this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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The chart clearly shows 80k in 2016?
Also worth noting that this only counts civilian casualties. Fun fact, under Obama, the US counted any "military-aged male" killed in a drone strike as an "enemy combatant" under the logic that if they were standing underneath a drone they must have been up to something. Looks like these numbers are from the UN so probably more reliable. But the numbers of 100-200k for Bush Sr. I believe were total causalities.
No.
The chart has total in red and yearly in orange.
Yes, and the total shows 80k in 2016.
I don't know why it doesn't add up.
Doing the math year by year from UN data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war_in_Afghanistan_(2001-2021)
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) recorded 2,412 Afghan civilian deaths in the American-led war in 2009 The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) recorded 2,777 Afghan civilian deaths in the American-led war in 2010 For the whole year of 2011, the United Nations reported that the civilian death toll numbered 3,021, a record high. In addition, 4,507 Afghans were wounded A 2012 report by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan noted that the number of Afghan civilians killed or injured in 2012 decreased for the first time since the United Nations began keeping track of such figures.[64] 2,769 civilian deaths (2013) The UN recorded 2,969 civilian deaths 2014 Overall, according to the UN, 3,710 civilians were killed 2015 The UN estimates that 3,545 civilians were killed 2016 The UN estimates that in 2016 3,498 civilians were killed
2412+2777+3021+4507+2769+2969+3710+3545+3498 = 29208.
One is casualties and the other is deaths. "Casualties" includes wounded.
Note that:
You are adding wounded to Obama but not Bush Sr to make Obama look worse. That's exactly the problem I described at the start.
Including wounded Obama is still less than the 100,000-200,000 killed by Bush Sr.
I swear, every time I demonstrate good faith, people accuse me of acting in bad faith. You provided casualty numbers and expressed confusion as to why they didn't line up with death numbers, I figured out and explained the confusion, even though it was favorable to your position, and now you say I'm trying to be deceptive. You provided those numbers, you interpreted them that way, tbh I also forgot that distinction until you pointed out the difference, don't come at me with "you're adding wounded to Obama's numbers to make him look worse" when you're the one who provided those numbers.
There's one other problem with the comparison you're making. You're looking at confirmed civilian casualties in Afghanistan, but total deaths in the Gulf War. Personally, I believe both wars were unjustified so total dead is the more relevant number, but we can also compare civilian casualties, just so long as we're looking at the same statistic in both cases.
Because we were talking about deaths, I used a small number and you then added wounded as a rebuttal instead of agreeing that Obama didn't kill as many. No matter how much data I show, you keep trying to make Obama worse than Bush.
No I'm not. https://www.forcesnews.com/news/remembering-gulf-war-key-facts-figures
I didn't add wounded as a rebuttal, you added wounded when you linked stats of total casualties, and I corrected your mistake. My only fault in that misunderstanding is that I didn't catch your mistake right away.
I literally just corrected your mistake by pointing out that you were overestimating the number of confirmed civilian deaths under Obama by including all casualties, so no, I am not twisting numbers around to make him look bad, I'm just trying to make sure that we're comparing the same stats and interpreting them correctly. Where I come from, that's called "responsible fact checking."
You're looking at confirmed cases in one case and estimated cases in the other. You can find a breakdown of that estimate on Wikipedia, where the vast majority of those numbers come from the uprisings and the aftereffects of things like destroying power plants.
Look, I don't care which figure you want to compare. Casualties, deaths, civilian deaths, confirmed civilian deaths, direct or indirect, but you have to use the same figure in both cases.
No, you said "military not civilian" without even checking. Once I showed it was civilian you then say "but estimated" The content of the wikipedia link I provided earlier is titled "Aggregation of estimates".
You can't stop looking for a way to make Bush look better than Obama. You won't even read links or research before writing anything to make Obama look worse.
By any measure Obama was less. I've shown it with sources. If you think Bush was better than Obama, show your sources.
Bro. I have looked at every single source you have provided. I wouldn't have been able to explain the discrepancy you were confused about if I hadn't.
No, you absolutely have not. Where did you cite, for instance, direct civilian casualties in the Gulf War? Objectively, you have not. You only say "by any metric" because you're playing fast and loose with the metrics, comparing stats of different things. I'm not asking for "by any metric," I'm asking for one metric. Whichever you choose! But it has to be the same for both.
You made the claim (the original claim was ("less than any president in 50 years," and we haven't even touched Clinton or any other presidents), so the burden of proof is on you. I'm not positively asserting that Obama caused more deaths than Bush Sr, I just found that claim questionable and was curious where you got it from.
