Trump has chosen to continue all 7 of the wars started under Bush and Obama
Trump has chosen to continue all 7 of the wars started under Bush and Obama
Trump took the easy road and wasted no time adding his name to the long list of bipartisan warmongers.
When he left office in January 2009, George W. Bush passed on two wars to his successor, Barack Obama: a US military occupation in Iraq, and another one in Afghanistan. When Obama departed the White House in January 2017, his successor, Donald J. Trump, inherited seven wars: a US military occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, aerial drone campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and two ground wars in Libya and Syria.
Trump, riding into office on a wave of empty promises to "drain the swamp" and make America great again, squandered a rare opportunity afforded to a very select number of humans in this country. He could have opted to end the wars. He could have ordered US troops home from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. He could have grounded Obama's blood-soaked fleet of robotic planes. He could have focused on his core campaign pledge of fixing US domestic issues.
Instead, Trump took the easy road and wasted no time adding his name to the long list of bipartisan warmongers.
One of his first acts in office? Personally authorizing a US raid in Yemen targeting "computer materials" containing possible future terror plots. And when all was said and done, a school, health facility, and mosque were damaged, and eight women, seven children, were dead.
Among these casualties was 8-year-old Nora al-Awlaki, who took a bullet to the neck and lasted a grueling two hours before she finally bled out and died. Her 16-year-old brother, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and his father, Anwar, were also both killed in separate US drone strikes back in 2011 under the Obama administration. All three were US citizens, and only the father was ever accused - never tried and convicted in any US court - of terrorism.
Not only did Trump immediately sign off on Obama's policy of executing US citizens without trial within his first month in office, but he has also continued Obama's drone war in Yemen. By the end of 2017, aerial strikes inside the country were up by 21 from the previous year, standing at 131. Shifting in 2018, the Trump administration bolstered funding and weapons to the oppressive dictatorship of Saudi Arabia to allow them to do more of the dirty work in Yemen.
In other parts of the world, Trump hasn't been shy about maintaining the wars started under Bush and Obama and selling his soul to the military-industrial complex.
In Pakistan, drone strikes continued, even if sporadically. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism counted five US attacks inside the country as of 2017, and at least one drone strike as of mid-2018.
Elsewhere, such as in Africa, Trump has continued to uphold at least two conflicts initiated by his predecessor.
In Somalia, for example, the Trump administration doubled the number of US airstrikes in 2017 compared to those seen during 2016, while also increasing the Obama-era number of US forces there, bringing the total to 500. At least five attacks by the US inside Somalia killed or injured 50 civilians in 2017.
And in Libya, home of Africa's largest proven oil reserves, Trump has also maintained a US presence following Obama's bloody overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. September 2017 saw Trump's first airstrike in Libya, but certainly not his last. By March 2018, Trump had launched eight confirmed airstrikes inside Libya, while US special forces still maintain a small but significant presence in the country.
Aside from relatively small US military campaigns in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya, the Trump administration has also continued to uphold three of the more widespread and arguably most destructive wars from the Bush and Obama years: the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and America's direct involvement in both stirring up and drawing out the "civil war" in Syria.
Starting with Afghanistan, let's take a momentary trip back to November 21, 2013, when then-reality TV star Donald J. Trump loaded up his Twitter account to type the following:
"Do not allow our very stupid leaders to sign a deal that keeps us in Afghanistan through 2024-with all costs by U.S.A. MAKE AMERICA GREAT!"
Hours later, he sent out another tweet:
Roughly 3.5 years later, he was president. And with that title came the longstanding tradition of American presidents to backpedal on anti-war rhetoric and fold to the military-industrial complex.
"My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like to follow my instincts," Trump told a crowd in August 2017 at the Fort Myer military base in Arlington, Virginia. "I heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk of the Oval Office."
By September of that year, the US military under Trump had launched 751 airstrikes in Afghanistan, the highest total for any month in seven years of military action in the country. Two months later, Trump had followed in the footsteps of Barack Obama by ordering his own "surge" of US troops into the mineral-rich country, bringing the total number to 17,000 US soldiers.
