and well-functioning family-based immigration system is the key to growing our communities and our economy.
Mark --
Ah, that's too bad, oh well. All the stuff about Asians is her playing to her base in Hawaii.
Sorry for the late reply, was on the road today, will be for two more days.
This shows where they were dropped:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-president-barack-obama-bomb-map-drone-wars-strikes-20000-pakistan-middle-east-afghanistan-a7534851.html
24,000 on Iraq and Syria in the campaign against ISIS I guess.
Steven --
Thank you for that. I'm surprised only 3 bombs in Pakistan, I guess those were "chasing" the Taliban over the border.
All this said, I suppose I'm glad Obama waged a war through drones rather than a ground war.
By 2014 the Pakistani army had conducted its operation in the border areas to clear out the ("bad") Taliban so it was past the peak. However, that number is probably a gross underestimation based on anecdotes from the area. I don't particularly trust the CIA and US military intelligence to report accurate numbers in this area because often there are some underhanded goings-on involved with local groups. There is also the local angle; while government officials and the ISI are complicit in the attacks, the outward presentation is that they are an unacceptable violation of sovereignty. Lowballing the reporting helps the image of the Pakistani establishment. It's a big mess.
Luqman --
The sounds about right. If the CIA has a motivation to lowball the number of bombs that land in Pakistani territory, they will do so. They are nothing if not an intensely politicized organization; that's become quite obvious recently. I hope Trump and Pompeo can clean the place out, at least somewhat.
It's stands as such a contrast fewer are dying than ever before in the 21st century compared to the past yet we are more sensitive to violence than ever before. The iraqi troops have been in Mosul, fighting a measly 9,000 Isis troops for over half a year. The soviets captured Berlin in 9 days. More people died in that one battle, soldiers and civilians, in a little over a week than everyone in the Syrian civil war that has been going on for 9 years.
This lack of cautiousness is something that still sticks out when I compare now and then. I asked my Grandmother how they felt knowing so many of their country men were dying, (I assumed it would be like opening a newspaper and seeing 5000 GIs dead in a single day landing in Normandy), she said they mourned but had to carry on.
Is it better to just blaze through and get it over with than move so slowly? Are we doing better now by being more careful?
Nobody had as many qualms back then. The USA had rows of heavy machine guns indiscriminately spray a single block in case of snipers before advancing half a football field's distance. The British bombed German cities leaving tens of thousands dead in a single night. The Soviets leveled entire buildings with 152 mm howitzers (I am not joking) at point blank range, and had sub-machine gunners sitting on tanks spray bullets into any remaining windows or rubble just to be sure.
Bloodthiry Barack is only bloodthirsty to us because it's the 21st century. If FDR were alive now, dear lord. What would the media think of him?
-Ga
Ga --
Great points. The death tolls from the recent wars, at least on the Western side, pale in comparison to the death tolls of WWII, WWI, and even the Civil War. That of course doesn't console the families who've lost loved ones, but the difference in numbers is stark. (Though less so on the Arab side.)
And yes, these wars drag on. WWII lasted for approximately four years for the US, yet the Afghanistan War lingers on, in diminished form, fifteen years after it was started. Nothing ever seems to come to a resolution these days.
The nature has changed. Professional armies fighting all out like the South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese regulars in Vietnam (8 times as many South Vietnamese soldiers than Americans died in the war, mostly against the NVA in their own conventional battles. The USA vs Vietcong was a mere fraction of the entire scale.) are bloodier but get resolved quickly. The south and north went all out after the USA left, no tiptoeing, and Saigon fell. We got Saddam in a month, more died and was destroyed than what followed. But people lamented the following 10 years more than the initial bloodbath.
I suspect the human mind doesn't base it's feelings on numbers or statistics, but how often or how long an obstacle lasts, hearing about 10,000 dead after a single day at Antietam doesn't take the same emotional toll of reading about people dying in hundreds of small battles spread out over 10 years even if the deaths at the end combined are half.
Now wars the USA go into damages our economy instead of helping (like ww2 ending the depression). Do you know why?
The difference in losses on the Arab side is still very stark. Less, but still very.
The times have changed, things have gotten better, and so have our values changed. I would be more understanding if liberal anti-war protesters in the USA acknowledged this and admitted that it is getting better. They could respond that it was worse in the past but they still want to achieve their modern goal. Even modern feminists could do the same. They could admits women in the USA aren't getting stoned like in the middle east, women aren't stuck in as many bad marriages, but that they still want to protest against whatever because their issues are in their immediate vicinity, both place and time. But they act like they have it the worst of all. And if they did, people would give them more legitimacy and they would achieve their goal. It's almost like they don't care about winning. I am less annoyed talking to people who I disagree with on an issue that think in terms of doing what they want for an end result and provide good arguments, than people I agree with on an issue who are only making it worse, stuck in la la land.
-Ga
Ga --
Yes, you're right about the wars. The human tolls don't compare, either between then and now, or between us and them.
What you say about the feminists is so true. Western feminists get upset if Western men look at them wrong, or crack a dirty joke in their presence, yet when women are stoned to death in the Middle East, it doesn't seem to concern them. And even worse, they want to import more of the Muslims who believe in Sharia law. There was a case (or two) in Michigan where Muslim doctors engaged in the genital mutilation of little girls (i.e., cut their clits off) but there was barely a peep from the MSM. Think about that: feminists are up in arms about an unfortunate word, and get upset about a man calling a woman "honey;" yet these Muslim doctors are depriving these young girls of a lifetime of sexual pleasure, and the Left doesn't make a sound.
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