The Iraq Diversion
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-iraq-diversion-1431988892
Liberals want to talk about anything but the current world disorder.
Normally it’s good when matters of policy turn into big public spats, because there is always the chance the public will learn something worth knowing. In the week since Jeb Bush was queried about the war that his brother waged in Iraq, the public’s store of useful knowledge about the Iraq war has, if anything, declined. Senator Marco Rubio is the latest Republican presidential candidate to wade through the media swamp called the Iraq war.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Senator Rubio and moderator Chris Wallace participated in an extended exchange of half sentences that seemed to depend on what the meaning of “mistake” is. Unlike Governor Bush, Mr. Rubio was spared a gotcha pile-on by his own party’s presidential wannabees. Instead, the political left jumped on him for what it called Senator Rubio’s “struggle” to explain himself on Iraq.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
The Iraq war “mistake” trope is really about an anxious Democratic left trying to reframe the one subject it would rather not talk about in this election—foreign policy. Thus it’s now trying to change the subject back to Iraq circa 2003 and away from the current, rampant disorder there that reflects poorly on the current President and implicates his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
For the record, none of the individuals running for the Republican presidential nomination cast a vote on the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton, then Senator from New York, did—in favor of the war, presumably based on what she knew at the time. The Republicans are at least now willing to expose themselves to fractured exchanges on the subject. Other than a long-ago repudiation of her vote, Mrs. Clinton won’t talk about Iraq, or much else.
The left’s pundits are now writing that those of us who supported the Iraq war are afraid that Jeb Bush’s answers make it clear that those who opposed the war in 2003, such as Senator Barack Obama, were right. No, we’re afraid he and the other GOP candidates will fall for this Iraq political diversion.
We’d be happy to settle this by having Hillary Clinton sit down soon with either Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio to discuss at length what happened in Iraq and why between 2003 and, say, this week’s occupation of the Iraqi city of Ramadi by Islamic State.
If Mrs. Clinton wants to say that George W. Bush’s decision to depose Saddam Hussein was a “mistake,” fair enough. Voters might also want to hear the former Secretary of State address whether Mr. Obama’s decision to draw down the U.S. troop presence in Iraq to zero in 2011 was a “mistake.” In retrospect.
For now, we would say Marco Rubio had it exactly right in his final point to Chris Wallace: “Presidents don’t have the benefit of hindsight. You have to make difficult decisions based on the information that’s before you at that moment.”
On current trend, the next President’s “moment” in 2017 will include China on the march in Asia, Russia threatening Eastern Europe, Islamic State occupying large chunks of Iraq, and a new era of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Voters might want to know what the candidates will do about that.
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