Everyone take a deep breath and calm down. For weeks now, every newspaper and news channel is full of the latest sins of the Great Satan, Donald Trump. He's the instant bogeyman, suddenly emerging from the fiery pit, leaving the commentariat all aquiver in fear and trepidation.
On Sunday, for example, one columnist was agonising over his next move, fearing he was on the cusp of "targetting and killing possibly innocent families of terrorists." A terrible thought for sure. But hardly some new and dastardly awfulness invented by President Trump.
His now saintly predecessor, Barack Obama, did not just contemplate such tactics. For eight years he employed remote controlled drone gunships to hunt down suspected terrorists, blasting away at homes, villages, wedding and funeral processions and anyone unlucky enough to be in their way, across a huge swathe of the Islamic crescent, from Pakistan to Somalia. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported last month of 546 confirmed drone strikes against suspected terrorists in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan under Obama. It calculated that between 384 and 807 civilians died in these attacks.
Obama inherited this instrument of state terror from George W. Bush, and took to it with alacrity, ordering ten times as many raids as his Republican predecessor. Bush didn't invent the destruction of "terrorists'" homes any more than Obama. Reading, over the holiday break, a history of the fall of the Ottoman Empire which sparked the past century of Middle East catastrophe, I learned how the British got home destruction down to a fine art in Palestine in the 1930s. A practice which the Israelis continued.
Trump may be the Great Satan, and New Zealanders might well end up being grateful that, as the president pointed out to Prime Minister Bill English in his recent phone call, "we are a long way away so ... aren't under the same pressures as everyone else." But if he is, he's not the first to emerge from the United States.
