Barack Obama took a rally stage in Cleveland to lecture Donald Trump.
The crowd ate it up, and the cable networks played the clip on a loop.
And Obama left out one chapter of his own record that wrecks the whole lecture.
Obama Cast Himself as the Diplomat Who Never Fired a Shot
The former President rolled into Ohio to stump for Democrat gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton and for Sherrod Brown, who is trying to get back to Congress.
He ran through the usual Democrat gripes about prices. Then he turned to Iran and announced he was the expert in the room. “Now, this is something I know a little about,” Obama said.
Obama claimed his 2015 nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, kept Tehran from ever getting a bomb. He told the crowd “everybody acknowledged” the deal worked. Then came the line Democrats clipped and passed around all over social media: “And I didn’t have to fire a missile to do it.”
He knocked Trump for walking away from the deal and mocked the White House for declaring victory early. “So seven months later how’s that war going?” he asked.
And he saved a few jabs for the Defense Secretary, sneering about the “jawlines and testosterone levels of our troops” and cracking jokes about how long the man spends in front of a mirror. “These are not serious people,” Obama said.
President Trump launched Operation Epic Fury with joint US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran on February 28. The conflict has claimed at least 21 American lives, and every one of those service members deserves the country’s gratitude.
Trump’s goal never changed. A regime whose crowds chant “Death to America” does not get a nuclear weapon.
But a man who wants to grade another President’s war record ought to pull out his own report card first.
The Peace President Bombed Seven Countries in a Single Year
In January 2017, as Obama packed up the White House, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Micah Zenko added up the Pentagon’s numbers. The US military dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016 on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Zenko considered that total a low estimate.
That works out to roughly three bombs an hour, around the clock, for a full year. Not exactly the record of a fellow who solves problems without firing a missile.
But the bomb count only tells part of it. Libya tells the rest.
In March 2011, Obama joined European allies in a bombing campaign to topple Moammar Gadhafi. He never got Congress to authorize it. When the House finally voted on a resolution authorizing the mission that June, lawmakers rejected it 295-123, and Obama kept the operation going anyway.
Candidate Obama sang a different tune. In a December 2007 questionnaire for the Boston Globe, he said a President has no constitutional power to launch a military attack on his own unless the country faces an actual or imminent threat. Gadhafi posed no such threat to Americans. Obama bombed him regardless.
Rebels captured and killed Gadhafi in October 2011. Libya splintered into warring militias and turned into a playground for Islamist terrorists. On September 11, 2012, terrorists stormed the American compound in Benghazi and killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.
And in April 2016, Chris Wallace asked Obama on Fox News Sunday to name the worst mistake of his presidency. “Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya,” Obama answered.
Read that one slowly. He regretted the cleanup. He never regretted the war.
Syria went no better. Obama drew his famous “red line” on chemical weapons in August 2012, then let Bashar al-Assad cross it a year later without a single American strike in response. His administration poured $500 million into a Pentagon program to train and arm Syrian rebels, and in September 2015 General Lloyd Austin told the Senate Armed Services Committee that only four or five of those fighters remained in the fight. American airstrikes on Syria began in September 2014 and continued right through Obama’s last day in office.
No Charges, No Trial, Just a Drone
Then comes the chapter Obama never brings up at Democrat rallies.
On September 30, 2011, a US drone strike in Yemen killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico-born al Qaeda propagandist. No prosecutor ever charged him with a crime, and no jury ever heard his case. The same strike killed Samir Khan, another American citizen traveling with him.
About two weeks later, another American strike in Yemen killed al-Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman. The boy was 16, a Denver native.
In May 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder finally admitted in a letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy that US drone strikes had killed four Americans since 2009. Holder conceded the government had not specifically targeted three of them, the teenager included.
Nobody needs to mourn an al Qaeda recruiter. But the Fifth Amendment does not come with an exception for unpopular citizens. A President decided, on his own authority and largely in secret, which Americans would die without ever seeing a courtroom. And Obama’s Justice Department blessed the whole arrangement with a classified legal memo.
Imagine that kind of power in the hands of the same crowd that padlocked churches during COVID. Amy Acton, the candidate Obama came to boost, signed Ohio’s stay-at-home order as the state’s health director in the spring of 2020. Folks in Ohio remember that one too.
Obama’s Diplomacy Came With Pallets of Cash and an Expiration Date
Obama sold the Iran deal as a permanent fix. It wasn’t. Key limits on Iran’s nuclear program carried sunset dates, letting the restrictions melt away over time like a snowman in April.
In January 2016, the Obama administration flew $400 million in foreign cash to Tehran on the same day Iran released American prisoners, part of a $1.7 billion settlement. That’s the “diplomacy” Obama now holds up as the gold standard.
And “everybody acknowledged” the deal worked? Chuck Schumer didn’t. In August 2015, the man who would go on to lead Senate Democrats announced his opposition, and he later voted with Republicans to try to block it.
Obama will say he inherited Iraq and Afghanistan from George W Bush. He did. But nobody handed him Libya, Syria, or the drone strikes that killed a 16-year-old from Denver.
Trump, meanwhile, spent his first term pulling troops out of Syria and signing a deal to bring soldiers home from Afghanistan, all while the press called him a warmonger.
Expect Democrats to roll Obama out at rally after rally from Cleveland to Detroit for the rest of the midterm campaign. He’s their best closer, and he knows how to land a punch line.
But every time he lectures Trump about missiles, somebody in the back of the room is going to remember Benghazi.
Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in December 2009. In his final year in office, his military dropped 26,171 bombs on seven countries.
Sources: Mediaite; Council on Foreign Relations; NBC News; Washington Examiner; Fox News; CBS News; Yahoo News; Associated Press; Brookings Institution; Christian Science Monitor