On Thursday, President Obama said in his speech in Cairo that "Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice", and that "events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible."
Today, President Obama visited the Buchenwald concentration camp with German chancellor Angela Merkel and Buchenwald survivor Elie Wiesel, who spoke movingly of the day he watched his father die at the camp:
"The day he died was one of the darkest in my life. He became sick, weak, and I was there. I was there when he suffered. I was there when he asked for help, for water. I was there to receive his last words. But I was not there when he called for me, although we were in the same block; he on the upper bed and I on the lower bed. He called my name, and I was too afraid to move. All of us were. And then he died. I was there, but I was not there."
Wiesel went on to say that the world still has not learned the lessons of Buchenwald: "Had the world learned, there would have been no Cambodia and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia."
In a March 2003 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, entitled "Peace Isn't Possible in Evil's Face," Mr. Wiesel wrote, "We have a moral obligation to intervene where evil is in control. Today, that place is Iraq." While Mr. Wiesel understood the inherent evil of Saddam's regime and the need for civilized nations to intervene, then Illinois State Senator Obama was describing Saddam Hussein as a "brutal man," a "ruthless man," and a "man who butchers his own people to secure his own power." But none of that meant the United States should get involved -- according to Obama, the Iraq War was a "dumb war," a "rash war," and a "cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne."
One would hope that the president's time spent with Mr. Wiesel today at Buchenwald will cause him to reassess his view of Iraq and his seeming lack of interest in those oppressed around the world, whether they are suffering in a Chinese prison cell or being killed or raped in Darfur, but perhaps such hope is too dumb, rash, and cynical.
