Tuesday, March 22, 2011

WELL, IF WE'RE GOING TO BE RIDICULOUS ABOUT THIS....

Fox Nation huffily declares that "Bush Had 2 Times More Coalition Partners in Iraq Than Obama Has in Libya." Bush's thirty-nation list, of course, included such global powers as Azerbaijan, Estonia, Latvia, and Uzbekistan, and didn't include the likes of, y'know, Germany and France.

But if we're going to play games like this, in the run-up to the war, how many coalition partners did Bush attract per week? The Libyan uprising started just about a month ago and Obama's coalition is fifteen nations. When do you date the start of the "Iraq crisis" the Bushies manufactured? The Axis of Evil speech, fourteen months before the war began? The Battle of Tora Bora, a month before that? The first administration meetings on Iraq regime change, mere days after Bush's inauguration, and more than two years before the Iraq War started? By that standard, Bush barely acquired one coalition partner a month! Obama obtained more than three partners a week!

I'm reminded of the 2000 electoral maps that measured Bush's vote by geography, as if winning a county with more jackrabbits than people was the equivalent of winning a county full of apartment buildings.

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