Praising Iraq War, Obama Faces Another "Dumb War"

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-boardman/55197/praising-iraq-war-obama-faces-another-dumb-war

Praising Iraq War, Obama Faces Another "Dumb War"
Barack Obama
by William Boardman | April 5, 2014 - 10:05am

~snip~

"What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”

Barack Obama said that at an anti-war rally in Chicago on October 2, 2002, when he was still an Illinois state senator.

Obama told the gathering that he favored going after al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but opposed going to war to remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Reading that 2002 speech more than eleven years later creates some dissonance: what happened to that guy who was challenging President Bush to finish the fight with bin Laden, to shut down banks that handle terrorists’ funding, to let the U.N. do its work in Iraq, to safeguard nuclear weapons material around the world, to push countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt to stop oppressing their own people, to control American arms merchants, to have “an energy policy that doesn’t simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil,” to fight against ignorance and intolerance, corruption and greed, poverty and despair?

It’s all in that speech, and more. What happened to that guy? He got elected and he inherited Bush’s wars, and he chose not to act on the near-certainty that the Iraq War had been illegal and its perpetrators war criminals. There’s a clue at the end of that Chicago protest speech where, as an outsider, he seeks to prevent a war in which Americans would die and “make such an awful sacrifice in vain.” Now, with 4,486 Americans dead and probably more than a million Iraqi civilians dead, with more dying almost daily from the murderous liberation Americans inflicted on a once stable, prosperous, educated, ancient country just because its dictator “tried to kill my dad” – what president contemplating all that blood and loss would want to tell his fellow citizens that their sons and daughters died in vain, died for the vanity of a handful of war criminals and profiteers?