l****z 发帖数: 29846 | 1 Wednesday, March 30, 2011
By Matt Cover
(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama, as an Illinois state senator in
2002, said that using military force to topple a murderous dictator amounted
to a “dumb war” and should be opposed.
The “dumb war” Obama was criticizing was the planned invasion of Iraq and
the murderous dictator was its leader, Saddam Hussein. Obama, speaking at an
anti-war rally in Chicago on Oct. 2, 2002 said that while Saddam was a
brutal tyrant, that was not enough to justify using military force to remove
him from power.
“Now, let me be clear – I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein,” said
Obama in his speech. “He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who
butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied U.
N. resolutions, thwarted U.N. inspection teams, developed chemical and
biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world,
and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.”
"... After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the
dust and the tears, I supported this administration's pledge to hunt down
and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance,
and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from
happening again," said Obama. "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."
Obama argued that deposing Saddam militarily was not necessary, because Iraq
posed no “direct threat” to the United States. Obama also cited Iraq’s
weakened economy and the fact that it was still possible to contain Saddam’
s aggression, repudiating the Bush administration’s rationale that Saddam
posed too great a threat to American interests and his own people to be left
in power.
“But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the
United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles,
that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength, and that in
concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the
way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history,”
said Sen. Obama.
However, as president of the United States, Obama has discounted those same
arguments he once made against using military force against brutal dictators.
In his March 28, 2011 speech justifying his decision to attack the
government of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, Obama cited Gadhafi’s record
of brutality, saying that allowing Gadhafi to continue his brutality was not
an option.
“Qaddafi declared he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people,” said
President Obama. “He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to
door to inflict punishment. In the past, we have seen him hang civilians in
the streets, and kill over a thousand people in a single day.
“Now we saw regime forces on the outskirts of the city,” Obama said. “We
knew that if we waited, if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly
the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated
across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
Gadhafi, apparently unlike Saddam, needed to be stopped because he would
kill his own people to maintain his own power, an act that this time posed a
threat to America’s “interests and values,” Obama said.
“But when our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility
to act,” said Obama. “That’s what happened in Libya over the course of
these last six weeks.”
Obama, in his 2002 speech, said that instead of deposing Saddam through
force, America should “fight” for democratic reforms in countries such as
Saudi Arabia and Egypt, stronger international nuclear safeguards, and
energy independence.
“Those are the battles that we need to fight,” Obama said in 2002. “Those
are the battles that we willingly join – the battles against ignorance and
intolerance, corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.”
By 2011, however, Obama had come to endorse the use of military power to
enforce America’s “responsibility as a [global] leader” arguing that the
United States was “different” and therefore had no other choice but to
attack Libya.
“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,” he said. “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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