Barack Obama isn't just a big fan of Ronald Reagan; he's also all swoony over George H.W. Bush's foreign policy in general, and the 1991 assault on Iraq in particular. Here's what he said last night in the debate:
SENATOR OBAMA: I think that when you look back at George H.W. Bush's foreign policy, it was a wise foreign policy. And how we executed the Gulf War, how we managed the transition out of the Cold War, I think, is an example of how we can get bipartisan agreement.
This is just a reiteration of trash he spewed last month:
OBAMA: You know, one of the things that I think George H.W. Bush doesn't get enough credit for was his foreign policy team and the way that he helped negotiate the end of the Cold War and prosecuted the Gulf War. That cost us 20 billion dollars. That's all it cost. It was extremely successful. I think there were a lot of very wise people.
What a change it will be to have a president who feels that the major criterion for a war's "success" is whether or not it can be executed within a reasonable budget. Doesn't it fill you with hope?
We should also note that slithering among these "wise people" that Obama so admires was Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense. And part of their wisdom was to deliberately attack Iraq's civilian infrastructure, in order to accelerate the effects of sanctions (there's certainly no doubt that that strategy was "extremely successful," measured by the number of Iraqi corpses). Obama didn't tout the wisdom of using the sanctions to degrade Iraq's water supply to the point where it would cause "increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease," but that's understandable since much of that policy was carried out by a Democrat—and so it wouldn't serve his purpose of kissing Republican ass to burnish his bipartisan pose.
My own opinion is that the Gulf War would have been "extremely successful" if it hadn't happened at all. But then, I'm not a Democrat, and especially not a Democratic presidential candidate.
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