Here’s an excellent article by Andrew McCarthy that skewers Obama and the left (with a small dig at RINO Lindsay Graham along the way) for their hypocrisy in dealing with Libya and Gaddafi vs. Iraq and Bush. I will quote his piece at some length:

Just to review what happened here: Qaddafi…was not “brought to justice”…In “leading from behind,” our government went rogue ”” to the evident satisfaction of the formerly antiwar Left. Obama claimed to be keeping the peace and protecting civilians while waging an unauthorized offensive war against Qaddafi’s government ”” a regime with which the United States was at peace; a regime with which the United States had made a great show of arriving at friendly relations; a regime to which the United States (urged on by such official emissaries as Sen. Lindsey Graham) had provided foreign aid, including assistance to prop up Qaddafi’s military; a regime to which the Obama administration, including Secretary Clinton’s State Department, had stepped up American taxpayer subsidies ”” including aid to Qaddafi’s military and contributions to charitable enterprises managed by Qaddafi’s children.

Protecting civilians? Please. We jumped in as a partisan on the side of the Islamists, who sported violent jihadists in their ranks and among their commanders ”” including al-Qaeda operatives whose dossiers included a stint at Guantanamo Bay and the recruitment of jihadists to fight a terror war against American troops in Iraq. While NATO targeted Qaddafi, the rebels rounded up black Africans, savagely killing many…When the Islamists finally began seizing territory, which they could not have done without NATO, they raided weapons depots. In Qaddafi’s Libya, his regime controlled the materiel; once the “rebels” swept in, weapons started going out ”” to other Islamists, like al-Qaeda in Northwest Africa and Hamas in Gaza.

And now that the Islamists have won, the first order of business, naturally, was to install sharia ”” Islam’s politico-legal framework that oppresses non-Muslims, women, homosexuals, and apostates. To install sharia, by the way, is the reason jihadists engage in violence ”” it is the prerequisite for Islamizing a society…

Qaddafi had last attacked the United States almost a quarter-century ago. Before that, he’d endured punishing retaliation for his Reagan-era terror attacks. The Bush 43 administration had declared these hostilities settled. The two governments resolved outstanding claims ”” much to the chagrin of those of us outraged by the moral equivalence drawn between Qaddafi’s terrorist aggression and President Reagan’s righteous response…Qaddafi abandoned his advanced weapons programs and began providing what the Bush and Obama administrations regarded as vital intelligence ”” vital, no doubt, because Libya is rife with Islamists who despise America and the West…[A]s the State Department put it in 2008, Libya had become “an increasingly valuable partner against terrorism.”

In the last several years, the Libyan regime never even threatened, much less attacked, American interests. Qaddafi spoke glowingly of Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and of President Obama, the Bush and Obama administrations embraced him and supported his regime. There was nothing close to a casus belli for the United States to launch a war against his government. The rationalization about the regime attacking civilians is nonsense: Qaddafi never stopped repressing Libyans in the years we were allied with him, and our aid to him only increased; Libya is a brutal society in which Qaddafi’s demise will not stop the internecine savagery; and we don’t intervene when hostile governments in Iran, Syria, China, Russia, and elsewhere repress their citizens.

Yet, President Obama invaded without congressional authorization ”” just consultations with the Arab League and a Security Council resolution that called for a no-fly zone to protect civilians, not for war against Qaddafi or regime change. Even as Obama paid lip-service to this charade, promising Americans there would be no U.S. “boots on the ground,” he dispatched covert intelligence operatives to guide the Islamists…

Qaddafi’s escape from his last holdout was thus cut off by NATO airstrikes. Trapped and hidden in a sewer, he was dragged out and brutalized ”” not for intelligence, but for sport. There is video here if you can stomach it. What NATO abetted was not a military capture. It was an assassination. We will be worse off that it happened. And the way it happened should sicken us.

It has occurred to me that, except for the fact that in Libya the US has been acting under the aegis of a US-dominated NATO rather than with a US-dominated coalition of allies as in Iraq, the invasion of Iraq was far more justified than that of Libya, for many of the reasons so ably stated by McCarthy. And yet, as we know, much (although not all) of the left defends Obama’s actions in the former while excoriating and reviling Bush’s in the latter.

Whether or not WMDs were ever found in Iraq, Saddam Hussein had done worse—to his people, his neighbors, and the UN—than Gaddafi ever did, and he did it far more recently prior to the US invasion. What’s more, Saddam had only been a supposed US “ally” briefly, back in the 80s in the war against Iran, on the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” but Gaddafi had (as McCarthy points out) been recently embraced by the US as a reformed sinner.

I am not saying Gaddafi shouldn’t have been deposed, although McCarthy goes so far as to say just that. I’m saying it should not have been done in this manner, and it most definitely should not be accompanied by continued criticism of Bush’s action in Iraq, which was a model of rectitude in comparison. After all, Saddam had continually and brazenly defied UN sanctions. He was not a US ally. He had committed genocide on the Kurds of his own country, and murdered countless other citizens of Iraq. Bush went to the UN for approval before the invasion, as well as to the US Congress, and got it. After the war, Saddam was tried, convicted, and executed by the Iraqis, not lynched by a mob.

And—very importantly to this neo-neocon—Bush was at least somewhat committed to the US sticking around to manage the aftermath of the invasion. That this was done poorly, especially at first, and that the task was far more difficult than the administration had naively expected it to be, does not alter the fact that there was at least a commitment to do it, and that in the end (post-surge), its efficiency and effectiveness improved dramatically.

Not so for Libya. You might say that, paradoxically, Obama is much more of a pure neocon in Libya (at least as the term is popularly although incorrectly defined) than Bush ever was in Iraq, since Obama seems to have a much lower threshold for military intervention. As for my own neocon persuasion, it comes with the following restrictions that appear to be lacking in the Obama brand: (1) support for liberal democracy that preserves human rights, not just democracy; (2) some responsibility for the aftermath of any war started in its name and in which the US participates, in order to give (1) the best chance of occurring; and (3) the need to determine what a side stands for before supporting it militarily.

[NOTE: It has long been great sport for the left to demonize neocons after setting up a strawman as to what they believe. But if you really want to know more about what neocons actually think, there’s this, this, and this.]