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 a hard 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.”
Santorum didn’t always see the war that way. He voted for the invasion as a senator and continued to support if for years. Last week, he mocked Jeb Bush’s reluctance to give what now seems the obvious answer when he was initially asked to reconsider the war in light of what’s known today. “I don’t know how that was a hard question,” Santorum said.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, as a Republican candidate in 2008, said invading Iraq had been “the right decision.” But on his way to winning the 2012 Republican nomination, Romney said the war never would have happened if U.S. and world leaders had realized Iraq didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction.
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.
Source: U-T San Diego +
