“Limited intervention contrasts Obama with Bush,” said the Washington Post this past Friday, claiming that the low-cost eradication of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya went better than and was a rebuke to the more prolonged and costly excursion that put paid to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Well, it did, and did not. Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan after his country had suffered an unprovoked attack that killed almost 3,000 civilians and nearly decapitated the federal government by stateless and shadowy terrorists who spoke of more killing to come.

In the days after, the country was obsessed with what might have occurred had the terrorists possessed nuclear weapons. Bush invaded Afghanistan because the killers were based there, and Iraq because it had a hostile regime that invaded its neighbors, despised the United States, was friendly to terrorists, and was known to possess or be seeking biological, chemical or atomic weapons, whose existence and whereabouts it refused to discuss or reveal.