Charles Bastille
2 min readNov 3, 2020

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I think that an argument against American military policy is always welcome and needed. It's been a policy of endless warfare ever since WW2.

Singling out Obama, and especially Biden, who was not commander in chief of the armed forces during Obama's presidency, is not useful.

In 2019, Trump revoked official policy that dictated that the U.S. government report drone strike casualties:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47480207

According to the article I've referenced: "there have been 2,243 drone strikes in the first two years of the Trump presidency, compared with 1,878 in Mr Obama's eight years in office, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a UK-based think tank."

From another article:

"According to a 2018 report in The Daily Beast, Obama launched 186 drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan during his first two years in office. In Trump’s first two years, he launched 238."

and

"As of January of this year, U.S. drone strikes fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria have killed at least 1,257 civilians, according to the Pentagon, and a monitoring group, Airwars, estimates the number to be as great as 7,500."

https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2019/5/8/18619206/under-donald-trump-drone-strikes-far-exceed-obama-s-numbers

Here is a more detailed report from Foreign Policy on just how secretive drone strikes are under Trump, and how difficult it is to get actual numbers from the American Predator in Chief:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/22/obama-drones-trump-killings-count/

Keep in mind, too, that Trump and Brazil's Bolsonaro have effectively dismantled the Pan-American Health Organization, or PAHO and chased out 10,000 Cuban doctors who could have helped the South Americans with the pandemic. The PAHO has an excellent track record with outbreaks. This was done out of a malignant disregard for human life.

Will Biden's foreign policy be more of the same kind of awful?

Probably (although you won't see humanitarian agencies like PAHO dismantled).

That won't change until Americans start becoming more accountable to themselves, and show more compassion for people in other parts of the world.

But Trump is not any more innocent here than Biden, so in that regard, this article is in error.

The headline should probably be: "America's state-sponsored terrorism needs to end."

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Charles Bastille
Charles Bastille

Written by Charles Bastille

Author of MagicLand & Psalm of Vampires. Join me on my Substack at https://www.ruminato.com/. All stories © 2020-24 by Charles Bastille

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