Who 'war' it better?: Why it's bogus to tweet about military prowess, especially with these numbers

President Trump recently distributed the following information, presenting it as a personal accomplishment that proves he is more competent or effective than his predecessor, President Obama. Here's why it is a mistake to use this information to make a point about who is more effective than whom.

Screenshot taken from the Washington Examiner the morning of Dec. 29, 2017. The article was dated Dec. 23. A factual error in the information circulated widely online before the media outlet corrected it.

1. Seemingly forgetting that the war against ISIS is about an international coalition defeating a common enemy, Trump self-promotes an argument that he is a better commander-in-chief than his predecessor. This is problematic on several levels. The war is about the freedom and safety of the people of Syria and Iraq; it should not be presented as a pissing content between Trump and Obama. It is morally repugnant to do so and, in its blatancy, it undermines U.S. credibility as a leader in international security. Also, credit for any successes needs to be shared with the dozens of countries who have served as coalition partners.

War is not a "who wore it better" contest.

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2. The numbers show that about the same area of land was liberated from ISIS during the first 11 months of the Trump administration as during the final 28 months of the Obama administration. Trump seems to want us to infer that his military campaign got the same results twice as fast. He is treating these numbers as a businessman looks at a balance sheet. This is a misunderstanding of how military campaigns work. Square miles are not dollars; they are not identical and interchangeable. Terrain, for example, plays a role in how difficult it is to conquer land. So does the civilian population you have to work around. And, of course, the level of resistance from enemy fighters is crucial. The chart reflects the U.S. Defense Department's assessment that Trump only had to contend with 35,000 ISIS fighters when he took office; it does not reflect how many fighters Obama's administration had to deal with at the outset nor how many additional fighters entered the fray during those years. The numbers indicate that the military sped up the rate at which it conquered land, but one possible explanation is that conquering land became easier.
3. Similarly, if half the number of bombs are required to capture the same amount of land, that suggests that the nature of the combat has changed. Bombs suggest an air war; ground combat may use fewer bombs. Indeed bombs are expensive for the country that drops them and they are destructive of lives and property on the ground, yet they may also be cheaper and less destructive than alternative weapons. Therefore, the military has its reasons for using or not using them. The way this information is presented, it appears at first glance that the international coalition used half the violence to conquer the same amount of land. This is not necessarily true. They used half the amount of one kind of violence. Other types of weapons and tactics are missing from the chart. Furthermore, the decision about whether to use bombs is not always up to the U.S. president. Most, but not all, bombs in this conflict have come at U.S. direction and expense. The second-most prolific bomber is Britain's RAF.
4. The numbers show that twice the number of people were liberated from ISIS under Trump as under Obama. That only means that the land taken from ISIS in 2017 was twice as densely populated as the land taken in 2014-2016. It probably reflects the 2017 victory in the Iraqi city of Mosul, a city whose population has been estimated between one and two million.
5. In listing the number of U.S. deaths, remaining ISIS fighters, and "people freed," an important category is missing: Iraqi and Syrian civilian deaths. Inevitably, in any war, some innocent people intended to be freed are killed in the conflict. In Iraq alone, where documentation of civilian deaths is spottier than in Syria, the U.S.-led coalition confirmed its responsibility for 971 civilian deaths in 51 incidents during the Obama administration (the end of 2014 through 2016) and 1,119 civilian deaths in 56 incidents in the beginning of the Trump administration. Iraq also has a number of civilian casualties for which responsibility is “contested”: 63 incidents under Obama and 213 incidents under Trump. (Source: Airwars) This gives a more complete picture of the human cost of war. Reducing the number of ISIS fighters in a territory with millions of inhabitants does not come without a price, and the president ought not to seem glib about it by erasing those casualties from the record as he claims to be a better commander-in-chief than his predecessor.
6. Charlie Kirk tweeted this information from the Washington Examiner on Dec. 27 at 3:14 p.m. and it was immediately retweeted by the president. In the original version of the information that was tweeted and retweeted, the arithmetic has an obvious error. If only 17,500 square miles were “held by ISIS” at the end of Obama’s administration, Trump could not have caused 26,000 square miles to be “liberated from ISIS” (unless he had lost ground to ISIS and then had to reclaim it). Accordingly, the Washington Examiner acknowledged their own mathematical error and corrected their article with an erratum. The president followed up at 6:09 p.m. with a tweet of a visual meme with a corrected number and a text caption that made his point without explicitly referencing the number in question. He did not acknowledge that he was correcting an error, but you can see the error for yourself since, as of Dec. 29, neither Charlie Kirk nor the President had deleted their original tweet with the wrong information. (Screenshots below were taken from the president's Twitter page the morning of Dec. 29. Red arrows are superimposed to highlight the error and subsequent correction.)

