What To Call Mid-Eastern Terrorists

There is a lot of criticism from the political right of the Obama administration's apparent refusal to use the term Islamic Militants or Islamic Terrorists.  Well, I am on the right, politically, and think we need to examine these terms and perhaps examine our use of the terms.  I estimate below that Muslim participation in terrorist activities is smaller than 1/10 of 1%!  Besides the fairness issue, discussed below, there are almost 1.6 billion people who are Muslim and not involved in terrorism.  

Obama and the Drone

This post is about the U.S. drone war.  While no discussion of the drone war lately failed to include Mr. Obama, as either a hero or a villain, here I just look at the data and avoid making any judgement about the President. 

Analyzed here are data from 2013 and 2014 regarding total and civilian casualties.  As I show below, the drone program is remarkably good in avoiding civilian casualties of late and has removed a significant number of combatants in the global war on terror. While there have been allegations about whether or not many of the reported combatants killed were actually active combatants, most articles are long on outrage and supposition and short on facts. Those data are not included in this post.

First a little background.  Since retiring, I get curious about things.  Sometime last year it was web crawlers.  In digging about for information on web crawlers, I came upon an article about an iPhone App, called Metadata+, that crawled news feeds and captured reports of US drone strikes throughout the world.  It captures the data and then sends a notification to your phone.  I loaded the App on my phone and iPad.

When the notification of the first strike of 2015 reached my phone, I found myself wondering how many people were killed  by drones last year.  Doing it the hard way, I compiled a list of all of the reported strikes from Metadata+ (see below) and totaled the numbers.  This method showed 292 people killed, a bigger number than I would have anticipated.  After this I found myself wondering about civilian casualties.  Now, I could have gone to the trouble of going through all of the media reports and independently compiling my own data but I discovered two organizations that were already doing that.

When I first saw the 292 number, I estimated 10-30% civilian deaths.  Even using the high end of the estimate, civilian fatalities amount to only 3.77%.  Of course we don't know what percentage of the wounded are civilians so the 3.77 value may understate the civilian impact.  Still, less than 4% civilian deaths is pretty impressive, to me, considering that we are dealing with high explosives.

While I list all of the data below, the major reason I wrote this post was to see how I felt about the drone war.  After review, I conclude that we are using targeted assassination by drone to impact our enemies in the global war on terror and that the program has little civilian impact last year. All in all, it looks like a very effective program to me.  It also appears that we have gotten more careful since the percentage of civilian deaths for 2014 is substantially lower than for 2013.

Data follows.