And then there's the US war in Iraq.
"Obviously the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake," Trump said in February 2016. "We should have never been in Iraq. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew that there were none."
Still, Trump has done next to nothing to get the US out of Iraq, despite being fully knowledgeable that the invasion was based on pure deception.
Twenty-one US military service members have been killed in Iraq since 2014, while Iraqi civilians, on the other hand, have paid a much higher price. Aside from the hundreds of thousands - possibly more than a million - slaughtered during the Bush years, the US acknowledges that it has killed at least 801 civilians in Iraq (and Syria) since the campaign against ISIS (a terror group largely generated by US intervention in the country) began in 2014. Organizations independent from the US with less of an incentive to hide what is likely a higher body count, such as London-based Airwars, insist the toll is much larger, at about 5,975 as of December 2017.
And though there has been chatter within the Trump administration about a possible withdrawal from Iraq, evidence for such a claim is severely lacking.
US commanders on the ground in Iraq, for example, have been very adamant about the US remaining there. "This is a significant win," a senior military official told Defense One. "We should be careful about rushing to the exit ... and inadvertently giving something away that was difficult to win and then not placing enough value in it, as we seek the next thing - whatever that is."
Trump's cabinet picks also offer little hope for the US to leave Iraq, with the most blatant example of this being his selection of proud neoconservative warhawk John Bolton, a truly pathetic shell of a man who still has no regrets about supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Lastly, we have the US war in Syria.
Though US involvement in Syria began under Obama, at first with the US funneling weapons to al-Qaeda linked "rebel" groups, and later with the Obama administration sending in troops and launching airstrikes, Trump has been anything but modest about his intentions to continue intervening in the war-torn country.
Shortly after taking office, Trump launched 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria, according to CNBC. These strikes came after Bashar al-Assad's near-victory over the US-backed rebel groups plaguing Syria with years of terrorism, justified by the US under evidence-free accusations that the Syrian government decided to use chemical weapons, despite having no actual reason or motive to do so.
In 2017, civilian deaths in Syria rose by 215%, and the coalition, almost all US planes, dropped 20,000 bombs on Raqqa. By the end of the five-month campaign, 80% of the city was declared uninhabitable by the UN.
Additionally, the US openly utilized white phosphorus in both Iraq and in Syria, a munition used as a smoke screen, for signaling and marking, and/or as an incendiary weapon. Though it sounds benign, upon contact with civilians, white phosphorus is nothing short of hellish nightmare. As reported by Human Rights Watch, "On contact, white phosphorus can burn people, thermally and chemically, down to the bone as it is highly soluble in fat, and therefore in human flesh. White phosphorus fragments can exacerbate wounds even after treatment and can enter the bloodstream and cause multiple organ failure. Already dressed wounds can reignite when dressings are removed and they are re-exposed to oxygen. Even relatively minor burns are often fatal."
To recap, we started with two wars under George W. Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan. That went from two wars to seven wars under Obama. And now, under Trump, all seven of those wars are not only shaping up to be fully continued, but more wars may even be added to the list before he leaves office.
Trump fulfilled one of his worst campaign pledges and carried out destroying peace talks with Iran over their nuclear program - not to be confused with their nuclear weapons program - which exists only in the wet dreams of Democratic and Republican warhawks.
It was also recently reported that Trump eagerly pushed for a US invasion of oil-rich Venezuela in 2017 before finally being talked out of it. "We're all over the world and we have troops all over the world in places that are very, very far away, Venezuela is not very far away and the people are suffering and dying," he was quoted as saying. "We have many options for Venezuela including a possible military option if necessary."
Regardless, while we might not know which country Trump will target next, it has become apparent that at least the seven wars he inherited from Bush and Obama are set to be continued not only to the detriment of US taxpayers, but also to the rest of the world on the receiving end of an overblown military empire now overseen by an asinine reality television show host.