Obama’s Fourth War

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 

To order Daniel Greenfield’s new Freedom Center pamphlet, The Great Betrayal: Obama’s Wars and the War in Iraq, click here. 

Fresh off three wars, Obama is looking to dive headlong into a fourth war in Syria. Even as Islamists are wreaking havoc across Mali, enforcing Sharia law and committing atrocities using weapons looted from the fall of Libya, the administration responsible for that disaster is looking to do it all over again.

Obama inherited two wars, botched them both, began a third war with disastrous consequences, and now appears equally determined to launch a fourth war. As discussed in my Freedom Center pamphlet, “The Great Betrayal,” Iraq is now in the hands of Iranian-backed Shiite Islamists while Afghanistan is swiftly falling into the hands of the Taliban.

Obama’s program of regional change, whether implemented by military means as in Libya or by political pressure as in Egypt, has led to local and regional chaos, instability and the empowerment of Islamist groups ranging from Al-Qaeda to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The coverage of the latest UN Security Council Resolution on Syria exposes the partisan hypocrisy of the print journalists and talking heads who attacked the Bush administration’s proposals on Iraq with ruthless hostility, but respond to the far less credible rush to war in Syria by his successor with the shameless enthusiasm of war propagandists.

In 2002, the United States had successfully liberated Afghanistan and when it turned its attention to Iraq it had a solid track record and was confronting a regime that had engaged in actual genocide. But when Obama went after Libya, he had already cut and run from Iraq, leaving it in the hands of an Iranian agent, and had blown his own surge in Afghanistan.

In 2011, when Obama intervened in the Libyan civil war, American soldiers in Afghanistan were living through their bloodiest March in ten years. That bloody March gave way to the bloodiest April on record with casualties almost four times as high as they had been under the Bush administration. As reporters were celebrating the fall of Tripoli, the bloodiest August in Afghanistan on record had claimed the lives of 82 soldiers in a war that the media wasn’t interested in reporting on any longer.
Serious journalists would have examined Obama’s proposal to go into Libya based on his track record in Afghanistan. Instead the media ignored the previous war in their rush to endorse the next war. That is why the debate over Syria has to begin with an examination of Libya.

Advocates for intervention are claiming that the lives of millions of Syrians are at stake. They claimed the same thing in Libya and that proved to be a lie.

“The Great Betrayal” examines and exposes the lie that Libya ever faced genocide at Gaddafi’s hands. Benghazi, the city that Obama claimed was in imminent danger of a massacre that would stain the conscience of the world, not only never saw anything of the kind, but is actually still caught in a civil war between the rebels and the new government that Obama helped put into place.
Ambassador Susan Rice, in her speech at the UN, derided the idea that the proposed resolution would lead to military intervention in Syria as “paranoid.” But military intervention in Libya followed a similar path from protecting civilians to sanctions to military intervention.

As “The Great Betrayal” lays out, Obama lied his way into Libya, deceiving the American people and the United Nations, while using legal arguments that even his own legal advisors did not believe had any credibility. Obama violated the War Powers Act and the terms of the no-fly zone to go to war, betrayed the trust of the American people and destroyed the credibility of American humanitarian interventions. His failure to achieve Security Council approval for sanctions on Syria stems from his lies on Libya.