I do not argue that the President should waste a single hour of his time figuring this out. Instead I argue that he should not waste untold hours of everyone else's fact-checking time by tweeting things that either he does not understand or that he does understand and about which is happy to mislead everyone else.

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Update: News broke on 14 February 2019 that President Trump would declare a national emergency to get funding for a border wall with Mexico on the grounds that terrorists are crossing the border. This is not true.

"In the United States since the 9/11 attacks, 455 jihadist terrorists have been charged or convicted or died before they faced trial. Not one of these terrorists crossed the southern border....And anyway, the vast majority of terrorists don't enter the United States at the southern border or anywhere else, because they are already in the country. Of the 455 jihadist terrorism cases since 9/11, 84% involved US citizens or permanent residents, and every lethal terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 was carried out by a US citizen or legal resident....And there isn't a case since 9/11 of a terrorist being arrested at the border, according to New America's research." (Peter Bergen, CNN, 14 February 2019)

Furthermore, "the United States has seen a steep decline in the number of jihadist terrorism cases over the past four years," Bergen says, since "the geographical caliphate [of ISIS] is almost entirely gone and ISIS recruitment has slowed to a trickle."

And on 17 February 2019, CNN reported that over a thousand well-funded ISIS fighters had simply relocated to Iraq: "More than 1,000 ISIS fighters have likely fled from Syria into the mountains and deserts of western Iraq in the past six months, and they may have up to $200 million in cash with them, according to a US military official familiar with situation."

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On October 14, 2019, David Rothkopf wrote:

The United States has a long history of debacles, mistakes, and catastrophes in the Middle East. But Donald Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds manages the near impossible. It incorporates all our past failures and then goes a step further by actually placing us on the side of our enemies while embracing their worst characteristics.

This time, we have joined the Axis of Evil.

It "is a new kind of low point," Rothkopf argues, because it "combines every single type of error noted above [in a list of U.S. foreign policy failures in the Middle East] and some new ones."

Worth emphasising the scale of the disaster Trump has wrought in the week since his call with Erdogan. 1. Revived Isis. 2. Cemented Assad’s grip on Syria. 3. Handed Russia yet another geopolitical windfall. 4. Betrayed the Kurds. 5. Immeasurably harmed US power. Thread 1.

— Edward Luce (@EdwardGLuce) October 14, 2019

The Kurds lost thousands of people defeating Isis. Trump has driven the Kurds into Russia's arms. The Russians mocked them (at the UN last week) for ever having trusted America, even while the US and Russia voted together against Europe to prevent a humanitarian pause. 3.

— Edward Luce (@EdwardGLuce) October 14, 2019

On October 16, 2019, asked about why he removed U.S. troops from northern Syria, Trump said: "It's been going on for a long time. Syria may have some help with Russia. And that's fine. It's a lot of sand. There's a lot of sand over there. So, there's a lot of sand that they can play with."

In 2025, where are we?

I hate to say I told you so but… I told you so. #mythofantiwartrump

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— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) July 17, 2025 at 7:15 AM

In 2026

While paying tribute to Lindsey Graham, President Trump called the late senator "hawkish," adding "he never saw a war that he didn't like."

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— NBC News (@nbcnews.com) July 28, 2026 at 5:40 PM

U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334 concerning Israeli settlement activity

On Dec. 23, 2016, the UN Security Council voted 14-0 on its Resolution 2334 concerning Israeli settlement activity. The vote was in favor of demanding that Israeli cease building settlements in disputed areas. The reason for condemning these settlements is that they are being built on disputed land that will likely have to be given to the future State of Palestine as part of any realistic peace agreement. The United States abstained from the vote but did not use its veto power to stop the resolution, as some had hoped.

After the vote, the Obama administration gave a 40-minute, on-the-record press call. On the call, Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, explained that President Obama had had "several rounds of discussions with Ambassador Rice, Ambassador Power, Secretary Kerry, and members of his national security team" before deciding not to veto the resolution. There is concern that accelerated settlement construction in disputed areas is an obstacle to a future peace agreement. Rhodes explained that "we cannot simply have a two-state solution be a slogan while the trend lines on the ground are such that a two-state solution is becoming less and less viable."

