The Concord Monitor (N.H), May 19:
There are some political games that are more disturbing than others. Take, for example, the Iraq War.
During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Marco Rubio became the latest presidential contender to stumble his way toward perceived political safe ground on the toxic issue.
Fox host Chris Wallace played a pair of clips of Rubio talking about the Iraq War. In one from March 30, Rubio said he didn’t think the war was a mistake because “the world is a better place because Saddam Hussein doesn’t run Iraq.” Six weeks later, Rubio said in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations that he wouldn’t have been in favor of war if he had known there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction. On Sunday, Rubio defended the duality of his position by saying that he was answering two different questions. Wallace repeatedly asked Rubio to state clearly, then, whether he believes the war was a mistake. After a dizzying semantic scuffle, Rubio settled on this: “It was not a mistake for the president to go into Iraq based on the information he was provided as president.”
Here’s Paul Krugman stating in yesterday’s New York Times why the Iraq positions of Rubio, Jeb Bush and many other politicians are pure garbage: “The Iraq War wasn’t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war.”
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, has spent much of the past decade saying the same thing.
“All of (the weapons of mass destruction intelligence) was essentially a fabrication,” Wilkerson told the Monitor during an editorial board interview last month.
The Iraq War, as Krugman says, isn’t a story about flawed intelligence; it’s a story about a pretext for war sold to the American people. Depending on your degree of cynicism, politicians who supported the war were either co-conspirators or innocent rubes. If you listen to most of the presidential contenders, they choose the latter: “Golly, if only we knew then what we know now.”
Voters should brace themselves to hear a variation of that line frequently over the next several months. As the Associated Press reported recently, “A dozen years later, American politics has reached a rough consensus on the Iraq War: It was a mistake.” There’s a good reason why there’s a “rough consensus” among hawkish politicians: Blaming flawed intelligence is a one-size-fits-all defense for bad wars. It’s safe, easy and pliable.
In the same Associated Press article, Army Col. Peter Monsoor, a professor of military history at Ohio State University and former assistant to Gen. David Petraeus, said: “There’s plenty of blame to go around. What we need is not so much blame as to figure out what happened and use that knowledge to make better decisions going forward.”
That’s more garbage ”“ the American people don’t need a soothing lullaby. Over the weekend, the Iraqi city of Ramadi fell to the Islamic State as the U.S.-trained military retreated. The blood still flows. This is the continuing legacy of a war desired and designed by the Bush administration, a war packaged for consumption by an impotent Fourth Estate and a cowed Congress.
In her memoir, Hillary Clinton said of her Iraq war vote: “I got it wrong. Plain and simple.” Wrong and wrong. It’s neither plain nor simple and shouldn’t be sold as such. Contrition is cheap. What the nation needs are leaders who are adamantly opposed to deadly lies and stupid wars, past and future.
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