From Investors Business Daily:
Leadership: For years, Barack Obama called Iraq “a dumb war.” But considering how that conflict undeniably scared Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi into ending his WMD program, the 2003 invasion has never looked smarter.
‘I don’t oppose all wars,” future President Barack Obama told Chicagoans Against War in Iraq during a 2002 rally. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war … a rash war … the cynical attempt by … armchair, weekend warriors in this (Bush) administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”
Obama called the plan to liberate Iraq an “attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us.” And he warned that it “will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida.”
Goading the then-commander in chief, Obama said: “You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure that the U.N. (nuclear) inspectors can do their work … let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people.”
Today, after two years of President Obama, our “so-called allies” like Egypt are destabilized, or threatened, and in danger of becoming enemies — nothing “so-called” about it.
Turns out that if it hadn’t been for those “armchair warriors” and their “dumb war” in Iraq, Libya might well be a nuclear weapons power today. All the U.N. inspectors in the world wouldn’t be able to stop Gadhafi from using atomic and chemical weapons to slaughter tens or even hundreds of thousands of his own people to keep himself in power, instead of just conventional weapons to kill a fraction of that number.
