Arab Uprising Vindicates Bush

A lot of people are calling for a US military intervention in Libya, which strikes Charles Krauthammer as odd, since the world so condemned the US for taking out Saddam Hussein. “Hussein’s evil was an order of magnitude beyond Gadhafi’s,” Krauthammer writes in the Washington Post. “Gadhafi is a capricious killer; Hussein was systematic.” The Baathist regime perpetrated a comprehensive national campaign of terror, torture, and mass murder. Barely armed rebels have Gadhafi on the ropes, but only US might could take out Hussein.

Indeed, it seems that these days “everyone is a convert to George W. Bush’s freedom agenda,” Krauthammer observes. Gone is the Obama administration’s proud “realism”—which led it to cut aid for democracy promotion in Egypt, among other things. Iraq supposedly turned the Middle East against us, but it’s the likes of Gadhafi and Ali Abdullah Saleh decrying America; protesters are “straining their eyes for America to help.” They’ve seen Iraq’s “purple-fingered exercises in free elections,” and they want the same. (More Charles Krauthammer stories.)