Barack Obama’s First Drone Strike |
Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
For the past quarter century, ever since 2001, presidents of the United States inaugurate their terms not with bottles of champagne but with drone and missile strikes. Donald Trump followed the rhythm. Not long after he ascended to the chair in the Oval Office, he sent off missiles against ISIS fighters “hiding in caves” – as he put it on social media – in the Golis mountains in northeast Somalia. No civilians were killed, said Trump. They always say that.
Trump’s first missile strike of this presidency reminded me of Barack Obama’s first missile strike, only three days after the Nobel Peace Prize winner was sworn in as the president of the United States in 2009. In the morning of January 23, CIA director Michael Hayden told Obama that they were ready to strike high-level al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in northern Pakistan. Obama did not object. At 830pm, local time, a drone flew over Karez Kot in Ziraki village, Waziristan. The people on the ground heard it. They called the drones bhungana, that which sounds like a buzzing bee. Three Hellfire missiles were fired remotely, and they smashed into some homes. Fifteen people died in that........