At Last, I Am Speechless

In the interview, with New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, Obama expressed agreement with one of the most salient critiques of his drone war, that it risks creating “institutional comfort and inertia with what looks like a pretty antiseptic way of disposing of enemies.”

Obama explained that he had looked at “the way in which the number of drone strikes was going up and the routineness with which, early in my presidency, you were seeing both DOD and CIA and our intelligence teams think about this.”

He continued: “And it troubled me, because I think you could see, over the horizon, a situation in which, without Congress showing much interest in restraining actions with authorizations that were written really broadly, you end up with a president who can carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate.”

  The Intercept

The emphasis is mine.

He can't really be this self-unaware, can he?

"People, I think, don’t always recognize the degree to which the civilian-casualty rate, or the rate at which innocents are killed, in these precision strikes is significantly lower than what happens in a conventional war.”

Okay, maybe I'm not speechless.  JFC!! WTF?!

No. No. And, NO. That is impossible, since a "conventional" war is one in which armies fight each other on battlefields. Civilians in "conventional" wars tend to be war spoils, not targets., with the exception of the nuclear bombs dropped on whole Japanese cities, and I will argue that that was not "conventional" warfare.  And remind that it was American bombs.  American distruction.  American war crimes in the extreme.

In 2013, [...] research by Larry Lewis, a former research scientist at the Center for Naval Analysis, found that drone strikes in Afghanistan were 10 times more likely to kill civilians than piloted airstrikes.

Obama’s critique of Congress — that it doesn’t seem to care enough to rein in the drone program — is both on point and ironic, coming from him. Far from encouraging Congress to weigh in, the Obama administration has actively fought Congress’s attempts to even get basic information about drone strikes.

[...]

He told New York magazine that the country still needs to find a balance between “not elevating every terrorist attack into a full-blown war” and “pretending as if we can just take shots wherever we want, whenever we want, and not be answerable to anybody."

Once he's gone, you see.

Jesus wept.