Yes, shocking news reported by The Week’s Ryan Cooper: Joe Biden is a good guy! Who’s all but halted the “blind man’s bluff” approach to targeting “bad guys” and anyone standing next to them initiated by President Barack Obama and heavily juiced by his successor, Donald Trump.
Cooper explains how the supposedly fool-proof mechanisms developed under President Obama for killing terrorists by remote control simply resulted in a slaughter of the innocents that was as random as it was ineffective, a sort of mindless brutality that was only amplified when it was placed in the hands of a fool, aka Donald Trump. According to Cooper (with links to corroborate his assertions):
To my considerable surprise, Biden seems to have internalized some of these lessons [that random murder leads to non-random disaster]. Immediately after taking office, he set up a new system requiring White House approval for any strikes outside of active war zones (and later published Trump's loose rules that enabled so many civilian massacres). Now that the occupation of Afghanistan is over, that requirement applies almost everywhere, and it appears Biden is extremely reluctant to grant approval. Where Trump oversaw more than 1,600 air and artillery strikes in Iraq and Syria during his first 11 months in office, Airwars reports just four during Biden's term so far. Strikes in Somalia fell from roughly 75 last year to fewer than 10 this year, with no civilian casualties. And in Yemen, the annual total dropped from about 18 to maybe four, with fewer than 10 casualties of any kind. (Precise figures are unclear because some strikes are classified.)
Congratulations to Ryan for passing on this piece of shockingly good news, and double congrats to Joe for daring both to end the war in Afghanistan and to shut down our trigger-happy drone warriors. Of course, judging from the mood of the Republican Party for the past, you know, 35 years, Joe may wish people didn’t know what a humanitarian he is. It’s bound to be used against him. I mean, what kind of a country are we when we aren’t killing people whenever we damn well feel like it?
