The Recent History of Bombing the Shit Out of ’Em

At a campaign rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Donald Trump, speaking of the Islamic State, once told supporters, “I would bomb the shit out of ’em. I would just bomb those suckers.” During Trump’s nascent tenure as Commander-in-Chief, air strikes conducted by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and Syria have increased. So have civilian casualties: coalition strikes killed more civilians in March than in any other month since our mostly aerial war against the Islamic State began, in late 2014. Last Thursday, the U.S. military also acknowledged that a strike had mistakenly killed eighteen of our local allies in Syria. The victims belonged to the Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., a coalition of Arab and Kurdish fighters that partners closely with U.S. Special Operations Forces and has been preparing for months to attack the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa. The incident was widely presented as evidence that President Trump is following through on the promise he made in Fort Dodge, as well as an illustration of the perils attending such a strategy. An article on the front page of the Times the next day said that the blunder raised “concerns about whether the White House is applying any rigor to the process of approving airstrikes,” and a front-page article in the Washington Post called it “the worst friendly-fire incident of the war against the Islamic State.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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