The always important Victor Davis Hanson has an important article today in the National Review. It compares Libya tor Iraq, and really dissects the crucial differences behind the most disastrous of Obama’s foreign policy moves. For example:
The Left is terribly embarrassed about the U.S. intervention in Libya. We have preemptively attacked an Arab Muslim nation that posed little threat to the national-security interests of the United States. President Obama did not have majority support among the American people. Nor did he even attempt to gain approval from Congress — especially egregious because he seems to be the first president since Harry Truman who sought and obtained sanction for military action from the United Nations without gaining formal authorization from his own Congress.
The administration offered no rationale for judging, on humanitarian grounds, that Qaddafi was more egregiously murderous than, say, the killers in the Congo or Ivory Coast. Nor, in terms of national security, did the relatively sparsely populated and isolated Libya pose a threat comparable to those posed by either Iran or Syria — concerning which we carefully steered clear when similar domestic unrest threatened both regimes.
He goes on to list twelve good reasons why the intervention in Iraq was necessary and proper while the half-assed intervention in Libya is not. Read the whole article. It is quite damning of the President. He ends it by damning with the faintest of praise:
To be fair, in Obama’s defense, it perhaps soon may be said that we suffered greatly in victory in Iraq and, by comparison, far less in defeat in Libya.
Somehow, though, I don’t think that the Islamists, who will see Libya as simply another Mogadishu for the Paper Tiger America, will agree with this.