If you leave it to me, I'll compare total deaths. Based on the sources you've provided, the total death toll of Afghanistan was probably about twice that of the Gulf War, and roughly half of Afghanistan happened under Obama. I don't have stats that break down the number of total deaths by president, so I don't know for sure, but it's close enough to be dubious.
You said I used military when the link said civilian. You said, "But Bush is estimated." when the Obama link also said estimated.
We only have estimates for both.
Which I provided yet you continue to fight.
That isn't true based on reported estimates.
Estimated 29k under Obama is not roughly equal to estimated 100k under Bush Sr.
I can't tell if you're confused or lying at this point. That 29k figure is direct deaths while the 100k figure includes indirect deaths, from things like losing power or access to medicine.
Again, I don't care if you want to include indirect deaths or not. What I do care about is if you arbitrarily include or exclude them in order to try to prove bullshit.
You keep imagining excuses to make Obama as bad as Bush:
100k isn't indirect. It is direct violent death.
"Population-based studies produce estimates of the number of Iraq War casualties ranging from 151,000 violent deaths as of June 2006"
"The Iraq Body Count project documents 186,901–210,296 violent civilian deaths in their table."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
Come on, now you're not even talking about the right war. We were talking about the Gulf War under Bush Sr, not the Iraq War which started under Bush Jr. (can't wait to hear how this is "another source I won't listen to"). What does the article on the Gulf War say?
The number of direct, confirmed civilian casualties by US forces in the air campaign was in the thousands, nowhere near 100k. However, many more civilians died due to the damage to infrastructure or in the uprisings that the bombing campaign encouraged.
In other words, the 100k figure includes indirect deaths. This isn't me twisting numbers around somehow, this is simply what the article says.
You are right, I referenced the wrong source. I'm remembering the links from 15years ago when I had this argument with conservatives on Reddit who were pushing the idea that Obama was the worst president ever.
You cannot take a Harvard study about predicted deaths from lack of medical care and then say that reported civilian deaths from war were from indirect.
If you are going with direct civilian killings from Obama then you use the column labeled "Civilians killed as a result of U.S.-led military actions" from the earlier link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war_in_Afghanistan_(2001-2021)
For example: "The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) attributed 596 Afghan civilian deaths as having been caused by international-led military forces in 2009, representing about a quarter of the 2,412 Afghan civilian deaths it recorded as having been caused by the war in 2009."
I was including indirect for Obama.
Which is not what I'm saying. I'm only saying that he's the same as the rest. A capitalist warmongerer with a smile who says nice things and acts with decorum, a kinder, gentler machine gun hand.
Also I'd be a little surprised if conservatives actually cared about how many Afghan civilians were killed.
Yes I can? Predicted deaths from lack of medical care are indirect deaths. That's what indirect means.
By all means. However the article only breaks down the stats that way through 2011. 596 + 440 + 207 gives us 1,244. If we assume a constant rate, then we can divide that by 3 to get the average per year and multiply by 8 for his whole term. That gives us an estimate of 3,317. As compared to the 2,300-3,364 direct, confirmed deaths from the US during the Gulf War.
And so finally we have one concrete metric we can compare the two on, and the conclusion is that they're roughly the same. Ofc, those numbers are both very low because of the metric we're using:
Both wars were wars of aggression, wars of choice, that could have been stopped with the stroke of a pen by the president and only the president, so I hold them each responsible for the total number of excess deaths, civilian or military, direct or indirect, Afghan/Iraqi or US. The total death toll for each is well over 100k.
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.
He looked at total deaths.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200719070432if_/https://www.ippnw.org/pdf/medact-iraq-2002.pdf
"Iraqi casualty figures are not known, but number at least 30,000. Some estimates are as high as 100,000." https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/gulf-war
Casualty figures again. Those include wounded.
Military deaths included.
Note that the Project for Defense Alternatives report (cited on Wikipedia) claims 20-26k military deaths and 3,664 civilian. It cites these previous estimates and gives a detailed breakdown of where they may have been in error. I'm no expert, so frankly I don't know which numbers are more accurate, and I don't particularly feel like digging through the report to defend an off-hand comment that has already gone on long enough.
I will concede that by some estimates, of some metrics, Obama may have killed fewer people than Bush Sr. The claim of "fewer people than any president in the previous 50 years" is still patently absurd though, as he still killed more than Clinton. And it's still a hell of a long way from "100 to 1."
He's still a war criminal either way.