A confusing concept explained: You are Not Obama.

[Gothmog]

26. President Obama is a lawyer and he used a legal explanation of his position

Remember that President Obama is a lawyer and a law professor. What President Obama did in his speech was to distinguish the Iraq war from the situation in Crimea. Here is a simplified explanation of this concept. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/distinguish

Distinguish
To set apart as being separate or different; to point out an essential disparity.

To distinguish one case from another case means to show the dissimilarities between the two. It means to prove a case that is cited as applicable to the case currently in dispute is really inapplicable because the two cases are different.

The Iraq war is a very different situation compared to the conduct of Russia in annexing Crimea. In his speech, President Obama did not defend the Iraq war but merely explained why the Iraq war was not relevant to the conduct of Russia in annexing Crimea. President Obama did mention in his speech that he opposed the war but it would have hurt the legal argument he was making to go into why he opposed and such opposition would not have been relevant to the legal argument that President Obama was making about the Russian annexation of Crimea.

I personally hate bush, cheney, rice and rumsfeld for lying to the US about the reasons for Iraq. I was opposed to the invasion at the time and was monitoring this board for those discussions.

However in his speech in Brussels, President Obama did not defend the war in Iraq but was refuting the argument made by Putin. President Obama did a good job of distinguishing the Iraq war from Russia's actions in annexing Crimea. As a lawyer, there is a huge difference between making a legal argument and defending the Iraq invasion.