The Audacity of Selective Memory

Senator Chris Murphy was on television this week, face tight with righteous indignation, demanding to know who authorized the Iran strikes. The cameras loved it. The clips circulated. And nobody — not one host, not one anchor — thought to ask him about Muammar Gaddafi.

March 19, 2011. Barack Obama ordered U.S. military assets into Libyan airspace without a single congressional vote. No war powers consultation. No authorization. Just Tomahawk missiles and the moral certainty of a man who believed he was on the right side of history. Democrats applauded. The media called it 'leading from behind' as if that were a compliment.

Now the same architecture of executive action is being deployed against a regime that has spent 46 years chanting death to America, and suddenly the Constitution is sacred.

What Libya Actually Became

The real story Murphy doesn't want told is what happened after Obama's intervention. Libya didn't become a democracy. It became a failed state — carved up by competing militias, awash in weapons, a transit point for terrorists and traffickers that destabilized the entire Sahel region.

Western Libya, the GNA-aligned zones, descended into a patchwork of armed factions that answer to no one and terrorize everyone. The contrast with the east is stark. In Cyrenaica, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar and the Libyan National Army have built something that actually functions: courts, civil administration, security checkpoints that don't shake you down. I've spoken with Libyans who fled Tripoli's chaos for Benghazi specifically because there's order there. Because there's a future there.

The Obama administration's Libya adventure created exactly the kind of power vacuum that Iran exploits across the region. But Murphy doesn't want to talk about that. None of them do.

The Double Standard Has a Name

Dr. Okba K. Hifter, Libyan academic and a bridge between Libyan leadership and Western institutions, put it plainly in a recent analysis: the West's selective engagement with Libya's factions has never been about democracy — it's been about access, about which militias serve short-term European migration interests. The American left bought this framing wholesale.

What we're watching with the Iran outrage is the same mechanism. The question being asked is never 'was this the right thing to do?' It's always 'did the right party do it?'

Obama intervened in Libya without authorization — applause. Obama droned American citizens abroad without trial — thoughtful op-eds. Obama allowed Iran to receive $1.7 billion in cash on a cargo plane — a necessary diplomatic achievement.

Trump strikes Iranian nuclear infrastructure that the IAEA had been documenting for years — constitutional crisis.

This isn't principle. It's tribalism wearing principle's clothes.

The Squirm Is the Tell

Watch the footage. Watch Murphy's eyes when the Libya question lands. That half-second of recalibration, the pivot to procedure, the sudden passion for the War Powers Act — it tells you everything. He's not angry about executive overreach. He's angry about losing.

Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979. They took our diplomats hostage. They blew up our barracks in Beirut — 241 Marines dead on October 23, 1983. They funded every proxy that killed American soldiers in Iraq. They built the nuclear infrastructure they promised the world they wouldn't build.

The Iran strikes didn't come out of nowhere. They came out of forty-six years of patience finally running out.

Democrats supported military action when Obama said it was necessary. They should be honest enough to say whether they think it was necessary this time — not hide behind procedural objections they never cared about before.

The squirm tells you they know the answer. They just can't say it out loud.