WASHINGTON – A dozen years later, American politics has reached a rough consensus about the Iraq War: It was a mistake.
Politicians hoping to be president rarely run ahead of public opinion. So it’s a revealing moment when the major contenders for president – in both parties – find it best to say that 4,491 Americans and countless Iraqis lost their lives in a war that shouldn’t have been waged.
Many people have been saying that for years, of course. Polls show most of the public have judged the war a failure by now. Over time, more and more GOP politicians have allowed that the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq undermined Republican President George W. Bush’s rationale for the 2003 invasion.
It hasn’t been an easy evolution for those such as Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, who voted for the war in 2002 while serving in Congress. That vote, and her refusal to fully disavow it, cost her during her 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama, who wasn’t in the Senate in 2002 but had opposed the war.
In her memoir last year, Clinton wrote that she had voted based on the information available at the time, but “I got it wrong. Plain and simple.”
What might seem an easy truth for a nation to acknowledge has become the safest thing for an American politician to say – even Bush’s brother.
The fact that Jeb Bush, a likely candidate for the Republican nomination in 2016, was pressured this past week into rejecting, in hindsight, his brother’s war “is an indication that the received wisdom, that which we work from right now, is that this was a mistake,” said Evan Cornog, a historian and dean of the Hofstra University school of communication.
Or, as Rick Santorum, another potential Republican candidate, put it: “Everybody accepts that now.”
It’s an easier question for presidential hopefuls who aren’t bound by family ties or their own congressional vote for the war, who have the luxury of judging it in hindsight, knowing full well the terrible price Americans paid and the continuing bloodshed in Iraq today.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz weren’t in Congress in 2002 and so didn’t have to make a real-time decision with imperfect knowledge. Neither was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who served an earlier stint in Congress.
All these Republicans said last week that, in hindsight, they would not have invaded Iraq with what’s now known about the faulty intelligence that wrongly indicated Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, in an interview Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” summed up that sentiment: “Knowing what we know now, I think it’s safe for many of us, myself included, to say, we probably wouldn’t have taken” that approach.
Rubio, in a long exchange on “Fox News Sunday,” tried to navigate the Iraq shoals once again, making a glass-half-full case that while the war was based on mistaken intelligence, the world still is better off with Saddam gone.
Those politicians didn’t go as far, however, as war critics such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a declared Republican candidate who says it would have been a mistake even if Saddam were hiding such weapons. Paul says Saddam was serving as a counterbalance to Iran and removing him from power led to much of the turmoil now rocking the Middle East.
Former President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, still maintain that ousting a brutal and unpredictable dictator made the world safer.
In his 2010 memoir, Decision Points, Bush said he got a “sickening feeling” every time he thought about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, and he knew that would “transform public perception of the war.”
But he stands by his decision.
