Ben Johnson, FloydReports.com

Anyone seeking to know why Barack Obama really committed U.S. troops to Libya’s civil war can begin by dismissing virtually everything he said in his speech Monday night out of hand. For instance, Obama claimed he initiated this military action for humanitarian reasons. Failing “our responsibilities to our fellow human beings…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.”

However, in July 2007 the Associated Press reported, “Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.”

Consider: in July 2007, Obama was discussing a war already in progress, one Osama bin Laden called “the most important and serious issue for the whole world today.” America’s most wanted terrorist called Baghdad “the capital of the caliphate” and said the Iraq war will result in, “either victory and glory or misery and humiliation.” Yet just as the surge and a series of agreements with northern tribal leaders began pacifying the country, Barack Obama said the Helpless Giant should turn the country over to the jihadists and stand by as they systematically exterminated our allies. (As president, he has conspicuously failed to take his own advice.) Today, he claims our vital national security interests demand that we take sides in an internecine feud between factions of pro-terrorist Muslims.

Why does the president really support the action in Libya?

1. It serves no U.S. interests.

For most Americans, the fact that a war in no way promotes U.S. interests would be a prima facie argument against initiating it. For left-wingers, the less our nation has to gain from a war, the more apt they are to support it. Liberals are afflicted with irrational guilt over privileges they believe Americans enjoy due to exploitation and militarism. These impulses can only be quieted through irrational acts of self-sacrifice on behalf of those who disregard, dislike, or actively hate us. Thus, liberals view “humanitarian” wars as a means of righting the wrongs their ancestors perpetrated over scores of generations – consider it a form of “redistribution of bloodshed.”

Consider Barack Obama’s statement that “as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.” That eerily echoed a section of George W. Bush’s opening salvo against Iraq in his 2002 State of the Union Address….

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