Liberals suppress the fact that Bush's Iraq coalition was much more multilateral than Obama's
But Bushs coalition that went into Iraq included more than 30 nations, most of them democracies. Kerrys and Obamas coalition against the Islamic State includes maybe eight, mostly autocracies.
What I would have liked to add, but didnt have space for, was a reference to the description, made by Kerry as a presidential candidate in 2004, to Bushs coalition as a trumped-up, so-called coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted. That description was recalled by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Marc Thiessen in a blogpost titled Kerrys coalition against the Islamic State fails his global test : the last two words quoting him in one of the presidential debates.
It was vicious of Kerry, and undermined the credibility of the United States, to characterize Bushs very large coalition in such negative terms terms that insulted democracies, including many NATO allies. Thiessen provides a much longer list of those who stood with us and sent ground troops into Iraq in 2003: the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Australia, Romania, South Korea, Japan, Denmark, Bulgaria, Thailand, El Salvador, Hungary, Singapore, Norway, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Mongolia, Latvia, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Slovakia, Albania, New Zealand, Tonga, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Spain, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Honduras, the Philippines, Armenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
