Over the last four years, several prominent talking heads have pushed an irritating narrative that is a lethal mix of misinformation, bad math, and relied on closing your eyes and ears to believe it true.
I’m not wild about using random Reddit comments as a credible source, but this is well-cited, and hopefully a good resource for anyone to dispel one of the cringiest myths to come out of this fiasco.
“The myth that Trump is ending the wars. Trump expanded and deepened the War on Terror and made it deadlier. Civilian deaths in U.S. wars skyrocketed under Trump.
Far from ending the wars, strikes in somalia tripled under Trump in 2017-2019 and in the first seven months of 2020, the Trump administration conducted more air strikes in Somalia than were carried out during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, combined.
US warplanes dropped a record number of bombs on Afghanistan last year, a nearly eightfold increase under Trump, the most since Pentagon began keeping track.
In Yemen, the Trump administration carried out 176 strikes in its first two years, compared with 154 during all eight years of the Obama administration. More than 85,000 children under the age of five have died as a result of the famine in 2016-2018 alone, caused by the Saudi Blockade and the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led bombing. UNICEF described Yemen as “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world”, over 24 million people, are in need of humanitarian assistance. The US gives the Saudi-led coalition logistic support, Saudi Arabia’s military is using U.S. intelligence and weapons to bomb the country. Last year Trump decided to continue America’s complicity in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis by vetoing the Yemen War Powers resolution.
The Pentagon has said at least 1,257 civilians were killed in drone strikes in Iraq and Syria from 2017 through 2019. But Airwars, a British drone monitoring group, insists the number is at least 7,500 civilians. The Obama administration said it killed 64 to 116 civilians during its eight years. But the Bureau of Investigative Journalism says that “noncombatant” casualties range from 380 to 801.
All of this is just the tip of the iceberg that we know because Trump reversed Obama-era policy requiring US to report on civilian casualties in drone strikes.
Trump is not ending wars, but preparing for more war. The president has increased the U.S. military presence in the Middle East. His rhetoric does not match the reality of U.S. forces deployed across the Middle East today.
Edit: Trumps “peace deals”: Israel, UAE and Bahrain were no enemies quite the opposite, they have the same interest in the region and they had covert ties based on an alliance against the “common threat” of Iran. There were the international cables that showed that they get along really well in the back channel and the public animosity in all politics. Secret contacts between the countries were routine since the mid-1990s – they were all recorded in the US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. Leaked cables also showed that Israel instructed Israeli diplomats to back the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen, and to back Saudi Arabia in the Iran–Saudi Arabia proxy conflict. All of this inflated rhetoric about Trumps “peace deals” is designed to conceal the reality that the sordid deals were only part of US efforts to solidify an anti-Iranian axis for a potentially world catastrophic war. The deals formalize what were already existing and barely concealed commercial, governmental and military ties between the dictatorial Sunni Arab monarchies and Israel.”