War mongering

Doug Ross's Quote of the Day at Larwyn's Linx is from James Taranto:

"Imagine that President Obama, immediately after his re-election, assembled a sort of reverse bucket list--an enumeration of the things he least wanted to do in his second term. What's on the list? By our reckoning the top two entries are obvious: 1. Sign legislation repealing ObamaCare. 2. Go to war in Iraq.

Now imagine that Lois Lerner had never been born and Obama narrowly lost in 2012. Fast-forward to the summer of 2014, and President Romney is facing the ISIS crisis. Romney announces U.S. air strikes in Iraq and demands that other countries cooperate: "From governments and peoples across the Middle East there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer, so that it does not spread."

Is there any doubt this would be contentious as hell? Democrats would denounce Romney as a war monger and accuse him of squandering one of Obama's "great achievements," the successful withdrawal from Iraq, by allowing the situation there to deteriorate so as to provide a pretext for military intervention. War protesters would fill the streets of American and foreign cities. Prominent leftists would denounce Romney--who avoided the Vietnam-era draft thanks to student and ministerial deferments--as a "chicken hawk." Opposition to the new Iraq war would mobilize the left, creating the prospect of a Democratic wave in November."