Other thing that is massively underreported on much bigger scale than actual air strikes are civilian casualties. Presumably so that Americans, or Russians or whoever of the other N countries that bomb people regularly can justify killing thousands of civilians in middle east a year by mistake. It is not a mistake though, it's a calculated acceptable collateral murder where the government determines some acceptable ratio of civcas vs combatant deaths and goes with that. Of course, now if civcas are underreported by the order of magnitude, ...
Other thing to ponder is that US claims it killed around 50 000 terrorists in the last two years. Think about that. Those are supposed to be people who are said to be threat to US citizens or allies and therefore are OK to be killed by USG even at the cost of killing bystanders. Americans should start asking themselves who are these people they are supporting the murder of. Don't stop at the terrorist label.
Humanizing "them" might not be fun though, because you'll inevitably run into your propagandized fellow citizens, and start feeling decidedly not good about their capacity for empathy or nuance in understanding the world.
The war on terrorism is so bloody pointless -- the military has achieved exactly nothing since 9/11. All I could think about the day after 9/11 was the hundreds of thousands (now millions!) of innocent people which had nothing to do with that attack that were going to be killed for no reason ...
It's ironic that the largest part of the us government which has also produced the worst results, gets a free pass from the anti-big-government crowd...
I would love for a politician to talk about the war on terror as a failure as big as the war in Vietnam and to start finally talking about ending it ...
Don't forget that as far as body counts go, the USG defines "terrorists" as any male appearing to be of military age. There is no such thing as a dead civilian male in a strike zone.
There are many maps of terrorist attacks, shared on Facebook and so on. I just wish they started including terror attacks from US. Just to see the ratio.
PS: I actually wish the International Haye Court would start an investigation on a US president on drone strikes. Not sure he's guilty, but the suspicion might finally raise ears in normal citizen.
https://airwars.org/
Other thing to ponder is that US claims it killed around 50 000 terrorists in the last two years. Think about that. Those are supposed to be people who are said to be threat to US citizens or allies and therefore are OK to be killed by USG even at the cost of killing bystanders. Americans should start asking themselves who are these people they are supporting the murder of. Don't stop at the terrorist label.
Humanizing "them" might not be fun though, because you'll inevitably run into your propagandized fellow citizens, and start feeling decidedly not good about their capacity for empathy or nuance in understanding the world.