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.
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.
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, Jeb, who was pressured this past week into rejecting, in hindsight, his brother’s war.
As Rick Santorum, another potential Republican candidate, put it: “Everybody accepts that now.”
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz weren’t in Congress in 2002 and 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.
Those politicians didn’t go as far, however, as war critics such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
The declared Republican candidate said it would have been a mistake even if Hussein were hiding such weapons. Paul said Hussein was serving as a counterbalance to Iran and removing him from power led to much of the turmoil now rocking the Middle East.
