The baseline here is what Trump has already done: attacking Iran and getting us within hours of a full-scale war against a country with 80+ million people. To find an example of a Democratic president doing anything close to that you'd have to go back to, what, LBJ?
Biden will no doubt continue the standard-issue imperialism of Obama and Trump -- expanding our drone terror campaign, trying (sometimes successfully) to initiate coups in places like Venezuela and Bolivia, etc. -- but attacking a country like Iran is in a whole different stratosphere. As a comparison, look at Libya vs. Iraq. Libya is a mess, but because we didn't invade and didn't engage in a full-scale bombing campaign for over a decade the casualties have been fairly limited. Wikipedia lists about 9,000 Libyan deaths since 2014, but let's assume that's off by an order of magnitude and call it 90,000 deaths over about six years. We've killed 2.4 million Iraqis and counting since 2003; a full tenth of their pre-war population. That's another order of magnitude greater than our damage to Libya even if you assume the Libyan Civil War will continue as long as the Iraq War has continued, and it doesn't even factor in the long-term effects of a sustained bombing campaign (CW for fucked up images of babies we've deformed). There's no comparison.
All this stuff runs together because even Democratic imperialism is fucking awful, but there's an enormous difference between run-of-the-mill CIA crimes against humanity and war.
I mean literal war criminal Colin Powell spoke at the DNC and endorsed biden too, so like i'm not sure that's really any worse
An endorsement =/= a cabinet position.
The baseline here is what Trump has already done: attacking Iran and getting us within hours of a full-scale war against a country with 80+ million people. To find an example of a Democratic president doing anything close to that you'd have to go back to, what, LBJ?
Biden will no doubt continue the standard-issue imperialism of Obama and Trump -- expanding our drone terror campaign, trying (sometimes successfully) to initiate coups in places like Venezuela and Bolivia, etc. -- but attacking a country like Iran is in a whole different stratosphere. As a comparison, look at Libya vs. Iraq. Libya is a mess, but because we didn't invade and didn't engage in a full-scale bombing campaign for over a decade the casualties have been fairly limited. Wikipedia lists about 9,000 Libyan deaths since 2014, but let's assume that's off by an order of magnitude and call it 90,000 deaths over about six years. We've killed 2.4 million Iraqis and counting since 2003; a full tenth of their pre-war population. That's another order of magnitude greater than our damage to Libya even if you assume the Libyan Civil War will continue as long as the Iraq War has continued, and it doesn't even factor in the long-term effects of a sustained bombing campaign (CW for fucked up images of babies we've deformed). There's no comparison.
All this stuff runs together because even Democratic imperialism is fucking awful, but there's an enormous difference between run-of-the-mill CIA crimes against humanity and war.