Acceptance of collateral damage is a well-established principle in international law.

If there’s a military purpose proportional to the damage inflicted. Bombing a wedding because a few attendants are enemy combatants is not that.

it would be extremely difficult to make any serious argument that the drone strikes were exceptionally careless about collateral damage relative to the military gain by current standards and thus constitute a war crime.

That would simply mean only some were war crimes compared to a majority that were legal. Even if you’re hitting one wedding for every nine enemy training camps, that one wedding is still a war crime. Also, I’d like to point out that the CIA is literally on record claiming international law is inapplicable to their drone strikes (back when they were still done by the CIA). Those are not the words of people not committing war crimes.

The CIA’s general counsel, Stephen Preston, in a speech entitled “CIA and the Rule of Law” at Harvard Law School on 10 April 2012, claimed the agency was not bound by the laws of war

Selling weapons is not a war crime.

Which is not the only thing America was doing under Obama.

This support involves aerial refueling, which allows coalition aircraft to spend more time over Yemen, and allowing some coalition members to home base aircraft instead of transferring them to Saudi Arabia

In October 2016, Reuters obtained documents under the Freedom of Information Act showing officials had warned that the United States could be implicated in war crimes for its support of Saudi Arabia’s intervention.

According to a March 2016 Human Rights Watch assessment, the U.S. involvement in certain military actions, including as target selection and aerial refueling during Saudi air raids “may make US forces jointly responsible for laws-of-war violations by coalition forces”.

-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Saudi_Arabian–led_operations_in_Yemen

Sounds real war crime-y to me.

You mean… trying to close it, restoring the standards to that of an ordinary prison instead of a torture camp, and releasing the vast majority of the prisoners when Congress refused to let him close it?

Obama did a lot to improve the conditions at Guantanamo bay, but still:

The report stated the United States violated international law, particularly the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, that the Bush Administration could not try such prisoners as enemy combatants in a military tribunal and could not deny them access to the evidence used against them.

-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp#International_law

This is one thing Obama didn’t change to my knowledge. See also:

In March 2009, the administration announced that it would no longer refer to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as enemy combatants, but it also asserted that the president had the authority to detain terrorism suspects there without criminal charges.

-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Barack_Obama#Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

This one is on the light end to be fair, but still a war crime.

If you think the president, and for that matter one of the least pro-Israel presidents since I’ve been alive could have easily “just done more” to prevent Israeli war crimes, you’re out of your gourd.

I mean, Reagan did it, literally with a phone call. US presidents can “just do more” to prevent Israeli war crimes that they fund, arm and protect. Also least pro-Israel in what way? The only instance of him going against Israel that I know of is JCPOA, which does nothing to absolve him of Israel’s war crimes in Palestine.

Fuck yeah!

The flimsy excuse is that the war is over so Afghanistan is “safe” now. The real reason is of course racism and xenophobia.

These countries have to realize the long-term side effects here.

What long-term side effects? Will they affect the ruling class?

I see what you mean then, but nobody’s gonna buy that. China certainly won’t. Also most Han Taiwanese people have nothing to do with the Kuomintang, with Han migration going in since the 13th century, so the line of who is a native and who isn’t is much blurrier than it sounds.

That’d require the left to gasp upset neoliberals, which would jeopardize the two sides’ Stockholm Syndrome-fueled abusive relationship. You can probably guess who the abusive side is.

You have that much faith in Americans? Because I sure as hell don’t.

Israel’s current public-facing goal is to indefinitely occupy Gaza, and their real goal is genocide, so Hamas surrendering would simply mean fewer people lobbing IEDs at Israel while they murder and displace Gazans. Israeli ethnic cleansing created Hamas, not the other way around.

You answer that. Who are “they” and why should they be considered refugees?

and stay there with refugee status

Uh… that’s not what refugee means.

Cope.

Every other major accusation I’ve seen stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of ‘war crime’ as ‘anything that’s bad’.

Okay let’s see:

• Everything about the drone strikes other than double-tapping. See: all those weddings he bombed.

• Supporting Saudi Arabia’s war crime-riddled intervention in Yemen.

• Everything to do with Guantanamo bay.

• Everything to do with Israel.

You replied to me in another comment asking how Obama was a step towards fascism, so consider this a response to that too.

In what way did you want him to ‘end’ the ‘War on Terror’, itself an immensely nebulous term for a broad range of foreign policy issues regarding non-state actors?

Stop fighting and bombing people in the Middle East for the sake of American imperialist ambitions, undo authoritarian post-9/11 legislation (see: ICE), return American society and politics to normalcy and not contribute to the expansion of executive power.

Perhaps nonintervention against ISIS? Or giving Afghanistan over to the Taliban ten years ahead of time?

Anti-ISIS intervention is more complicated, not the least because it started more than two full years after the death of Bin Laden, but Afghanistan? Absolutely, unequivocally yes. Afghanistan was never America’s to “give over” to anyone.

What ‘golden opportunity’ did he have?

Again, the death of Bin Laden. There was absolutely no reason for the war in Afghanistan to turn into an anti-Taliban crusade; he absolutely could and should have said “our job here is done” and left. Not doing so, alongside his expansion of the war on terror into new fronts, protected fascism in America from what should’ve been a leftward swing following Bush’s presidency.

Obama was an insufficient solution to America’s post-Bush problems. But the urge to counter the hagiography of some liberals about Obama with a broad-spectrum condemnation of the Obama’s administration’s policies is not really a reasonable response.

Insufficient is an understatement. American fascism (what will go on to become MAGA) grew through two main vectors: war and economic uncertainty. Obama did basically nothing to address the former and only took halfhearted measures to address the latter. He did some good things, but in the face of what he paved the way for, his accomplishments are about as important as whatever Hindenburg was up to before appointing Hitler as chancellor.

You might be small c conservative, but there’s no time period where you’d be capital C Conservative; those guys have always been defending and furthering at least one abhorrent system or institution. Monarchy, slavery, segregation, neoliberalism, you name it.

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The government can “lose” all the money they want; it’s the people’s tax money going down the drain. Tyranny needs to be stopped in the streets.

I think you’ll find that labor movements function better without government crackdowns.

Young people are becoming more right-leaning, but they still trend left/“left” IIRC. This shouldn’t be a boon to Farage, though it also won’t hurt him nearly as much as it would even a few years ago.

I mean, Obama did shit his pants, hard. He did do some good things, but he failed the test given to him by history same as Biden by not ending the War on Terror after the death of Bin Laden. America was going to have to reckon with the rot at the heart of its society sooner or later, but that rot was rapidly metastatizing fast through the War on Terror, and Obama had a golden opportunity to stop that but he didn’t. Compared to this one gigantic failure, all his successes (and most of his other failures) are footnotes. I view him the same as Biden: Someone who would’ve been a good or good-ish president in saner times, but who was woefully inadequate for the hour. The consequences of his failure weren’t as immediate as Biden’s so it’s harder to notice, but Obama shitting his pants is why we’re living through Trump 2 right now.

Youre right in that war crimes are a constant in american history, but America desperately needed Obama to be the peace president he’d said he’d be.

Well I’m not American so voting for anyone would’ve been a pretty egregious case of election fraud, but why so?

Maybe that’s true, but even so that’s no excuse to glorify him. Obama was a step towards, not away from, fascism, and a decisive one at that.