How does an idealistic, highly intelligent President come to do things that just a few years ago he spoke strongly against? Is this hypocrisy or just the normal “evolution” idealistic and principled people sometimes go through when confronted with another reality, one they didn’t know existed when they first formulated their principles?
The following is from Yahoo News:
FACT CHECK: How Obama's Libya claims fit the facts (from Yahoo News)By CALVIN WOODWARD and RICHARD LARDNER, Associated Press, 3-29-11
OBAMA: Seeking to justify military intervention, the president said the U.S. has "an important strategic interest in preventing Gadhafi from overrunning those who oppose him. A massacre would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya's borders, putting enormous strains on the peaceful — yet fragile — transitions in Egypt and Tunisia." He added: "I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America."
THE FACTS: Obama did not wait to make that case to Congress, despite his past statements that presidents should get congressional authorization before taking the country to war, absent a threat to the nation that cannot wait.
"The president does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation," he told The Boston Globe in 2007 in his presidential campaign. "History has shown us time and again ... that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the legislative branch."
Obama's defense secretary, Robert Gates, said Sunday that the crisis in Libya "was not a vital national interest to the United States, but it was an interest."
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OBAMA: "Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action."
THE FACTS: Mass violence against civilians has also been escalating elsewhere, without any U.S. military intervention anticipated.
More than 1 million people have fled the Ivory Coast, where the U.N. says forces loyal to the incumbent leader, Laurent Gbagbo, have used heavy weapons against the population and more than 460 killings have been confirmed of supporters of the internationally recognized president, Alassane Ouattara.
The Obama administration says Gbagbo and Gadhafi have both lost their legitimacy to rule. But only one is under attack from the U.S.
Presidents typically pick their fights according to the crisis and circumstances at hand, not any consistent doctrine about when to use force in one place and not another. They have been criticized for doing so — by Obama himself.
In his pre-presidential book "The Audacity of Hope," Obama said the U.S. will lack international legitimacy if it intervenes militarily "without a well-articulated strategy that the public supports and the world understands."
He questioned: "Why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma? Why intervene in Bosnia and not Darfur?"
Now, such questions are coming at him.
MY ideas:
What does Obama now know that he didn’t know when running for office? Probably a lot. But I would love to know just what “facts” changed his perspective on these issues and made him look like a hypocrite in the “Fact Check” above.
Four years ago Obama spoke out against the President going to war without Congressional approval. Now he does exactly that. Why? He said in his speech last night that he learned it took President Clinton a full year to get Congressional permission to intervene and stop the tens of thousands slaughtered in Bosnia, and he couldn’t wait that long again. Yet this article doesn’t mention that. Why?
OR- Did he learn that indeed the US went to war in Iraq over access to oil? I have yet to actually SEE any article from a respected news organization that makes that claim. You would think that, if that statement were true, some legitimate writer would have found the proof and written about it somewhere. I’ve searched and it just isn’t there. Just recently on Facebook I defended our country’s decision to go into Iraq after a group of British writers there accused us of doing it mainly for the OIL. Could Obama now believe our national interests include access to (Iraqi and now) Libyan oil? That, perhaps, without their oil our industries might fail to produce products? I do not know what Obama knows, but I sure wish I did. Then I might understand his apparent hypocrisy. What changes such a good man’s mind? He has got to now be privy to facts we simply are not allowed to know, facts that would change any thinking man’s mind.
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