“Now let me be clear: I suffer no illusions about Moammar Gadhafi. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. … The world, and the Libyan people, would be better off without him. But I also know that he poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors … and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.” A young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama spoke those words in October 2002, with the important difference that he referred not to Gadhafi and Libya, but Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
He predicted that our imminent intervention in the latter would be “a dumb war … a rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion.”
It was an incredible, bold and prescient speech at a time when public opinion ran very much in the opposite direction. It would play no small part in Obama’s subsequent success in Democratic politics.
By 2008, that speech was probably still his most important public achievement. The position he had staked out early on distinguished him clearly from Hillary Clinton and certainly from his Republican election opponent, the hawkish Republican John McCain.
War-weary America made the obvious choice.
Today Obama has dropped his farsightedness to become the most deliberately nearsighted man in America. Having unilaterally engaged in Libya’s civil war without the required authorization, he now denies that we’re in a war at all.
One can only presume that, as a follow-up to his petulant whining about cable news coverage, his top officials will next appear on Sunday talk shows to call the “so-called war in Libya” a Fox News-inspired hoax.
Having represented himself as a dove, Obama has embraced the position that presidents have unilateral authority to engage in low-intensity conflicts that have no bearing whatsoever on American interests.
He ignored the constitutional requirement for congressional approval of his war, and then he ignored this week’s statutory deadline for either obtaining congressional approval or withdrawing.
His position, outlined in great detail, is far more hawkish than that of President George W. Bush, who started two wars but only after extensive consultation and bipartisan congressional votes. For however dubious the argument was that Hussein’s removal served American interests, there at least was an argument over which reasonable people could disagree. With Libya, there is no argument at all.
Any young person who believed in Obama in 2008 should officially consider himself once fooled. If you need proof, just look at who marched to the Senate floor last week to take Obama’s side. McCain, although unwilling to adopt Obama’s dishonest denial that a war exists, nonetheless upbraided his fellow senators for not supporting the war that this dishonesty made possible.
McCain promised to present a Senate resolution soon that would approve the war retroactively — which will be slightly awkward considering that Obama maintains he doesn’t need any permission.
“[W]hether people like it or not,” McCain said, “we are engaged in Libya and we are succeeding. I would ask my colleagues, is this the time for Congress to begin turning against this policy … to tell all these different audiences that our heart is not in this?”
In other words, as long as “we are succeeding,” the merits and legality of the conflict are of no consequence. Resistance and opposition to a president’s arbitrary use of war powers is, to paraphrase McCain, the equivalent of riding to Gadhafi’s rescue.
Which just goes to show that if you care about such things as “dumb wars,” it never really mattered much who won in 2008.
David Freddoso is The Examiner’s online opinion editor. He can be reached at [email protected].
