On Tuesday’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel, conservative commentator Ann Coulter said President Barack Obama was likely to attack Syria so he “wouldn’t look like an idiot” for saying that the use of chemical weapons there would require an American response.
“There’s a lot of military action the commande- in-chief can take,” the “Mugged” author said. “I do not think he should take it here. And I do not think — unfortunately, he is a Democrat and Democrats generally they intervene when it is directly contrary to the interest of the United States. They seem to think it’s selfish to do something that will help the United States such as invade Iraq, take out a dictator and preside over several democratic elections.”
“No, that they’re against. This is now the second time under the Obama administration that America has engaged in a military intervention — a continuation of a war in one case — solely so that our President wouldn’t look like an idiot for something he said. Escalating the war in Afghanistan — the only reason he did that was that this rhetorical device to attack the war in Iraq, to say, that was a war … of convenience, whereas Afghanistan — that’s the real war. What does he think he’s accomplishing in Afghanistan? And here, it’s because he said the chemical weapons were used, that’s a ‘red line’.”
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Later in her “Hannity” appearance, she compared Obama’s Syrian intervention to the prior efforts by Democratic presidents, including former President Bill Clinton’s Yugoslavian adventure in the mid-1990s and Obama’s 2009 Afghanistan surge.
“I mean, we know that actually is happening in Syria,” she said. “But it does remind me, to go back to another useless Democrat president, Bill Clinton when he went into Bosnia. And [former Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright and Secretary of Defense [William] Cohen claims to us that hundreds of thousands of civilians were being murdered by [Slobodan] Milosevic. and the U.N. goes and digs up bodies and they find a few thousand men of military age. They wanted to intervene in Bosnia and specifically said, Madeleine Albright did, Bill Clinton did, ‘This is America at its best, because it serves no territorial interest, no national security interest of ours.’”
“This is what Democrats tell us,” he continued. “And again, the only reason Obama escalated a war in Afghanistan — where there is no point to regime change, there are more goats than flushed toilets there — The literacy rate is literally 19 percent. That is not a joke. The life expectancy is 44. What are we doing in Afghanistan? He’s allowing Americans to die in Afghanistan because of a line he used on the campaign trail and that’s what’s happening in Syria now. He said the ‘red line’ if chemical weapons are used, and now that’s why we have to intervene?”