Did You Know...

**Written by Doug Powers

President Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner, launched an attack on another country while in another country, without the congressional approval that George W. Bush had and with only about half as many other countries on board. Obama seemed to feel this constituted enough of a moral high ground from which to take a jab at the former president.

John Hayward at Human Events:

Speaking in Chile [pronounced Chee-lay -- DP] to defend his decision to launch Operation Odyssey Dawn, President Obama couldn’t resist taking a swipe at George Bush, in a clumsy attempt to make himself look superior.

As reported by Fox News, the President declared: “In the past there have been times when the United States acted unilaterally or did not have full international support, and as a consequence typically it was the United States military that ended up bearing the entire burden.”

As the folks at Fox quickly pointed out, Bush actually had twice as many international allies for the invasion of Iraq as Obama has put together for his adventure in Libya.

Here are the lists of members of the international coalitions, Iraq vs. Libya:

[Source: US State Department]

Coalition Countries – Iraq – 2003

Afghanistan,
Albania
Australia
Azerbaijan
Bulgaria
Colombia
Czech Republic
Denmark
El Salvador
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Georgia
Hungary
Italy
Japan
South Korea
Latvia
Lithuania
Macedonia
Netherlands
Nicaragua
Philippines
Poland
Romania
Slovakia
Spain
Turkey
United Kingdom
Uzbekistan

Coalition – Libya – 2011

United States
France
United Kingdom
Italy
Canada
Belgium
Denmark
Norway
Qatar
Spain
Greece
Germany
Poland
Jordan
Morocco
United Arab Emirate

Team Obama often talks about what they “inherited” from Bush, but one of them was not over a dozen coalition nations — and that’s just got to be Bush’s fault. Either way, it’s certainly nothing worth bragging about. But these little slip-ups are bound to happen when the “blame Bush” switch is set to auto-pilot all the time.

Update: Maybe President Obama heard his list of coalition nations was several countries shorter than Bush’s, because he’s cutting short his Latin America trip by two hours to head back to Washington. Golf withdrawals?

**Written by Doug Powers

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