The word “Iraq” does not appear in the address, yet again and again the president flails out against that war. That is his opinion and his policy. Fine. Elections have consequences, as the saying goes. But Oslo is a horribly inappropriate venue for such criticisms. If he wants to argue with other Americans, let him do it in America, not in the course of accepting an award from some non-Americans for joining with them in their criticism of other Americans.

It’s human nature to prefer compliments to criticism, flattery to dissent. In that respect, Barack Obama is a very human man. But here he has gone too far: He has allowed an international organization to exploit his weakness to drive a wedge between this president and half his country – the half, ironically, whose support he most needs to sustain his ongoing foreign policy. ~David Frum

Via Conor

Conor has some fun comparing Bush’s attacks on past U.S. Near East policy to Obama’s allegedly “graceless” remarks criticizing the invasion of Iraq, but that doesn’t address some of the larger problems with Frum’s response. It has been many years since half of Americans supported the war in Iraq, but even if we take Frum to mean the roughly half of the country that voted for McCain this complaint doesn’t make any sense. Obama hasn’t allowed a wedge to be driven between himself and these people. If criticizing the Iraq war is so unacceptable to the latter, the wedge between them and Obama has existed for years. Then again, Bush hardly endeared himself to most of his countrymen when he whined about so-called appeasement in his Knesset speech in the closing year of his second term. Everyone at the time could see that he was making a not-so-veiled attack on Obama’s proposed diplomatic engagement with “rogue” authoritarian regimes, and he was free to do so, but I’m pretty sure that Frum et al. would not have taken seriously arguments that Bush had allowed a foreign parliament to drive a wedge between himself and half his country.

The thing I find far harder to understand is why Frum objects to that particular statement from the Oslo speech. Obama said:

The world rallied around America after the 9/11 attacks, and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense. Likewise, the world recognized the need to confront Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait – a consensus that sent a clear message to all about the cost of aggression. Furthermore, America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we don’t, our action can appear arbitrary, and undercut the legitimacy of future intervention – no matter how justified.

Leave aside how Obama reconciles this statement in his own mind with his endorsement of the bombing of Serbia, which was as arbitrary, illegal and wrong as an intervention could be (and which certainly did not have any global consensus behind it), and look at his final sentence. According to what he’s saying in the Oslo speech, the main problem with invading Iraq wasn’t necessarily that it wasn’t justified, but that the invasion lacked global consensus support and went outside the “rules of the road.” If you didn’t know Obama’s position on Iraq from before this speech, you would conclude that he would have had no objection to the invasion if it had commanded broader international support. This is a revised version of the old chestnut that the Iraq war was bad because it was “unilateralist,” and not because it was aggressive or unjust.

All that Obama is saying here is that operating within the framework of international institutions and their rules makes it possible to continue to engage in military interventions in the future and that the invasion of Iraq jeopardized the future of interventionism when the last administration failed to abide by those rules. Supporters of military intervention should be quite happy with this statement. Obama here not only reserves the right to order new interventions, but he has effectively recast his opposition to the war in Iraq in terms that do not attack the merits or wisdom of the invasion. Instead, he states merely that the war was launched in the wrong way, and that this will make it harder to start future wars humanitarian works of mercy. Once again, Obama commits himself to the same ambitious and interventionist foreign policy that he has advocated for years, and this is received as either some striking change from his previous statements, as Peter Feaver would have it, or it is ignored entirely as it is in Frum’s response. One wonders if Frum has any idea what Obama’s “ongoing foreign policy” actually is if he cannot see that this statement is as strongly interventionist as anything Obama has said since his election.