Liberals were appalled that the president, who, as a senator had always praised the War Powers Act, was now ordering his legal team to find ingenious ways of bypassing it. If this was to be a multilateral, un-Bush war, why then did it split NATO apart? Roughly half the members declined to participate. Germany and Italy soon openly opposed the effort. And now the instigator, France, seems to want to bail.

The left had also decried Western attacks on oil-exporting Muslim countries, but now liberal-in-chief Barack Obama was doing just that. Indeed, the antiwar president who promised to end the Bush Mideast wars had suddenly expanded them into a third theater.