this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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If you ignore it was 8 years vs 4.
And we're still have the "During the nationwide uprisings against the Ba'athist Iraqi government that directly followed the end of the Gulf War in March and April, an estimated 25,000 to 100,000 Iraqis were killed, overwhelmingly civilians.[253]"
That's direct death, not the lack of food/medicine mentioned kn the next paragraph: "A Harvard University study released in June 1991 predicted that there would be tens of thousands of additional Iraqi civilian deaths by the end of"
So ignoring the indirect death there's still 25k direct death added to the bombing deaths.
One is higher than the other.
So there is no difference between Guilani and Mamdani because both have deaths from police action under their leadership? 1 or 100 is the same?
We seem to have vastly different understandings of what the word "direct" means. When I (or any reasonable person) talk about direct deaths, I mean people who were, uh, directly killed by US forces. As in, directly by the bullets and bombs they employ. That's the standard you're using for Obama. If the actions of US forces lead to uprisings, and those uprisings resulted in deaths, that is the very definition of what anyone would call "indirect." I mean, how many of the deaths included in those numbers were from government forces suppressing the uprisings? Are you really trying to include people Saddam Hussein killed as "direct" deaths from Bush? This is completely ridiculous.
You're just twisting definitions around because the actual facts don't line up with your narrative. If you want to include indirect deaths, then let's include indirect deaths when it comes to Obama. You have not presented any figure or estimate for that at all, so we have nothing at all to compare the 100k number to.
No, that's literally what this entire conversation has been about. The problem is that in the case of Obama vs Bush Sr, it is not "1 to 100," the actual number of deaths is roughly equivalent. It's only "1 to 100" according to your completely baseless, incredibly biased "analysis" where everything Obama does is interpreted in the most generous possible light imaginable.
I swear, the power his cult of personality has over you. You're trying so desperately to justify a double standard, to find some metric that lets you include a type of death in one case and exclude it in the other, because that's the only way to maintain the illusions you have about Obama.
I finally rediscovered the source of my idea that Obama was better than Bush: This research paper made the circles 10 /+ years ago:
https://www.academia.edu/6515361/Presidents_Body_Counts_The_Twelve_Worst_and_Four_Best_American_Presidents_Based_on_How_Many_Lived_or_Died_Because_of_Their_Actions
Unfortunately, the author does not seem to cover where he's getting the numbers for Bush Sr. We do know from his section on Obama's drone strikes (quite interesting btw, you should read it), that he is only counting those killed by the drone strikes themselves, and not counting anything that came from the ground occupation. Meanwhile, his number of 52,000 "direct" deaths from Bush Sr.'s air campaign is unsourced and conflicts with other, more established sources, like the Project for Defense Alternatives numbers.
This is one guy who's an assistant professor at a community college. I'm not going to treat his numbers as absolute when I have no idea where he got them from. If we are going to treat his word as authoritative, you should know that he also claims that Obama murdered three times as many people as George W. Bush. I don't agree with that claim either.