President Barack Obama’s decision to take military action against the “atrocities” being committed by a brutal dictator in Libya directly contradicts statements made by a Democratic senator in 2002.
That senator was Barack Obama.
On Oct. 2, 2002, Illinois state Sen. Obama spoke at an anti-war rally in Chicago and expressed his opposition to President George W. Bush’s planned invasion of Iraq.
Obama acknowledged that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant who “butchers his own people.” But referring to the planned invasion, he declared: “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war.
“What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”
He also said Saddam posed “no imminent threat to the United States, or to his neighbors.”
But in his address to the nation Monday night justifying the attack on Moammar Gadhafi’s forces in Libya, President Obama cited Gadhafi’s record of brutality and said that this time, American “interests and values are at stake.”
He stated: “To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and, more profoundly, our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances, would have been a betrayal of who we are.
“Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.”
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