Rare News Desk
“Turns out I’m really good at killing people,” President Obama reportedly said in 2011. “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”
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As much as his White House attempted to downplay that aspect of his presidency, it was a strong suit — if that rather glib term can be fairly applied to such a macabre achievement.
RELATED: Obama’s drone war is a black mark on his legacy that cannot be ignored
Nowhere was Obama’s grim talent so evident as in his drone strike program, and now that his time in office has officially come to a close, we have his final drone kill count. Well, sort of.
By the Obama administration’s own count in its first and only annual report on U.S. strikes “terrorist targets outside areas of active hostilities” in 2016, last year saw 53 strikes killing 431 to 441 combatants and just one innocent.
More broadly, according to data compiled by the Council on Foreign relations, Obama is responsible for about 540 strikes killing about 3,800 people over the course of his entire presidency; roughly 11 times the drone attacks ordered by his predecessor, George W. Bush.
It is the composition of the kills which makes me say we only “sort of” have the final tally of Obama’s drone record. By the government’s count, the maximum number of civilians killed in strikes Obama ordered is 117: the one this past year plus 64 to 116 between his first inauguration and the end of 2015.
Furthermore, while it is comparatively easy to get, say, a woman or a child who is killed classified as a non-combatant casualty, where men are concerned the numbers are likely more distorted still. Unless there is evidence proving a military-aged man (roughly, between the age of 18 and 60) is not a terrorist, they’re automatically labeled an enemy combatant. In many cases that is undoubtedly a mislabel.
RELATED: Obama is leaving office on an anti-privacy note — and Donald Trump is coming in the same way
Even without exact numbers, it’s clear President Obama was indeed “really good at killing people,” and with President Trump’s tenure just a few days old, it remains to be seen how he will maintain, escalate, or restrain Obama’s drone program.
Given what we know about the effects of drone warfare, if Trump is serious about seeking “friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world,” he’ll shift hard toward restraint.
