Caught on video: Horrifying proof that Libya's freedom fighters have turned into brutal torturers

[sabrina 1]

93. That is not the quote I am talking about.

From 'Audacity of Hope':

“I agree with George W. Bush when in his second inaugural address he proclaimed a universal desire to be free,” Obama wrote. “But there are few examples in history in which the freedom men and women crave is delivered through outside intervention.”

And I am not going to go searching for it now, but he expanded on that in a question and answer session after a speech he gave in 2007 when asked if he supported Humanitarian Intervention by using the miliatary. His answer was no, that he did not. However when asked again later in the campaign, maybe even that year, he had changed his mind. That change was attributed to his association with Samantha Powers:

It's true Obama doesn't have a long record of foreign policy stances. "He's not fully formed," argues the conservative military historian (and Obama supporter) Andrew Bacevich. "The paper trail is thin," says Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. Nonetheless, the candidate's views are not hard to discern. He believes the United States makes itself safer by promoting "dignity" in other nations through diplomacy and foreign aid. He also believes crumbling societies and failed regimes such as Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe must be confronted by the international community, including the United States, before they ignite and become threats. And while he sees Iraq as a "dumb war," he's game for smart warfare in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Obama's views started to crystallize when he came to Washington. The new senator fished around for foreign policy talent and scheduled a brief dinner with Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the author of the 2002 book "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide. The dinner went on for hours. Soon Power was taking a weekly shuttle from Boston to Washington to tutor Obama on foreign policy.

Power believes the United States creates long-term problems when it fails to intervene in failing states or to protect threatened populations. "Security for Americans at home and abroad is contingent on international stability," she writes in "A Problem from Hell", "and there is perhaps no greater source of havoc than a group of well-armed extremists bent on wiping out a people on ethnic, national, or religious grounds." That is what Obama now believes.

http://reason.com/archives/2008/09/19/obamas-wars

So he supported Humanitarian Intervention 'through diplomacy and foreign aid'. But once he hired foreign policy advisers, he began to change. Although even then, his statements were vague when he spoke about intervention

And I'm not the only one who noticed the changes in his stances on foreign intervention. Steve Clemons also was disappointed and clearly remembered as I do, his original position of intervention by diplomacy and foreign aid rather than military intervention:

Steve Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the center-left New American Foundation, has watched with mounting disappointment as Obama clarifies his stance on foreign interventions. "He's not the Obama we thought he was," Clemons says.

Clemons, not alone among liberal foreign policy analysts, believes Obama listens to two groups of experts: liberal interventionists and "progressive realists." The latter group, rattled by the Iraq war, agrees with one of Obama's most traditional homilies from his memoir The Audacity of Hope: "There are few examples in history in which the freedom men and women crave is delivered through outside intervention."

But his position on this has always been arbitrary. Earlier, he seems, although it's never clear, to support intervention, but doesn't really clarify what kind. After his association with Power however, he was much more inclined to at least infer, that he would use military intervention. As I said, he changes, changed his mind several times on the issue.