When I heard that the House of Representatives has established a select committee to investigate the attack on Benghazi that left several Americans dead in 2012, I couldn't help but wonder what these same legislators might have done had Barack Obama been president in 2003, and had the audacity of George W. Bush to attack a sovereign country that had no relevant connection to the 9/11 attacks with the result that nearly 5,000 Americans and well over 100,000 Iraqi civilians (many of them women and children) perished.
As an aside, I'd like to note that many on the left didn't want to invade Afghanistan after 9/11, and that Afghanistan only became the "good" and "necessary" war while we fought in Iraq. When our role in Iraq died down, the left stopped calling Afghanistan the good war.
The issue of Benghazi for me is leadership and whether we wrote off our people on the ground by refusing to try to help when we had no idea how long the fight in Benghazi would last.
The issue of lying about the cause of the attack for a year and a half to avoid responsibility for failures is secondary if not unimportant to me.
The reason it would be stupid to investigate the Iraq War is that it is nonsense to claim that the war was fought despite Saddam's lack of connections to the 9/11 attacks when the declaration of war did not charge Saddam with any responsibility for the 9/11 attacks and because regime change in Iraq was already our official government policy, having been signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
I'll also note that our invasion involved low American and Iraqi casualties, and that the toll rose only because we stood with Iraqis to defend the new government against Baathist terror and a Syrian-Iranian-al Qaeda invasion to destroy the new government. The death toll is on our enemies who targeted civilians--not on us.
There is so much wrong with the piece that I could just about delve into the use of semi-colons. Let me just note that in a real whopper, the author says that the destruction of the bloody and aggressive Saddam regime only benefited Iran because Saddam's Iraq--evil as it was--was a bulwark against Iran!
Say! Let's investigate FDR since the destruction in World War II of that anti-Communist bulwark Nazi Germany paved the way for Soviet Russia to advance into the heart of Central Europe!
And he says the defeat of Saddam only benefited Iran as if it was a good thing to contain Iran, which must have been worse than Saddam's Iraq. So what's the betting line that the professor would back military action against "bad" Iran under any circumstances?
Whatever else you might want to argue about the Iraq War, the war was debated and lawfully begun for good reasons.
Which is more than can be said for the Libya
Compare and contrast the Iraq and Libya wars, eh?
