That's what Obama's excuse will be after Iran has nuked Israel off the face of the planet....and maybe Manhattan for good measure. Right now his claim is a bit more self-aggrandizing, if just as trite:
Barack Obama defended the deal the U.S. and other world powers struck with Iran on its nuclear program and said many critics of the agreement are the same people who rushed to support going to war in Iraq.
Going to war in Iraq was not "rushed" - it took six months the first time back in Desert Shield/Storm, another twelve years to finally finish the job, including a year and a half buildup that included the Bush Administration running it by Congress AND going back to the UN for an eighteenth Security Council resolution that sent the ridiculous little white "UN" weapons inspectors Fisher-Price vans put-putting all around Iraq except where Saddam wouldn't let them go (sound familiar?), a fatal delay that allowed Saddam to stash all his WMDs across the border in Syria for the eventual Islamic State to help themselves to.
Oh, and Democrat support for taking out Saddam actually predated GOP support, but Bill Clinton never had the balls to follow through on it, leaving the mess for his Republican successor to clean up. Does that also sound familiar?
Also sounds like another typical mendatious Obama strawman.
In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Pittsburgh Tuesday, Obama said a core component of American leadership in the world must be exhausting every diplomatic or economic avenue before committing U.S. troops to another armed conflict.
“Sending our sons and daughters into harm’s way should always be a last resort,” Obama said in an address to the group’s annual convention. “That is strength and that is American leadership.”
That's always been the case anyway. No POTUS has ever said that military force is or ought to be the first choice. Yet another Obama strawman.
But by the same token, in order for diplomacy to be effective and have any teeth, military force must not be such a last resort that our enemies never have to fear that we might resort to it. Diplomacy, sanctions, war, they're not mutually exclusive policy rivals but different, complimentary tools on the same statecraft continuum. The credible threat of military force is what creates the deterrent factor that gives diplomatic measures and efforts relevance and potential usefulness. And a skilled, patriotic diplomat will use that position to advance his/her country's vital national and strategic interests, not try to win his peckerwood boss another Nobel Prize at the eventual cost of millions of lives.
Ronald Reagan was one of the most effective diplomats in American history precisely because his "cowboy" reputation - the deterrent factor - compelled the Soviets to have to listen to him and take him seriously. Remember in the first Reykjavik summit with Gorbachev, at which the Soviet dictator demanded that Reagan give up SDI before any talks could even begin? Obama would have coughed up U.S. strategic missile defenses in a heartbeat; the Gipper walked out instead, and the ultimate result was the Medium Range Ballistic Missile treaty, the fall of the Berlin Wall two years later, and the collapse of the USSR two years after that.
He understood that the opposite of diplomatic surrender was not war, but rather that not surrendering is the only way to avoid war on your enemy's terms.
But then, Ronald Reagan was an American president, too, not an Iranian stooge.
He didn't spare his critics.
"We’re hearing the echoes of some of the same policies and mindset that we’ve heard in the past,” Obama said at another point. His Republican critics are “the same folks who were so quick to go to war in Iraq and said it would take a few months," he added.
Actually, once the shooting started, it only took about three weeks. But leave that aside. The above comes from the same Iraq war critic who said the Surge would never work, and after the Bush Administration won the guerrilla war against al Qaeda and Iranian proxies by that very Surge strategy, stole credit for a "quiet and stable Iraq" that he bitterly fought against, used as an excuse to abandon Iraq and everything his predecessor accomplished there via the cost of 4,486 lives, approximately 25,000 wounded, and a trillion dollars. and birthed and armed the Islamic State that arose from the ashes of al Qaeda In Iraq as well as ushered in the Iranian vassalization of whatever part of Iraq ISIS hasn't overrun, and has now gifted the latter the nuclear weapons arsenal they had already been constructing, guaranteeing an inevitable nuclear arms race and atomic war in the Middle East that will not spare us or our allies.
You know O is grasping for straws when he has to resort to his discredited Iraq boilerplate.
When he starts blaming the aforementioned Iranian nuclear holocaust on George W. Bush, that'll be the signal to head for your fallout shelter with all available haste.
Hope you have it well-stocked.
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