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posted by on Monday March 20 2017, @02:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the discuss dept.

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.

Source: http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com/archives/us-drone-strikes-have-gone-up-432-since-trump-took-office


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Monday March 20 2017, @04:05PM (9 children)

    by Gaaark (41) on Monday March 20 2017, @04:05PM (#481547) Journal

    Agreed.

    Or if they all stayed in a couple of buildings: you know, towers or such. Two towers, looking much the same, like...oh... yeah! Twin towers.

    You could planes into those twin looking towers, and if you kill a few civilians, well.... what is the problem.

    FUCK!!!

    It doesn't matter if innocents are killed, does it? I mean, really? If your cause is good: like oil.... lots of oil. Own the oil: Pwn it even. No matter what.
    Drone, plane. Same.

    FUCK... most intelligent species on Earth, my white/black/yellowpurple ass.

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @04:53PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @04:53PM (#481580)

    Agreed.

    Or if they all stayed in a couple of buildings: you know, towers or such [blah blah blah]

    The point is: if you have cause to use force, use the amount of force necessary to bring the conflict to an end in the shortest possible time. If that means use of wildly disproportionate force, then so be it.

    The question YOU are focused on (and one which I ignored up until now) is whether or not force should be used in certain cases. Therefore your issue is not US soldiers' use of drones to blow certain people up - it is US soldiers' killing of certain people in the first place regardless of the method used to kill them. That's an entirely different matter from the use of "disproportionate force", and a matter which you and I are likely to be in general agreement on.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday March 20 2017, @05:18PM (3 children)

      by bob_super (1357) on Monday March 20 2017, @05:18PM (#481599)

      > If that means use of wildly disproportionate force, then so be it.

      Nuke the whole Middle-East!

      Nobody will ever be resentful for collateral damage.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @08:59PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @08:59PM (#481769)

        Nuke the whole Middle-East!

        TFA is talking about drones here: little [wikipedia.org] go-karts [wikipedia.org] in the sky carrying a few missiles, each bearing a ~10kg conventional warhead [wikipedia.org].

        That said, to respond to your attempted reductio ad absurdum: if there is a group of people, largely concentrated in specific geographical areas, who adhere to written religious materials [prophetofdoom.net] that literally call for a world-wide war [quran.com] until "all religion is for [our god]", who consider lying to advance their case as moral [thereligionofpeace.com], whose religion could be thoroughly disproven by destruction of specific physical property on lands they inhabit, and whose members actively [wikipedia.org] engage [thereligionofpeace.com] in warfare [markhumphrys.com] or support those who do [wikipedia.org], yes, it does seem wise to take such peoples' claims and actions at face value and nuke them and their lands to glass. (That US soldiers kill such people in small numbers and for different reasons (oil/mercantilism) is nonetheless objectionable.)

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @10:14AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @10:14AM (#482030)

          Leave Trump/Congress out of this.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @12:39PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @12:39PM (#482071)

            I see what you're trying to say, that "Trump/Congress" is trying to take over the world through war. So let's run with your assertion for the moment:

            Are you paying taxes ("zakat") to the US federal government? If so, it would seem that you are personally responsible for a measure of the warlike actions taken by said government's soldiers, and that while you personally may not be the most effective war target, you are nonetheless a valid war target for the enemies of the USA due to your direct financial support.

            "But but the Internal Revenue Service will steal my stuff and/or point guns at me!" Giving into criminal coercion doesn't make you a good guy, though it does make you a coward.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday March 20 2017, @05:21PM (3 children)

      by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Monday March 20 2017, @05:21PM (#481600) Journal

      No, it's not just a case of whether force but used. It is a matter of what kind of force.

      If drones kill 49 civilians for every 1 legitimate target, well that seems like a pretty shitty way of doing it. Are there ways of reducing the number of innocent victims? Probably. Boots on the ground might do it - I'd reason that a guy standing in front of the target is probably less likely to take out a building full of innocents than a guy splatting bug on a computer screen half a world away, who can only see the target through a grainy camera from a thousand feet up.

      Trouble is, one of those situations risks the lives of US soldiers, and the US public seem unwilling to accept that. They would rather see a school full of Syrians blown up than a single flag-draped coffin borne back to the US. That is seriously wrong thinking in my view.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday March 20 2017, @08:46PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Monday March 20 2017, @08:46PM (#481761)

        A century of the Good Guy killing countless Bad Guys and being rewarded by Getting The Girl will warp people's perception of what's appropriate.

        The other side is worthless evil wasteland. Our soldiers are Heroes. Why risk even one Hero on the odd chance that he would save a few anonymous people? Those who live near Bad People in The Wasteland are guilty too, otherwise they'd move.
        We'd tell the rare good people in those lands to run away so we can carpet-bomb the useless place to smithereens, but they keep asking us to move into Our Paradise.

      • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:48AM (1 child)

        by hemocyanin (186) on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:48AM (#481942) Journal

        This is why drone wars are so evil - they let one side escape the horror of war and thus perpetuate it.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @03:50AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @03:50AM (#481959)

          This is why drone wars are so evil - they let one side escape the horror of war and thus perpetuate it.

          A Taste of Armageddon [wikia.com] aside, I now presume you will take up an inferior weapon (one on par with the opponents) and charge manfully into their bayonet-equivalents? Y'know, since it'd be wrong for you to escape the horrors of war...