Separately, Ambassador Samantha Power said, "We would not have let this resolution pass had it not also addressed counterproductive actions by the Palestinians such as terrorism and incitement to violence, which we’ve repeatedly condemned and repeatedly raised with the Palestinian leadership, and which, of course, must be stopped."

The Obama administration continues to demonstrate its support for reaching an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Three years previously, Secretary of State John Kerry spent nine months attempting to broker a deal (more information below).

2013: VP Joe Biden expresses his commitment to a two-state solution

The article below was originally posted to Helium Network on Oct. 1, 2013.

"This very moment may offer the best opportunity for peace," U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations currently under way in Washington. For the first time in years, he said, "both sides are talking directly, and both sides have taken some risk to get where they are today."

Biden addressed the J Street conference in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 30, 2013. Over 2,800 people were gathered in Washington for the conference. J Street is a political advocacy and education organization for American Jews who support a "two-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, meaning the creation of a Palestinian state through negotiations with Israel.

"Like you, the president and I are absolutely devoted to the survival of the Jewish state of Israel," Biden said. That survival "requires a just and lasting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians."

He described Obama's commitment as "unrelenting." "That's why Obama chose Israel for his first visit in his second term," he explained. "That's why Secretary of State John Kerry has been there six times in the last six months."

He said that the United States shares practical security interests with Israel, as well as having a moral commitment to it. "If there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one," he quipped. More seriously, he added, "The leaders on both sides need to know, if they take risks for peace, their people will be behind them, and so will we."

Biden spoke on the last day of the federal government's fiscal year, as politicians were working overtime to determine whether the government would temporarily shut down beginning at midnight after failing to pass a budget for the coming year. For this reason, Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, had to cancel his appearance before the same crowd; he had been scheduled to speak to the J Street audience just before Biden.

Biden had also been busy, spending an earlier part of the day meeting with President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The J Street crowd enthusiastically received the vice president after waiting over two hours.

Of his meeting with Obama and Netanyahu, Biden said only that they had been "talking about issues that are of mutual concern" and that Netanyahu had publicly thanked Obama. Secretary of State John Kerry is the only one "authorized to comment publicly on the talks," as Kerry previously stated at the beginning of the nine-month negotiation process. The negotiations intend to arrive at a "final status agreement" that solves the conflict.

Biden reminded the audience that the United States is simultaneously addressing other security concerns in the Middle Eastern region. Obama has been focused on Syria's stockpile of chemical weapons. Syria killed about a thousand of its own citizens with sarin gas on Aug. 21, an incident that was close to the Israeli border and that occurred in the context of Syria's larger violent ethnic conflict.

Iran may be on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon, and Obama also spoke with the new Iranian president Hassan Rouhani on Sept. 27, the first such US-Iran diplomatic outreach in over 30 years. Furthermore, Egypt must continue building its democracy and maintain its peace treaty with Israel, Biden said.

"We approach these problems with a great deal of humility," he remarked, regarding efforts to resolve strategic problems that affect the entire world. "We cannot impose a solution."

"We cannot want peace in their country more than they do," he added.

He was introduced by Ambassador Lou Susman, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom. Susman said that Biden "understands that a two-state solution is the only solution" and commended him for having the "guts" to speak his mind to Israel and to other parties in the region. "I think we can all agree," Susman said, "that is the measure of a true friend: to tell others the truth."

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Ark painting by Dorin Coltofeanu. Wikimedia Commons.

False reports that President Obama is a Muslim

Americans question the President's religion — and always have.

Originally posted to Helium Network on Aug. 22, 2010. Including updates.

The U.S. President Barack Obama is a Christian. His spokesman said in 2010 that he prays daily, and Obama said the same at a February 2011 National Prayer Breakfast. At an Easter Prayer breakfast in 2012, Obama referred to Jesus as "Son of God," in keeping with Christian beliefs. Increasingly, however, since his election, Americans hold the false belief that their President is a Muslim.

Polls conducted by the Pew Form on Religion & Public Life during the first two years of Obama's presidency consistently found that half of respondents correctly identified that the President is a Christian, while a third claimed not to know, and just over a tenth believed he is Muslim. (The last observation was also reported by the Economist in April 2009: "Meanwhile, roughly one American in ten still believes, incorrectly, that Mr Obama is a Muslim.") An August 2010 survey found these numbers suddenly dramatically changed: only a third correctly identified him as a Christian, nearly half claimed not to know, and a greater percentage than ever believed him to be Muslim: 18 percent. A September 2015 survey by CNN/Opinion Research Corporation found it had increased to 29 percent.

