The president’s speech on the Iranian deal, delivered at American University on Wednesday, was vintage Obama, as in a compendium of demagoguery, historical revisionism and outright lying. Nothing emphasized that more forcefully than the portion of the Obama’s speech addressing the war in Iraq. Obama insisted U.S. involvement there was the result of “a mindset characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy, a mindset that put a premium on unilateral U.S. action over the painstaking work of building international consensus, a mindset that exaggerated threats beyond what the intelligence supported.”
That is litany of falsehoods. First, it was a complete lack of military action against a rapidly metastasizing Islamist terror threat, studiously ignored during the Clinton years, that gave Osama bin Laden the ability to plan and execute the 9/11 attacks from the terrorist sanctuary provided to al Qaeda by the Taliban government in Afghanistan. That would be the same Bill Clinton, along with numerous other Democrats, including Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Al Gore who provided ample incentive for the invasion of Iraq, characterizing Saddam Hussein and his burgeoning WMD program as a mortal threat to world peace and stability. Moreover, as David Horowitz and Ben Johnson explain in their book“Party of Defeat,” every Democrat who voted to authorize the use of military force in Iraq—including Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Chuck Schumer—had access to the same National Intelligence Estimate that Bush and Republicans did.
It was a report, despite years of Democratic lying, that ultimately turned out to be correct. Twoseparate reports revealed the existence of large stocks of chemical weapons contained in the Al Muthanna Chemicals Weapons Complex that was overrun by ISIS last year. And in 2008, after Democrats had campaigned for years on the slogan, “Bush Lied, people died,” the New York Times reported that “hundreds of tons of natural uranium” had been removed from Iraq’s main nuclear site and moved to Canada.
As Horowitz and Johnson explain, none of it mattered to a Democratic Party intent on undermining Bush and the war, an effort driven by pure partisan politics arising from the reality that anti-war Democrat Howard Dean vaulted to the top of the pack of Democratic presidential contenders in the 2004 campaign. Without missing a beat, presidential candidates John Edwards and John Kerry suddenly decided they were against the same war they had previously supported, and their Democrat colleagues embraced that defeatist change of heart with all the gusto they could muster. No one more so than Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton. Even before the surge that turned the tide of the Iraq war decisively in America’s favor was completed, Reid declared the war to be “lost.” Less than six months later, Clinton, with an eye towards her own 2008 presidential ambitions, attacked the integrity of Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus, insisting reports on that success “require the willing suspension of disbelief.”
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