[a green flag with a leaf stands above an utopian green city with vegetation and clean energy]
Greenists believe that the world should be a better place for green people, and everyone else too
[an orange fascist-looking star in a gear logo stands above a bleak concrete city]
Orangites believe that the world should only have orange people, and that all greens should be hung
[an orange character speaks smugly, in a bedroom that contains an orangite logo and a greenist/orangite flag]
Me?
I’m a greenist-orangite,
why do you ask?
We seem to have vastly different understandings of what the word “direct” means. When I (or any reasonable person) talk about direct deaths, I mean people who were, uh, directly killed by US forces. As in, directly by the bullets and bombs they employ. That’s the standard you’re using for Obama. If the actions of US forces lead to uprisings, and those uprisings resulted in deaths, that is the very definition of what anyone would call “indirect.” I mean, how many of the deaths included in those numbers were from government forces suppressing the uprisings? Are you really trying to include people Saddam Hussein killed as “direct” deaths from Bush? This is completely ridiculous.
You’re just twisting definitions around because the actual facts don’t line up with your narrative. If you want to include indirect deaths, then let’s include indirect deaths when it comes to Obama. You have not presented any figure or estimate for that at all, so we have nothing at all to compare the 100k number to.
No, that’s literally what this entire conversation has been about. The problem is that in the case of Obama vs Bush Sr, it is not “1 to 100,” the actual number of deaths is roughly equivalent. It’s only “1 to 100” according to your completely baseless, incredibly biased “analysis” where everything Obama does is interpreted in the most generous possible light imaginable.
I swear, the power his cult of personality has over you. You’re trying so desperately to justify a double standard, to find some metric that lets you include a type of death in one case and exclude it in the other, because that’s the only way to maintain the illusions you have about Obama.
I finally rediscovered the source of my idea that Obama was better than Bush: This research paper made the circles 10 /+ years ago:
https://www.academia.edu/6515361/Presidents_Body_Counts_The_Twelve_Worst_and_Four_Best_American_Presidents_Based_on_How_Many_Lived_or_Died_Because_of_Their_Actions
Unfortunately, the author does not seem to cover where he’s getting the numbers for Bush Sr. We do know from his section on Obama’s drone strikes (quite interesting btw, you should read it), that he is only counting those killed by the drone strikes themselves, and not counting anything that came from the ground occupation. Meanwhile, his number of 52,000 “direct” deaths from Bush Sr.'s air campaign is unsourced and conflicts with other, more established sources, like the Project for Defense Alternatives numbers.
This is one guy who’s an assistant professor at a community college. I’m not going to treat his numbers as absolute when I have no idea where he got them from. If we are going to treat his word as authoritative, you should know that he also claims that Obama murdered three times as many people as George W. Bush. I don’t agree with that claim either.
He looked at total deaths.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200719070432if_/https://www.ippnw.org/pdf/medact-iraq-2002.pdf
“Iraqi casualty figures are not known, but number at least 30,000. Some estimates are as high as 100,000.” https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/gulf-war
Casualty figures again. Those include wounded.
Military deaths included.
Note that the Project for Defense Alternatives report (cited on Wikipedia) claims 20-26k military deaths and 3,664 civilian. It cites these previous estimates and gives a detailed breakdown of where they may have been in error. I’m no expert, so frankly I don’t know which numbers are more accurate, and I don’t particularly feel like digging through the report to defend an off-hand comment that has already gone on long enough.
I will concede that by some estimates, of some metrics, Obama may have killed fewer people than Bush Sr. The claim of “fewer people than any president in the previous 50 years” is still patently absurd though, as he still killed more than Clinton. And it’s still a hell of a long way from “100 to 1.”
He’s still a war criminal either way.