Pretty straight forward.
I’ll opine that it was never the purpose of the Bush administration and its attendant NeoCon contingent to kill terrorists; their goal was to keep Americans scared and voting Republican, and they needed the bogeymen to be very alive to achieve it.
Iraq was also a major distraction which drew focus and resources away from the hunt for terrorists in Pakistan / Afghanistan. And the methodology used by the Bush administration for finding terrorists was pretty half-assed too, which is why so many innocent people ended up in Gitmo.
Simple, Bush made more of an effort to capture them and extract intelligence. It is much easier to kill them than capture them.
Bush and friends had no interest in doing anything about terrorism, and especially had no desire to do anything about Osama bin Laden. One of Bush’s first acts in office was to tell the state Department to leave bin Laden alone. And even after 9-11 at one point he called off all efforts to catch him until Congress pressured him into doing otherwise.
Obama is more effective for the same reason Clinton was more effective; he’s actually trying. The Democrats in general are more effective, in large part because they actually care to make the effort. Republicans don’t care in the slightest about the welfare of the country or if Americans are killed, so they’re terrible at national security issues (and most everything else.
I imagine it’s because Obama goes out on weekends as O-Dog and hunts down terrorists by himself (Michelle stays home with the kids).
Keep it quiet though.
Is it? How does one measure? Straight body count, or by percentage? Do high-value targets count more? Is there a scoreboard?
Now I’m picturing Obama walking by Batman and muttering “amateur” under his breath.
Or the fact that we have 3 more years of intelligence gathering and a bigger network? There’s a huge number of variables that make the question difficult to define, let alone answer.
I think my question is pretty straight forward.
Either way, I suppose, averaged on a “per year” basis (after 9/11), perhaps.
Yes.
Whatever.
So, give us the numbers. How many terrorists did Obama kill and how many did Bush kill?
Do you think Michelle and the kids ask him to, ‘bring them back something’ before he leaves for his mission? I’m thinking yes.
Obama has also been willing (rightly or wrongly) to go into Pakistan to kill and capture key Al Qaeda figures, something which Bush and McCain (again, rightly or wrongly) did not want to do. Since a lot of these people were hiding in Pakistan, it’s not surprising that Obama is having more success.
The Bush Administration didn’t have much interest in intelligence gathering. They just made things up or tortured the answers they wanted to hear out of people. Having zero interest in objective reality makes intelligence gathering besides the point.
Again, what are the numbers?
And why is it better to kill rather than capture terrorists?
Here is an article listing the senior terrorists that have been killed or captured during Obama’s time in office (I count 22). I’m still looking for a list for the Bush admin.
This is undoubtedly an incomplete list, but from this wikipedia article, approximately 13 “notable” terrorists were targeted and killed during the Bush administration. I’m sure this leaves out several others that were captured, but I can’t find a list so far.
Thanks for looking into the numbers.
But it’s interesting how everyone seems immediately to jump to the conclusion that as long as Obama kills someone, that someone must be a terrorist. Bush captured hundreds of “terrorists” that ended up in Gitmo. Do we get to count them?
Bottom line, I think this numbers game is flawed from the start unless we develop some reliable, independent source of identifying who is and who is not a terrorist.
I think a factual answer could be the drone program, which has expanded dramatically every year and is opening totally new avenues of action on a scale that did not exist before. The military started adopting drones in the mid-90s but the use of them and the number deployed really hit massive growth in the past 5 years. Since 2002 the drone fleet has increased over 13 times what it was in 2002, and much of that has come in the last few years.
While I completely agree with this I don’t think the OP’s premise is correct. Lots of people have died in the last 10 years, both good and bad, from the actions Bush and Obama have set in motion. Who can tell them apart at this point? We are all taking the word of those administrations on who died, how it happened and who is a terrorist.