One prominent former elected official supporting Donald Trump has declined to criticize the New York businessman for stating President George W. Bush and his administration knowingly lied about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In an email exchange with THE WEEKLY STANDARD Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator who endorsed Trump before the New Hampshire primary, said he did not want to play “Monday morning quarterback” on the question of the Iraq War.
“I’m more focused on how we deal with terror challenges of today, not yesterday,” Brown said when asked about Trump’s comments at Saturday’s debate in South Carolina. Trump said Bush and his administration “said there were weapons of mass destruction” but that “they knew there were none.”
What about the fact that Trump’s comments, which indicate a belief that Bush willfully mislead the country into war, sound more like what left-wing director Michael Moore has been saying for years about the most recent Republican president? Did Brown think Trump was right?
The former senator again declined to criticize Trump. “I want to know what the new president is going to do to keep us safe. I want reestablish our ties with our allies, along with making our foes fear us,” Brown said.
Brown is a 35-year veteran of the Army National Guard, and retired in 2014 at the rank of colonel. During his time in the Senate, he was a critic of the decision by President Obama to withdraw troops from Iraq. And when he ran for reelection to his seat in 2012, Brown defended the decision to depose Saddam Hussein.
“Saddam Hussein was a murderous dictator who had the blood of Israelis, as well as hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Shia, on his hands,” Brown wrote. “He was a state sponsor of global terrorism, and I’ll never forget his missile attacks on Israeli civilian targets in the first Gulf war. His murderous reign had to be stopped. It was the American forces that captured Saddam and gave the Iraqi people the chance to chart their own destiny, voting in free and fair elections for the first time.”
