Obama's moral equivalence

Barack Obama seems to be drawing a parallel between our invasion of Iraq and Russia's invasion of Georgia.

Democrat Barack Obama scolded Russia again on Wednesday for invading another country’s sovereign territory while adding a new twist: the United States, he said, should set a better example on that front, too.

The Illinois senator’s opposition to the Iraq war, which his comment clearly referenced, is well known. But this was the first time the Democratic presidential candidate has made a comparison between the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Russia’s recent military activity in Georgia.

“We’ve got to send a clear message to Russia and unify our allies,” Obama told a crowd of supporters in Virginia. “They can’t charge into other countries. Of course it helps if we are leading by example on that point.”

Does he really see an equivalence between our invading a bloody dictatorship to establish a democratic government and Russia invading a democracy to extend their power and establish a puppet government?

John Hinderaker sums this up perfectly.

So our "charging into" Iraq--with dozens of allies, supported by a U.N. resolution, as a last resort after six months of build-up and negotiations, to unseat one of the cruelest dictators of modern times who had twice invaded neighboring states, was in violation of more than a dozen U.N. resolutions and was responsible for the deaths of something like two million people, who was shooting at American aircraft and had tried to assassinate a former President of the United States, in Obama's childish mind, was just like Russia's "charging into" Georgia, which resembles Saddam's Iraq in no respect. And, of course, we invaded a horrifying charnel-house so as to establish a democracy, whereas Russia invaded a peaceful democracy that it wants to re-incorporate into its empire.

Put this example of Obama's blame-America attitude together with his answer on evil to Rick Warren.

OBAMA: Evil does exist. I mean, I think we see evil all the time. We see evil in Darfur. We see evil, sadly, on the streets of our cities. We see evil in parents who viciously abuse their children. I think it has to be confronted. It has to be confronted squarely, and one of the things that I strongly believe is that, now, we are not going to, as individuals, be able to erase evil from the world. That is God’s task, but we can be soldiers in that process, and we can confront it when we see it.

Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for to us have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil, because a lot of evil’s been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.

Notice how quickly he pivots to discuss evil in America and to intimate that the United States has perpetrated evil when we were confronting evil.

And also notice that Obama seems to think that Putin would change his behavior if we had acted differently in Iraq. Does he really think that anything we did in Iraq would have served as an example for what Putin wanted to do anyway? Is he aware of Putin's history with Chechnya? If he honestly thinks that we provided the example that allowed Putin to invade Georgia and that a more humble foreign policy would deter Putin from exerting his dominance over the former Soviet republics then Obama is even more clueless on foreign policy and the reality of the world we are living in than I imagined.