Syria and Libya: Obama’s dumb wars

“I don’t oppose all wars,” then-Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama told a crowd of anti-war protesters on a crisp Chicago afternoon in October 2002. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.”

Mr. Obama would go on to denounce every bugaboo and bogeyman that had ever haunted the pipe dreams of the anti-war Left during the Bush years. Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz and of course George W. Bush himself all fell before Mr. Obama’s rhetorical scythe. It was a characteristically eloquent denunciation of the most convenient of strawmen and – like nearly every other speech he has given since – it was characteristically phony.

As president, Mr. Obama doesn’t oppose all wars, and he certainly doesn’t oppose dumb ones. In fact, dumb wars are the only types of war he seem interested in waging. If there is a foreign conflict with no clear American interest that is grabbing the headlines, it seems the current commander-in-chief is only too willing to get involved.

Take his first war in Libya. There, the longtime dictator Muammar Qaddafi, a buffoonish brute who had long ago been voluntarily neutered, was engaged in a high-profile civil war against a ragtag group of rebels caught up in the throes of the Arab Spring. The United States had no major trade with Libya that this civil war could interrupt. Neither the country nor the rebels had any real domestic constituency that could put pressure on President Obama to intervene. Libya is hardly a strategically significant place, and Qaddafi had no real powerful friends.

And yet, Mr. Obama decided that Qaddafi had to go. So, in the dead of night, he ordered the U.S. military to begin joining in an internationally sanctioned effort to first aid the rebels and eventually oust Qaddafi. The war was baldly illegal under American law. The president did not receive even the faintest hint of the congressional authorization required by the Constitution, claiming instead that a United Nations resolution and a few secret briefings were sufficient.

The result was predictably disastrous: A stable, predictable state in a predictably volatile region became a failed backwater, filled with all the instability and danger one would expect. Weapons began to flow from Qaddafi’s old stockpiles into the hands of regional terrorist groups, most notably al Qaeda. The same regional al Qaeda affiliates soon became power-players in the country, culminating in their attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi and the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

Libya was, by Mr. Obama’s own 2002 definition, a dumb war. It was a “war based not on reason, but on passion,” as he articulated it that October day. It was an intervention against a thug who “posed no imminent or direct threat to the United States.”

Now, it seems Barack Obama is set on launching another dumb war, this time in Syria. The situation is largely the same: A ragtag group of rebels – again of questionable origins – is trying to unseat a repugnant strongman that has never been a friend to America. The violence has captured headlines across the world.

But where is the U.S. interest? American freedom is not at stake; our allies are not in significant danger; we have no dog in this fight at all. Syria’s civil war is a conflict between the bad and the worse. Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels are trying to oust a terrorist-sponsoring, WMD-seeking goon. The best outcome for America is that each side simply drains itself of blood and treasure until both are spent.

Syria, like Libya, passes none of the tests Mr. Obama himself laid out. His own wars fail to meet his own standards, the standards by which he so cavalierly judged his opponents to be morally and strategically deficient.

Who’s dumb now?

Matt Cover is Content Editor for Rare. Follow him on Twitter: @MattCover.