The main purpose of Donald Trump’s national security address Wednesday was to lay down the broad outlines of an approach to foreign policy. But one side effect was to torture Republicans one more time over the war in Iraq.
Speaking from a teleprompter in an ornate room in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, Trump was far more diplomatic than he is in stump speeches, when he calls the war “a big, fat mistake.” But Trump’s critique of Iraq — and the Republican leaders who started and supported the war — was his most fundamental yet.
“Although not in government service, I was totally against the war in Iraq, saying for many years that it would destabilize the Middle East,” Trump said. “Sadly, I was correct.” Trump went on to explain that “mistakes in Iraq,” in addition to later missteps in Egypt and Libya, brought chaos to the Middle East and gave the Islamic State “the space it needs to grow and prosper.”
Trump has said as much many times. But on Wednesday at the Mayflower, he dug deeper.
“It all began with the dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western democracy,” Trump said. “We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed. Civil war, religious fanaticism, thousands of American lives, and many trillions of dollars, were lost as a result. The vacuum was created that the Islamic State would fill. Iran, too, would rush in and fill the void, much to their unjust enrichment.”
Trump’s jab at the democracy-promoting roots of the war was aimed squarely at George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the conservatives who supported the Iraq invasion. (And perhaps at a certain Democratic senator who voted to authorize the war.)
And now, of course, some of those conservatives are supporting Trump. Sitting up front at the Mayflower was Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, whose early endorsement of Trump was enormously helpful in lending Trump credibility, as well as serving as a source of staff and advice. Sessions, who came to the Senate in 1997, supported the war in Iraq all the way. Reassessing it all has been “painful,” he told me after the Trump speech.
“It’s a painful thing for me, because I was a total supporter of it,” Sessions said. “So in retrospect I think it’s fair to say it was a risky proposition from the beginning. And President Bush and fabulous work by the United States military, courageous work, helped create a government in Iraq that had a chance to survive. But I do believe President Obama, perhaps his worst mistake was pulling out all the troops, creating insecurity in Iraq, and it got away from us. So now we have a very bad circumstance.”
The latter part of Sessions’ answer is standard Republican doctrine. George Bush started the war, there were problems, but it was won, and then President Obama messed everything up. But I noted to Sessions that Trump’s critique was more basic, charging that it was the product of misguided democracy promotion.
“Well, I agree that we went into it with high hopes for creating a democratic government, not fully recognizing the difficulty of the task,” Sessions answered. “It failed because of actions, I think, in the end by President Obama, but there are any number of other ways it could have failed. But it might have been successful. But the extent of our effort to do that was extraordinary, and I think one lesson learned from that is we’ve got to be more careful in the future.”
Trump, even in his semi-presidential mode, said it more bluntly: “Our goals must be to defeat terrorists and promote regional stability, not radical change,” he said. “We getting out of the nation-building business.”
