Republicans and Iraq How Jeb Bush Could Have Answered the Gotcha Question
http://www.wsj.com/articles/republicans-and-iraq-1431646531
Knowing what we know now, would we have urged President George W. Bush to invade Iraq, as we did at the time? A version of this question was put to Jeb Bush by Fox News’s Megyn Kelly the other day, and, well, oh dear.
The former Florida Governor and presumptive Republican presidential candidate told Ms. Kelly Monday that he would have authorized an invasion, adding “and so would have Hillary Clinton”—a reminder that the Democratic frontrunner is the only person in the 2016 race who cast a vote for the war. But Mrs. Clinton long ago recanted that vote, and Mr. Bush recanted his answer, too, telling an Arizona audience on Thursday that he would not have invaded “knowing what we know now.”
We’ll leave aside what Mr. Bush’s struggles with the inevitable question say about his preparedness as a candidate—and his team’s as a campaign. The right answer to the question is that it’s not a useful or instructive one to answer, because statesmanship, like life, is not conducted in hindsight. Knowing what we know now, we wouldn’t have been in equities in 2008, or bet on the Green Bay Packers in January. Sigh.
The better question, and one that would better address Mr. Bush’s fitness as a potential Commander in Chief, is what lessons he would draw from Iraq that would inform his own decision-making if confronted with similar circumstances.
Plainly one lesson would be that Presidents cannot take the claims of their intelligence agencies as conclusive. George W. Bush took the country to war in the sincere belief that Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction was a “slam dunk” case, as then-CIA Director George Tenet believed.
Mr. Bush’s critics, both the dishonest and the foolish, called him a liar for the mistake. But as the 2005 bipartisan Robb-Silberman report on the intelligence leading up to the war noted, it was the CIA’s “own independent judgments—flawed though they were—that led them to conclude Iraq had active WMD programs.”
So how to do better? Mr. Bush could cite the experience of his father, George H.W. Bush, who as CIA director in the Ford Administration organized a “Team B” panel of outside experts to question his agency’s estimates of Soviet military power and strategy. Historians still debate the merits of Team B’s conclusions, but the point is that the quality of intelligence, like everything else, improves with choice and competition.
A second lesson Mr. Bush could draw is that when America does go to war it should fight to win—and win fast. The 2007 surge was an act of military genius and political courage, but it came four years too late.
Before then, Iraq policy suffered when military planners and the CIA both failed to anticipate that Saddam Hussein would fight the war as an insurgency after Baghdad fell. It suffered, too, when the White House decided to impose the Bremer Regency on Iraq instead of immediately handing the reins of political power to Iraqi leaders, so they could solve their own problems.
At the same time, Mr. Bush might note that the war in Iraq wasn’t fought simply on account of Iraq’s presumed possession of illicit weapons. It was Saddam himself who was Iraq’s most destructive WMD, a one-man killing machine who had destabilized the Middle East for 25 years while killing hundreds of thousands of people. And there was also the question of what Saddam might have done had no war taken place.
“Saddam wanted to re-create Iraq’s WMD capability—which was essentially destroyed in 1991—after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized,” noted the 2004 report of the Iraq Survey Group. “Saddam aspired to develop a nuclear capability—in an incremental fashion, irrespective of international pressure and the resulting economic risks—but he intended to focus on ballistic missiles and tactical chemical warfare (CW) capability.”
One other lesson is that, just as there are unintended consequences to military action, there are also consequences to inaction. By 2008 al Qaeda in Iraq was a spent force, demoralized and defeated even according to its own internal communications. It came back and transmogrified into the Islamic State only after President Obama had squandered the gains of the surge by withdrawing all U.S. forces from Iraq, against the wishes of his senior advisers, including then-CIA director Leon Panetta and, yes, Mrs. Clinton.
The media love easy retrospective judgments—we specialize in shooting the wounded—and so do political candidates who want to score easy points. But we suspect voters are smarter than to credit the breezy claims of ex-post-facto wisdom by Mr. Bush’s GOP competitors.
What voters should care about is that the next President will have to confront the new global disorder bequeathed by this Administration. The ultimate lesson of Iraq is that there are no easy calls in foreign policy, and that intelligence of the sort generated by spooks can never substitute for the judgment required of statesmen.
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