top | item 45536960

(no title)

mw67 | 4 months ago

Barack Obama is the only two-term President in US history to be at war every day of his Presidency. The only one.

discuss

order

Krssst|4 months ago

The two first wars that come to mind were not started by him though.

rob74|4 months ago

To his credit: he didn't start any of those wars. But yes, I agree that the Nobel prize was unfounded.

crazybonkersai|4 months ago

He surely started Libyan War by bombing the hell out the government forces and creating power vacuum. The war is still ravaging the country to this day

antonymoose|4 months ago

He started a number of color revolutions though out MENA?

And let us not forget his assassination of an American citizen by drone strike for visiting the place of his fathers death, also assassinated by drone strike.

And if we want a “fun fact,” he is the only Nobel Peace winner to bomb and kill another, as commander and chief his forces bombed and killed innocents in a Doctor’s Without Borders outpost in Afghanistan. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike)

wilg|4 months ago

Yeah two unpopular wars he did not start and spent a lot of effort figuring out how to get out of. He ended one and his vice president later ended the other.

cheema33|4 months ago

Did Obama start the Afghanistan war? or the Iraq war?

Yes, he could exit those countries hastily. But that has its own cost. Getting in wars is the easy part. Getting out of one is the hard part. Ask Putin who went into Ukraine on a 3-day limited special military operation.

Bush Jr. got us into multiple wars and unlike his father did not limit the scope of them. His father did get us into a war with Iraq but was smart enough to keep it limited in scope.

Also, under Obama, the "wars" were not real wars like the Russia/Ukraine war where both sides are losing hundreds of people every week. But they were more like peacekeeping operations that occasionally ran into skirmishes.

benjiro|4 months ago

> like the Russia/Ukraine war where both sides are losing hundreds of people every week.

Every week? If we just look at the Russian casualties numbers, its around 1000+ casualties PER DAY.

There was a recent leak of the death toll and the most active area's had a 2/5 dead rate, 1/3 "missing" rate, and the rest was wounded.

If we only count the death + "missing" over the entire front for Russia, its 500+ PER DAY.

Ironically, the Russian->Afghanistan invasion was WAY less deadly then what we see today in Ukraine.

Your point still stands about the US evolvement in Iran/Afghanistan, but darn your numbers really way below the actual body count in the Russian "3-day limited special military operation". Those are numbers from the first year, not the daily of the third year.

grafmax|4 months ago

> more like peacekeeping operations

Peacekeeping is like the UN sending troops in to monitor a ceasefire. These were wars. 35,000+ civilian deaths in Afghanistan. Overthrowing Gaddafi. Tens of thousands of airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Drone strikes killing thousands of civilians in Pakistan. US foreign policy has equated “peace” and “stability” with its own military hegemony, being almost constantly at war to further its hypocritical ideology. It’s been a cash cow for the defense lobby.

JacobThreeThree|4 months ago

Obama was very explicitly promising to get out of the middle east wars.

Of course it's hard, but if that's true, then why is he making those promises, or worse, why is he being given a peace award based on those promises?

rob74|4 months ago

If you ask me, Putin is welcome to end the Ukraine war at any time he wants! Getting out of a war is actually easy if you don't care what happens after that, e.g. in the case of Afghanistan accept as "sunk costs" the billions of dollars and thousands of lives that were lost during the 20 years that NATO was involved there.

rzzzwilson|4 months ago

Depends what you mean by "be at war". For example, the Russo-Ukraine war has been going since February 2014. Through both Trump presidencies.