The Pew Forum's associate research director Alan Cooperman mused: "You would think the longer the person is in the White House, the more the 'don't knows' would decline. But the 'don't knows' are higher now than when he came to office."

The facts about Obama's background are widely available. His mother came from a Christian family in Kansas; she was an anthropologist who respected all religions as part of human experience. Obama's half-sister in Kenya has stated that their father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., "was never a Muslim although he was born into a Muslim family with a Muslim name." Obama has said that his step-father, too, was only nominally Muslim. "When my mother remarried, it was to an Indonesian with an equally skeptical bent, a man who saw religion as not particularly useful," he wrote in his book The Audacity of Hope. "Like many Indonesians, [my stepfather] Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths," he added in Dreams from my Father. Obama spent part of his childhood in Indonesia where he attended a secular public school. "Madrasa" is simply the Arabic word for "school"; when English speakers use the word, they often intend to connote a Muslim religious school, but this does not describe the school that Obama attended.

J. J. Goldberg, editorial director of the Jewish newspaper The Forward, was quoted in 2008 as speculating that Obama's "decision to keep his middle name, Hussein, raises symbolic fears among some of these [older and conservative Jewish] voters, and reports about his record – including his early flirtation with black identity politics and his long association with Reverend Wright – strengthen these fears."

For a number of American Christians, calling someone a Muslim may be a vague, indirect way of expressing disapproval. The Pew Forum data from 2010 show that those who disapprove of Obama's performance as President and/or identify as Republican are three times more likely as supporters and Democrats to make an incorrect assertion about his religion. When ideological qualifiers are added, such that specifically "conservative" Republicans are compared to specifically "liberal" Democrats, the gap widens so that the former group is five or six times more likely to make the incorrect statement. Similar surveys in 2012 by the Pew Forum and Gallup show these numbers holding steady on a national level, while Public Policy Polling found that more than half of likely Republican voters in the state of Alabama made the incorrect statement.

Although one might assume that knowledge of the President's religion is unrelated to approval of his performance, this has not been the case historically. George Washington's Masonic loyalties were questioned, Abraham Lincoln's critics suspected him of being Catholic, FDR was believed to be Jewish, and JFK (who was indeed Catholic) was feared to be taking orders from the Vatican.

Bruce Feiler wrote that there is nothing new about such an attack: "It's the nature of how we conflate political frustration, economic anxiety, and concern about the changing fabric of our identity. In a country where our national character has been tied up with God since our founding, it's hardly surprising that we tar our political opponents with worshiping a different god than we do."

Particularly because Obama inherited wars in two Arab countries and because Democrats are often perceived as "softer" on security than Republicans, some people were concerned that Obama would mismanage these wars or discontinue efforts to keep the United States safe from terrorism. The allegation that he is a Muslim was, in this context, meant to be understood as an allegation of disloyalty toward his country. Obama actually strengthened forces in Afghanistan and carefully drew down forces in Iraq until the last troops left in December 2011.

In a Newsweek poll in July 2008, 12 percent of voters asserted that "Obama was sworn in as a United States senator on a Qur'an, while 26 percent believe the Democratic candidate was raised as a Muslim and 39 percent believe he attended an Islamic school as a child growing up in Indonesia. None of these things is true." (When I blogged about this for JVoices the same month, I noted that I had been unable to locate a breakdown by religion for the people who held these false beliefs.) For that matter, a February 2010 poll by CBS News/New York Times found that 88 percent of Americans didn't know that the Obama administration has lowered taxes for most Americans. Accusing the president of raising taxes (even if he hasn't) is another traditional American way of expressing disapproval.

Considering the Muslim rumor in 2008, two authors in the New York Times shrugged it off by pointing out that "[f]alse beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found." (Note: This has increased to 26 percent as of 2014, the National Science Foundation uncovered.) The New York Times added that, in their opinion, the rumor about Obama "seems slightly less egregious" than the incorrect belief about the Earth's orbit. But one should not jump to the conclusion that false beliefs about the President are harmless. "According to a Harris interactive poll," Newsweek reported in April 2010, "two thirds of Republicans believe Obama is a socialist, while 57 percent believe he is a Muslim, and almost one in four suspect he's the Antichrist."

