SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 Monday March 20 2017, @02:33PM (5 children)
332 or 432? Much confused.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @03:15PM (4 children)
The article says 432%. The URL for the article says 432. You get 432 by dividing 5.4 by 1.25.
The editor seems to have taken it upon himself to say (5.4 - 1.25)/1.25 = 332% and is insisting that "increase of" is pedantically correct; then he went and changed the article submission title.
I think that is quite the editorial overreach going on there.
(Score: 2, Informative) by charon on Monday March 20 2017, @05:29PM (3 children)
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday March 20 2017, @08:23PM
While I have no problem with the edit, I think it's still a poor way to discuss the data. As the summary notes, Obama ordered over 500 drone strikes. Trump so far has ordered 45. Claiming that "U.S. drone strikes have gone up 332%" still doesn't make much sense.
The assumption is that drone strikes will be uniformly distributed over an entire presidency. Even a cursory glance at the available data [thebureauinvestigates.com] shows huge variability from month-to-month and year-to-year in number and frequency of strikes, along with obvious variability depending on theatre of operations.
For example, the highest year of drone strikes just in Pakistan according to the data had ~43 times as many strikes as the year with the lowest number of strikes in Pakistan during Obama's presidency (128 in 2010 compared to 3 in 2016). Some countries have markedly increased drone strikes over the course of Obama's presidency, others peak and decline, etc.
So, it's certainly possible that 36 strikes in 45 days is as bad (or even worse) as during the most active period of strikes for Obama, though it's tough to discern without crunching the data more. But a 45-day window is just too small to make a proper statistical comparison to a 2900+ day window when there's this much variability.
(BTW - I have issues with excessive drone strikes too, and I certainly have issues with Trump. But I also have issues with inappropriate presentation of data.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @11:15PM (1 child)
I agree. A number of years back I wrote a retrospective on the anniversary of the publication of Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451, but I had to keep referring to it has Fahrenheit 480, except when I quoted other people referring to it because there I had to write Fahrenheit 451 (sic). You see, Bradbury got the autoignition temperature of paper incorrect! I felt like such a tool, but I had to do it.
(Score: 1) by charon on Tuesday March 21 2017, @12:05AM