When he was in office, former President Barack Obama earned the ire of anti-war activists for his expansion of Bush's drone wars. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning head of state ordered ten times more drone strikes than the previous president, and estimates late in Obama's presidency showed 49 out of 50 victims were civilians. In 2015, it was reported that up to 90% of drone casualties were not the intended targets.
Current President Donald Trump campaigned on a less interventionist foreign policy, claiming to be opposed to nation-building and misguided invasions. But less than two months into his presidency, Trump has expanded the drone strikes that plagued Obama's "peaceful" presidency.
"During President Obama's two terms in office, he approved 542 such targeted strikes in 2,920 days—one every 5.4 days. From his inauguration through today, President Trump had approved at least 36 drone strikes or raids in 45 days—one every 1.25 days."
That's an increase of 432 [sic] percent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @06:17PM
You wish to deploy lethal force against me, with the aim of kidnapping and caging me? I'd prefer you change your mind and leave in peace those who aren't threatening others. Otherwise, if you ever find yourself in a position to influence the actions of individual members of US law enforcement while continuing to espouse such threats, you'd make yourself a perfect target for the legitimate use of deadly force in self-defense. You are also showing signs of Stockholm Syndrome, in your cheering of taxes (assuming you actually pay them and aren't subsidized by them, in which case you would merely be a beneficiary of theft/slavery).
Perhaps I should have been more verbose to clarify: I certainly make no claim that Islam is in any way perfect. Islam claims itself to be perfect and unchangeable. As I disagree with claims of "Islamic perfection", I used quotation marks to short-handedly denote "so-called perfect" and my disagreement with the same. Islam is vile and evil; I weep for the souls enslaved by it.
It's a good thing that I'd written "under attack by Muslims" rather than "under attack by Barbary pirates", then, eh? As for piracy being a crime and not a war, well, Thomas Jefferson disagreed with you [wikipedia.org] (and perhaps surprisingly to you, I disagree with Thomas: the merchants should have banded together privately to provide for their own defense in international territory rather than becoming subsidized by governments). As for gaps in attacks after winning the Barbary Wars - of course! The attacking Muslims were defeated, their soldiers killed, and their ships sunk - did you expect them back the next Tuesday? I'm not interested in revenge - what's done is done and I can't change it. However, Muslim attacks have occurred in my own country within my own lifetime, and are continuing against other Western countries, increasing in frequency and severity. I am not a blind fool, and so if the attackers cannot be reasoned with, a reasonable response is to destroy the attackers.
I did that, and I learned that Islam was not a religion of peaceful nomads with a charming culture and glamorized by the harems of the sultans as I'd previously believed, but is instead a socio-political system that mandates a literal world-war of conquest among many, many despicable things, such as effectively treating women as chattel property. There are many sources (in addition to the three Islamic "holy" books themselves: the Quran, Sura, and Hadith) from which to learn about the basics of Islam, and having already made use of several, I would turn your own advice back on you: read Prophet of Doom [prophetofdoom.net] along with a copy of the Quran, and keep your eyes peeled for conflicting claims between the two. If you do this, you will have your own experience, and you will be astounded.
Your "logic" is faulty, because the written doctrine of Christianity does not call for its adherents to wage a literal worldwide war of conquest. (That said, I am increasingly suspicious of Christianity to the point of being quite certain that the author of most of the so-called New Testament, Paul, was a liar [questioningpaul.com]. A false religion used to wage war (Inquisition, etc.) sure does seem like something a government would like to use to its advantage...)