Wow.  Excellent work.  Devastating.

In July of `04, Barack Obama, "I'm not privy to Senate intelligence reports. What would I have done? I don't know," in terms of how you would have voted on the war. And then this: "There's not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George Bush's position at this stage." That was July of `04. And this: "I think" there's "some room for disagreement in that initial decision to vote for authorization of the war." It doesn't seem that you are firmly wedded against the war, and that you left some wiggle room that, if you had been in the Senate, you may have voted for it. ("Meet the Press," 2004, via MyDD, Nov. 11, 2007)

What about Obama's speeches on Iraq in the U.S. Senate? "[H]e did not give a speech devoted to Iraq for 11 months, and waited 16 months to give his first floor speech dedicated to Iraq, which happened to express his opposition to Senator John Kerry's troop withdrawal plan. ..."

What about Obama's voting record in the U.S. Senate on Iraq? TPM Election Central painstakingly compared every single vote on Iraq by Sens. Clinton and Obama, since Obama entered the Senate. Senators Clinton and Obama voted identically, except once: On the confirmation of "General George Casey to be Chief of Staff for the Army, held just this past February. Hillary voted against confirmation, while Obama voted to confirm."  ...

There's more where that came from here.

this is snark, right? John mccain being right about the war all along?

if it isn't you really shouldn't be expressing ideas, because they aren't worth a bucket of warm piss.

what? and it's recommended? wow, mydd has really gone downhill.

1. Not quite. Obama never said that Iraq had Nuclear Weapons or was "a Nuclear threat". He did not "believe all the same intelligence" here,  or go around repeating the phony Dick Cheney "Al-Qaeda" talking-points,  the way that Hillary did (and even still does).   He just simply acknowledged that Hussein had a bad track record, while simultaneously drawing very, very different conclusions about what the policy consequences needed to be.   That is to his credit.

   
   

2. You have already destroyed your own false premise here (claiming Obama 'was wrong'), by posting the actual statement that Obama made:   "But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors."   This, of course, was indeed 100% accurate here, and the responsible & competent analysis to make.  

   Obama was correct here.    There was no military threat (and there was no weapons to substantiate the concept of an Iraq military threat).   Iraq was, in fact, very militarily weak (not 'a threat' whatsoever), and even Colin Powell himself admitted that much, back in January of 2001 (before he participated in Bush's and Hillary's campaign of lies and propaganda). Powell had made a statement, in Jan 2001, saying that Hussein "could not project any military power against his neighbors". So, Obama made the right judgement here.   You can't twist that around now!   Everyone knows now that there was indeed no Iraq military threat, and Obama got it right.

   
   

3. This is just sad, desperate nonsense.  You claim that Obama said that Iraq was 'a threat', but we have already seen from the prior statements that Obama rejected that propaganda (about Iraq as a threat), and said the exact opposite.  You can't have it both ways here.  Obama said that Iraq was not a threat to the United States.  Then, because Obama correctly opposed  an illegal Invasion & Occupation, and gave very sound & practicle reasons why this was indeed reckless and destructive policy (which it was), you then try and portray Obama as unpatriotic. (-?-)    This is insane.   You have zero credibility whatsoever here.   You make a laughably absurd statement that:   "A President Obama would have responded to Pearl Harbor by saying "Screw it, let the Japanese have their fun".    This is sad and pathetic.    If that's all you got here, you ain't got nothing.   You have no valid argument here.   First of all, Japan directly attacked us, while Iraq never did anything to us and never attacked anyone for 12 years, so there is no comparison here between the two whatsoever.    Secondly, we did not Invade and occupy an unarmed and innocent Nation during WWII.   So, it is illogical to say that because we fought back against Japan in WWII, this somehow means that it is okay to attack, invade, occupy, and torture a weak, unarmed Nation that never attacked us in the first place.

   We all know that there was no honest justification here for the United States to invade Iraq and slaughter 1.5 million innocent people.    Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11.    There were not 'a threat' here of any true significance and no proof of any weapons was ever at any time clearly established.   The hostile U.S. Iraq seizure was about Oil, profits, and building 14 U.S. Military Bases in the Middle-East.   Obama was correct for opposing such reckless, destructive, and unjustified policy.

   
   

4. Finally, even if Iraq had weapons, the mere possession of weapons is not an act of violence. Starting the War is the act of violence.  John Kennedy showed the correct way to handle a provocation during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.  Kennedy had established proof that the weapons really existed, and then rejected the pressure to invade and worked out a diplomatic solution - thus savings millions of lives.  This is what you call leadership.  Obama has already demonstrated the same calm, cool, responsible judgement, true leadership,  and he refused the reckless course of action that his opponents were too stupid, or dishonest, or to cowardly to stand up against.  

_____

History has proven that Obama made the correct and competent judgements.
Hillary Clinton and her dishonest Neocon supporters can lie and lie all they want to, but they cannot change that history.

How many times do you plan to write the exact same diary?  Horrible arguments don't become good just because you repeat them.

You could drive a truck through the gaping holes in this diary's logic.  Point 2 starts out by quoting Obama saying that Iraq is not a threat.  Then point 3 starts off: "aha, so Obama recognized Iraq was a threat!"  No, no, he didn't, as you'd know if you had read your own diary.

When you found yourself saying that Obama would have done nothing in response to 9/11, you should have stopped right there and realized you were writing a rant that only made sense in your own head.  The argument that "if you opposed Iraq, you would have opposed Afghanistan too, and you would have opposed retaliating for Pearl Harbor for good measure" is just astounding.  It's like something I would read at Blogs 4 Bush.

What I find most remarkable is that as many times as you've posted this identical argument, you still can't rid yourself of the unsupportable canard that everyone knew the war would be a long, hard slog.  Not only was the war sold by the Bush Administration as something that would be measured in weeks rather than months (or years), but Donald Rumsfeld threatened to fire anyone who presented him with a plan for an extended postwar occupation, so confident was he that no such occupation would be necessary.  Yet in your retelling, the American people realized as one that the administration was full of shit and that we'd be in Iraq for years.

Amazingly, at a time when the administration was trying to mislead the public into thinking that this war would be finished quickly and easily, your harshest criticism of Obama is aimed at the fact that he tried to expose this lie!  For the offense of making the true statement that even the good scenarios for Iraq would involve "an occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences," something that virtually no one in either party was explaining to the public, you smear Obama as unfit to command.

How strange it must be to inhabit your world.

We could NOT contain Iraq indefinitely

No need to wait indefinitely.  The Soviet Union, an enormously bigger and tougher nut to crack than Saddam, crumbled into the dustbin of history, after a mere handful of decades.