[For more about false beliefs, see the Dead Men Blogging post on "Avoiding and correcting false beliefs."] Polls have suggested that people with some college education are more – not less – likely to be wrong on this question. John Chait, quoted in Eli Pariser's book The Filter Bubble, addressed this seemingly strange observation. "People with more education are more likely to follow political news," he said, and political news in the United States is highly partisan. "Therefore, people with more education can actually become mis-educated." A 2014 poll found that Muslims were more likely to approve of Obama's performance than Catholics, Protestants or Mormons.

One sound bite that helped fuel the rumor came from Obama's appearance on ABC's "This Week" news program in September 2008. During the conversation, interviewer George Stephanopoulos said "You mentioned your Christian faith" and then challenged Obama as to why he "took after the Republicans for suggesting you have Muslim connections...McCain's campaign manager said they've never done that." After some back-and-forth, Obama tried to clarify: "You're absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith..." Stephanopoulos interrupted and corrected him: "Your Christian faith." Obama finally made his point: "What I think is fair to say is that coming out of the Republican camp, there have been efforts to suggest that perhaps I'm not who I say I am when it comes to my faith, something which I find deeply offensive, and that has been going on for a pretty long time." The part of the video where Obama used the phrase "my Muslim faith" was taken out of context and went viral on the Internet.

Another example occurred when, writing for Israel Today in April 2010, Aviel Schneider quoted Egypt's foreign minister Ahmed Aboul-Gheit as having said on Nile TV: "The American President told me in confidence that he is a Muslim." The alleged conversation could have taken place when the minister was in Washington, D.C. for Mideast peace talks in early January 2010. Additional details of this story were recounted by Dennis (Avi) Lipkin on Gary Stearman's "Prophecy in the News" TV show:

"On January 19 of 2010, just a few months ago, my wife picked up a broadcast from Nile TV from Egypt...it was called a Round Table discussion... [Aboul-Gheit] said very calmly that he had had a one-on-one meeting with President Obama, and President Obama swore to him that he's a Moslem...that he went to the mosque, that he went to the madrasa until age 11, and he said...'You Moslems will see what I will do for Islam regarding Israel.' This was on Egyptian TV. Two months later, there was an article in the Okaz of the Emirates newspaper in which the envoy of President Obama to the Arab League – his name is Rashad Hasan – said, 'As a Moslem' – I'm quoting now – 'As a Moslem, President Obama understands the significance of Jerusalem for the Islamic world...'" (see 12:00-13:10 of the video)

Lipkin made many statements during the half-hour interview that call his credibility into question. He said that Islam's god is the Devil, that this god commands Muslims to tell lies to hide their religious identities, that the religion (not just fanaticism) presents a global threat, and that the United States is in danger from its own growing Muslim population. He also said that "atheists came into power...so there's no freedom to be Christian anymore" (despite the fact that there is only one openly atheist person in the 535-member Congress). Even if Aboul-Gheit translated and interpreted Obama's words correctly and spoke honestly and without deliberate embellishment, and even if Lipkin's wife had reported the minister's words faithfully and accurately to her husband, Lipkin is demonstrably not the best person to repeat and represent those words. Where rational discussion with such an ideologue seems unlikely, some people simply resort to lampooning and satirizing these fringe beliefs.

Viewed in 2010, the president's official website, BarackObama.com, had a lengthy page dating back to the 2008 presidential campaign devoted to debunking this rumor. The page denied that he ever prayed in a mosque; instead, it recalled his memory of feeling God's presence in a church in Chicago. At the top of the page, he was quoted as saying during the campaign: "I have been victimized by these lies. Fortunately, the American people are, I think, smarter than folks give them credit for." (The original page no longer exists during the 2012 campaign, but the quote still appears in many places.)

Victoria Jackson, formerly a comedian with Saturday Night Live, posted a video to YouTube on Feb. 3, 2015: "There's a Muslim Living in the White House". It is a musical ditty interspersed with supposed evidence that Obama is a Muslim. She begins by saying: “He released terrorists from Gitmo that our sons and daughters died to capture!...His cabinet is made up of Muslim Brotherhood people!...His name is Muslim, and he was raised in a Muslim country, and the application for his school says Barry Sotero and then it says ‘Religion: Islam’.” Naturally, a form filled out by an adult (whether a relative or not) about a child's religion does not necessarily represent what the child actually believes and certainly does not establish that child's religion for the duration of their lives.

One can only hope that Obama's faith in the American people's collective intelligence will be shown to be justified.