Posted on 04/04/2011 6:11:19 PM PDT by neverdem
Remember when a crusading president, acting on dubious intelligence, insufficient information, and exaggerated fears, took the nation into a Middle Eastern war of choice? That was George W. Bush in 2003, invading Iraq. But it's also Barack Obama in 2011, attacking Libya.
For weeks, President Obama had been wary of military action. What obviously changed his mind was the fear that Moammar Gadhafi was bent on mass slaughter—which stemmed from Gadhafi's March 17 speech vowing "no mercy" for his enemies.
In his March 26 radio address, Obama said the United States acted because Gadhafi threatened "a bloodbath." Two days later, he asserted, "We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi—a city nearly the size of Charlotte—could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."
Really? Obama implied that, absent our intervention, Gadhafi might have killed nearly 700,000 people, putting it in a class with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. White House adviser Dennis Ross was only slightly less alarmist when he reportedly cited "the real or imminent possibility that up to a 100,000 people could be massacred."
But these are outlandish scenarios that go beyond any reasonable interpretation of Gadhafi's words. He said, "We will have no mercy on them"—but by "them," he plainly was referring to armed rebels ("traitors") who stand and fight, not all the city's inhabitants.
"We have left the way open to them," he said. "Escape. Let those who escape go forever." He pledged that "whoever hands over his weapons, stays at home without any weapons, whatever he did previously, he will be pardoned, protected."
Alan Kuperman, an associate professor at the University of Texas' Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, is among those unconvinced by Obama's case. "Gadhafi," he told me, "did not massacre civilians in any of the other big cities he captured—Zawiyah, Misratah, Ajdabiya—which together have a population equal to Benghazi. Yes, civilians were killed in a typical, ham-handed Third World counter-insurgency. But civilians were not targeted for massacre as in Rwanda, Darfur, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bosnia or even Kosovo after NATO intervention."
The rebels, however, knew that inflating their peril was their best hope for getting outside help. So, Kuperman says, they concocted the specter of genocide—and Obama believed it, or at least used it to justify intervention.
Another skeptic is Paul Miller, an assistant professor at National Defense University who served on the National Security Council under Bush and Obama. "The Rwandan genocide was targeted against an entire, clearly defined ethnic group," he wrote on the Foreign Policy website. "The Libyan civil war is between a tyrant and his cronies on one side, and a collection of tribes, movements, and ideologists (including Islamists) on the other. ... The first is murder, the second is war."
When I contacted Miller, he discounted the talk of vast slaughter. "Benghazi is the second-largest city in the country, and he needs the city and its people to continue functioning and producing goods for his impoverished country," he said.
Maybe these analysts are mistaken, but the administration has offered little in the way of rebuttal. Where Bush sent Colin Powell to the United Nations to make the case against Saddam Hussein, Obama has treated the evidence about Gadhafi as too obvious to dispute.
I e-mailed the White House press office several times asking for concrete evidence of the danger, based on any information the administration may have. But a spokesman declined comment.
That's a surprising omission, given that a looming holocaust was the centerpiece of the president's case for war. Absent specific, reliable evidence, we have to wonder if the president succumbed to unwarranted panic over fictitious dangers.
Bush had a host of reasons (or pretexts) for invading Iraq. But Obama has only one good excuse for the attack on Libya—averting mass murder. That gives the administration a special obligation to document the basis for its fears.
Maybe it can. Plenty of experts think Obama's worries were justified. But so far, the White House message has been: Trust us.
Sorry, but we've tried that before. In 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice waved off doubts about Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions, saying, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Right now, the Benghazi bloodbath looks like Obama's mushroom cloud.
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I’m still unclear on why we’re there at all.
Barry needed a war on his resume’. He wanted something quick and dirty that he could make go away quickly.
I think we can all agree that he acted stupidly.
There is no legal reason for this war.
Bump.
Nothing will help Zero when all his dirt surfaces.
Barak? Is that the name of a horse?
I think he was looking for an excuse to intervene so another country
Would fall to muslim killers.
I think Barry is intent on creating a super Iran
Finally a good Democrat war, instead of an evil Republican war.
Obama lied, Libyans died :) Yesterday a poster at DU said he will never listen to anti-war progressive Ed Schultz again because Ed is backing Obama’s war of lies and the liberal poster feels he has to be consistent, unlike Koolaid no principles Ed.
Not being a Bush fan myself I still find the craphole Democrats stepped in after so much complaining about Bush, sweetly ironic.
Saddam had a track record of slaughtering his subjects ( http://www.iraqfoundation.org/news/2003/ajan/27_saddam.html ), so Bush had plenty of reason to include averting more of the same.
Has Qaddafi been killing thousands of Libyans throughout the years? I haven’t found anything like Saddam’s record being repeated in Libya, not that I don’t think Qaddafi isn’t capable. He is very likely to have had people killed before this uprising, but has anyone heard about mass graves or thousands of people gassed at one time, that sort of thing?
I think we can all agree that Barry is a card carrying moron and there must have been some electonic screw up between the hand up his sock puppet butt and the teleprompter. Houston we have a problem.
Now let me be clear — I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power.
He’s a bad guy.
But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors ....
I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars." -- Obama in 2002.
"Wary" my butt. What "changed his mind" was getting the deal he wanted from the Saudis: In return for looking he other way while they backed the king in Bahrain, Bammy got the blessing of the Arab League to do what he obviously WANTED to do in Libya anyway. All that "deliberation" was merely cover while the bargaining proceeded. Now Obama has what he REALLY wants: The Saudis are tied up fighting in Bahrain while AQ is taking control of Yemen, which is closer to Mecca than Riyadh. US naval assets in the Middle East are minimized.
When you're out to set up the Caliphate, you're thinking religion, not oil. That comes later, easily.
Strange events happen. Bush2’s weapons of mass destruction come very close to Oba
Very strange parallels in history that do occur. Bush2’s weapons of mass destruction seem eerily like Obama’s incidents of mass human destruction. I would think both were written by the same cabal screen /stage writers.
Very strange parallels in history that do occur. Bush2’s weapons of mass destruction seem eerily like Obama’s incidents of mass human destruction. I would think both were written by the same cabal screen /stage writers.
Very strange parallels in history that do occur. Bush2’s weapons of mass destruction seem eerily like Obama’s incidents of mass human destruction. I would think both were written by the same cabal screen /stage writers.
Obama doesn’t mislead. He flat out LIES!
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