Methinks Ms Rubin's Washington Post essay doth protest to much, in her desperate effort to coyly point out liberal inconsistencies, she compares Obama's Libyan action to the wrong war and the wrong Bush.

GHWB invaded Iraq with broad international support, and with strictly limited military objectives which he scrupulously honored, even though it was obvious at the time that Saddam was destined to give us more trouble in the future. This is why I have always supported that action, even though I often disagreed with Bush I on many other issues. To put it bluntly, he did the right thing.

The Cheney-Rumsfeld adventure was a cynical attempt to gain a geopolitical advantage in the region by creating a puppet state friendly to the US with a border on every single major player in the middle east; a keystone state that threatened all our enemies and provided comfort to all our friends in the region. It also had the advantage of being an oil producer which would allow it to finance the costs of its own defeat and occupation and make us essentially independent of Arab oil blackmail. Iraq controlled the Straits, too, as would we if we took over. Not only was regime change and occupation the mission from the start, there were no military limits or broad international support. Our invasion was a gambit to secure strategic position and economic advantage. Wars fought for this reason are naked aggression, pure and simple.

It is true, Saddam was an SOB loathed by his neighbors and his people, but the same can be said for almost every leader in the region, including our allies. That alone could not be used as an excuse to convince the American people of the necessity for invasion. Instead, an elaborate charade about WMDs and Al-Quaeda links had to be constructed out of the flimsiest of evidence, a fraud that we now know, from the testimony of its perpetrators, was not even fully a legitimate requirement for military action and may have indeed been a tissue of lies from the start. The desire for and the planning of this aggression had been a Bush White House wet dream since before 9/11.

The long term strategic failures of the war will be around to haunt us for a long time. We lost credibility with our friends, justified the fears of neutrals, and provided ammunition to our enemies. Iran now has no counterweight in the region, Iraq will never be a dependable ally, our financial costs and oil independence will never be secured by the expropriation of Iraqi crude. Our legitimate presence in Afghanistan was undermined and victory there postponed, perhaps forever as we squandered our initial gains there, and the country was deliberately and maliciously split on partisan lines in a shameless and cynical attempt to justify the war on strictly ideological grounds.

To put it bluntly, it was the wrong thing to do.