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Tuesday, December 30, 2014

The New (For Now) Good War

Ponder that the Left dishonestly claims that President Bush 43 "lied us into war" over the Iraq War (when they once agreed that Saddam has WMD but still didn't want to defeat him).

Yet President Obama, who has authorized 3,000 US troops for Iraq, began our war in Iraq with a humanitarian intervention to drop supplies for trapped people in Iraq who had fled under threat of massacre by ISIL.

He then then expanded the humanitarian effort to drop bombs to keep them alive in the face of ISIL attacks, then expanded our bombing to protect the US troops that the president sent to Iraq, and now simply bombs ISIL targets in Iraq while training Iraqi troops to begin an offensive we are planning to direct in 2015.

That's a fascinating gradual easing into a war, no?

And ponder that in summer 2013, our president was pondering bombing Assad over his alleged use of chemical weapons (which Assad denied using and even denied having) but declined to carry out those missions when Congress objected.

Then we made a WMD deal with Assad that has not prevented Assad from again using chemical weapons and which is still dragging on months after the deal was supposed to be complete. And President Obama is now bombing--without seeking Congressional authorization--ISIL targets in Syria, which essentially helps Assad who has been fighting ISIL.

And so now we are in a war in the Middle East with Syria and Iran as our sort-of allies that the president says will last for several years (which means beyond his term of office). I guess an outreach speech in Cairo just wasn't enough to tame the jihadi heart, after all.

Perhaps this convoluted path to war doesn't rise to the level of lying, but it sure is interesting, isn't it?

Mind you, I support this war effort and think it could work (and with allied trainers, we may be able to double the trained Iraqi brigades I mention in that post). So this post is more about how the Left reflexively opposed the Iraq War and now either supports (the president, most prominently) or tolerates without protest Iraq War 2.0.

Not that I'm shocked that the Left is silent about Iraq War 2.0. After all, opposing the President's policies is racist, as they've been telling us for years.

But don't fret! Come February 2017, when the war is still raging, the Left will be able to safely oppose the war that former President Obama started without new Congressional authorization.

Hey, let's just all be grateful that this obviously isn't a war for oil!

UPDATE: Iraq's oil exports reached a level last year unseen since 1980--the year Saddam invaded Iran and began a run of three decades of wars and sanctions that crippled Iraqi oil production.

As President Obama re-engages our military in Iraq, thank goodness nobody will accuse him of shedding blood for oil!