One imagines that had Obama been president at critical times we would never have intervened in Bosnia, freed Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, aided pro-Western democratic fighters in Central America or liberated Grenada. ~Jennifer Rubin

I know this is supposed to be an insult, but it’s an awfully strange selection of conflicts. In light of the last twenty years of endless conflict involving Iraq and the radicalizing effects of a prolonged U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, going to war against Iraq over the invasion of Kuwait seems like more of a cautionary tale against intervention than it is a brilliant example of enforcing collective security. Had the U.S. not aided the Contras, invaded Grenada, or intervened in Bosnia, would American security and interests have been harmed?

Had Reagan not backed the Contras for so many years, Nicaragua might be governed today by Daniel Ortega, and we wouldn’t want that. Oh, right, Nicaragua is once again governed by Daniel Ortega, and it’s remarkable how little that matters to American interests. I realize that Grenada has a near-mythical significance for some Republicans, and as far as American “small wars” in the Western Hemisphere go it is the least objectionable, but it also wasn’t very important. Had Reagan not intervened in Grenada, would anyone today look back on his administration and say, “I can’t believe he stood idly by and let Grenada turn communist!”?

Intervening in Bosnia is supposed to be counted as one of the “correct” interventions of the 1990s, and it is widely regarded as one that was delayed for too many years, but the merits of that intervention as far as American security was concerned were negligible if they existed at all. Bosnia today is hardly an inspiring model for the sort of political settlement that foreign interventions make possible. Had the U.S. never intervened in Bosnia, it is hard to imagine how the rest of Europe and the U.S. would have been worse off. Had there been no Bosnia intervention, there probably wouldn’t have been one in Kosovo, either, and I am failing to see how this would have been a problem for the U.S.

No lament about administration decisions would be complete without the required shout-out to the Green movement that Obama could have magically delivered from the violence of government crackdowns by wishing:

It never dawns on them, apparently, that defeat of anti-totalitarian movements becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy [sic] when the U.S. slinks away from a confrontation.

What might occur to them is that it doesn’t make sense to support the Iranian opposition when Iranian opposition activists say that they don’t want American government backing. That doesn’t mean that it would have made sense to support them had their leaders requested assistance, but it ought to lay to rest this idiotic claim that the administration contributed to the Green movement’s defeat.