The left’s worst nightmare has come true. Obama has morphed into George W. Bush.

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Way back in 2002, then-Senator Barack Obama had a lot to say about the Iraq war.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income — to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear — I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN 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.

And the key argument against going to war in Iraq?

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States…

So going to war against Saddam Hussein was “dumb” because Hussein posed no imminent or direct threat to the US. Obama doctrine then was we don’t go to war when there is no imminent threat.

In 2003 George W. Bush said

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

On 2002 Nancy Pelosi said:

I have seen no evidence or intelligence that suggests that Iraq indeed poses an imminent threat to our nation.

Flash forward to today:

Obama: ISIS is not a direct or imminent threat. Head of DHS Jeh Johnson:

Hours before Barack Obama is to announce an expanded military campaign against Islamic State (Isis) militants, his senior homeland security official assessed that the organization poses no imminent danger to America at home.

“At present, we have no credible information that [Isis] is planning to attack the homeland of the United States,” Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson told a Manhattan audience on Wednesday.

Johnson is the latest in a string of top US officials to concede that the jihadist army currently in control of much of eastern Syria and northern and central Iraq is not targeting the US at present, despite beheading two captured American journalists.

If ISIS is not a direct or imminent threat, why are we bombing them? Does this not qualify as a “dumb war”? Here’s what Obama said about ISIS:

He said that ISIS poses the most direct threat to Iraq, Syria, and the broader Middle East, but “if left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region, including to the United States.”

So in other words, we should not wait for the ISIS threat to become imminent. Golly, I know I’ve heard that argument somewhere before.

It doesn’t end there. George Bush sought and received from Congress an Authorization to Use Military Force and won approval from Congress for the wars both in Iraq and Afghanistan. in Iraq. Two months ago Barack Obama demanded that Congress rescind the AUMF.

The Obama administration is calling on Congress to fully repeal the war authorization in Iraq to ensure that no U.S. troops return to the country, which is under siege by the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS).

White House national security adviser Susan Rice petitioned Speaker of the House John Boehner (R., Ohio) in a letter Friday to completely repeal the war authorization, officially known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq, or AUMF.

Rice’s letter was sent as Congress just hours before it approved a resolution opposing U.S. military intervention in Iraq, where the terrorist group ISIL claims to have established an Islamic caliphate.

“We believe a more appropriate and timely action for Congress to take is the repeal of the outdated 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq,” Rice wrote, according to a copy of her letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

If you know anything, you know that Barack Obama’s words have no lasting value. Today Obama leans heavily that AUMF.

The administration’s embrace of the 2002 Iraq war authorization through this obscure citation is awkward because it paints the expanding anti-ISIL campaign as a successor to President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq 12 years ago. Last year at the United Nations General Assembly, Obama spoke of working “to end a decade of war” and cited the withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq as a part of that effort. On Wednesday he’ll address the General Assembly the day after having essentially extended that effort.

In addition, Obama’s reliance on the measure is jarring because National Security Adviser Susan Rice wrote to House Speaker John Boehner in July to urge Congress to rescind the law. She called the Iraq War resolution “outdated” and said the White House had no plans to rely on it.

“The Iraq AUMF is no longer used for any U.S. Government activities and the Administration fully supports its repeal,” she wrote.

Barack Obama has morphed into George W. Bush but without the honesty, integrity or competency. The left’s worst nightmare has been realized.

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There’s a lot of morphing going on lately.
Obama becoming hawkish.
But seriously, if we had not started to fight ISIS now, it was going to have a safe haven in both Iraq and Syria.
Way back when Osama had his safe haven in Afghanistan he had to physically train and plot then send out those 9-11-01 bombers.
By going after ISIS’ home bases Obama is telling would-be new recruits that there will be no where to run if they act like their Caliphate exists.
Obama is poking a stick in ISIS’ Caliphate dream.
Sure they will scurry into the shadows and hide like cockroaches, but the damage to their egos will be unrepairable.
A caliphate flag with no caliphate to go with it is massively destructive to ISIS.

There is a recent historical parallel……
Israel did this by continuing to go after the various replacement leaders in Hamas until they went into hiding.
A ”leader” in hiding has ZERO charisma.
It worked to end the fighting for several years.
From Ahmed Yassin’s death in 2004 until years later.
Too bad they couldn’t keep doing it in recent years.
Hamas keeps its leaders in different places all the time.
Israel could only find secondary leaders in recent fighting.

The trouble is that we are not in the ISIS fight to win. We are only there to wag the dog; air strikes will soon end, with the claim that ISIS has been degraded, at no cost to the US. This will be a lie, as have all the previous policy positions of the regime.
Just ask who is dropping the bombs.
Our “allies” are just in for the photo-op, and are doing nothing I can see.
The real war is against climate change, where I WON really has his heart in the fight. He has no weapons to use, he has no idea of what science is available to him, but he believes with all his heart in carbon pollution. Too bad he does not know that all organic chemistry is built on carbon. Oh, well. A true idiot is true to his ideology and the facts be damned.
But the 30% will love him forever, because he is, well, black.
The damnation of being a servant of a lesser god.
The curse of being judged exclusively by the color of your skin.
Ugh.

developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity.

Uh, excuse me? Are you saying there WAS a threat there?

Some people really don’t want to see any difference between deciding to invade Iraq and having to deal with the predicted consequences of that invasion over a decade later. Those differences seem so obvious that I can think of no other reason than an unwillingness to see.

There are only so many ways of dealing with pure evil. Now that Obama is not sitting in a safe senate seat, the view looks a lot different. I believe he will not be nearly as successful as Bush, but there may be a smart conservative come into office in 2017 and pull Obama’s chestnuts from the fire.

@Greg:

What a convoluted statement. The situation with which we are dealing now is a direct consequence of Obama’s insistence of pulling out of Iraq too soon, against the advice of his military commanders.

Greg,

What Pete said.

Your blaming the 2003 invasion is like blaming today’s ISIS crisis on the First Gulf War; or Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait which triggered the first Gulf War.

What would you suppose all these Islamists, Jihadis, and Mujahids would be doing today, anyway, if not for OIF? Was OIF also a trigger for the Syrian Civil War? If not for Syria, what would all these foreign fighters be up to? C’mon….there are a lot of moving parts; but how can you hold Bush responsible for today’s events and not share that responsibility with the man who’s been president for these last few years? Bush can no longer exercise his influence upon the world as leader of the free world. Obama has occupied this position since 2009.

And please don’t tell me you are still sticking by your “Obama would have left behind an overseas contingency force if only his hands weren’t tied down by SoFA signed by Bush”.