For Jeb Bush and the issue of the Iraq War, the third time was the charm—but you wouldn’t know that from reading the headlines. Bush, the former Florida governor and brother of the president who took American troops into Iraq in 2003, had a difficult time explaining his position on the war this week, first in an interview with Fox News’s Megyn Kelly and later with radio host and Fox News personality Sean Hannity.
The question Kelly posed—knowing what we know now, would President Jeb Bush have authorized the war?—was not the one Bush answered. Instead he said he would have done so given the intelligence at the time, as Hillary Clinton would have as well. Bush’s attempt to clean things up with a friendly Hannity, he claimed he misheard the question and added that considering it again, he “didn’t know” because the question was a “hypothetical.” His rivals for the Republican nomination pounced on the opportunity to say, of course, knowing what we know now, they would not have led the country into war.
So at an event in Nevada Wednesday, Bush finally seemed to get a substantive statement on the issue. (It’s buried in the Washington Post’s focus on a young Democrat’s hostile back-and-forth with the Florida Republican.)
First, Bush continued to say the question of the wisdom of invading Iraq in 2003, “knowing what we know now,” was a hypothetical. “Rewriting history is a hypothetical,” he said. He further explained to reporters at the event, “Talking about the future is more than fair. Talking about the past and saying how would you have done something after the fact is a little tougher. And it doesn’t necessarily change anything. That was my point.”
That wasn’t good enough for NBC News’s Mark Murray, who wrote in his Thursday newsletter that Jeb saying the question is an unanswerable hypothetical is “unacceptable.” “The ENTIRE premise behind a presidential candidacy is a hypothetical exercise,” Murray wrote. “It’s imagining the candidate making policy decisions about past, present, and future matters. It’s an unacceptable answer for a candidate to say he/she won’t engage in hypotheticals, because the whole game is a hypothetical.”
It’s a fair point, but it’s also unfair for Murray and others to leave out that Jeb Bush did in fact engage in the substance of Iraq on Wednesday. As the Washington Post noted in its first story (though not in the story published in Thursday’s print edition), Bush spoke at length about what went wrong in Iraq, what mistakes were made during and after his brother’s administration, and what should be done in the future.
“What we ought to be focused on is what are the lessons learned?” Bush said, according to the Post. “There are two lessons. One is, if you’re going to go to war, make sure that you have the best intelligence possible and the intelligence broke down. That’s clear, clearly one of the mistakes of this. And secondly, if you’re going to do this have a strategy of security and a strategy and have a strategy to get out. And both of those things didn’t work the way they did, although I give my brother credit. Once the mess was created, he solved that mess with the surge and created when he left a much more stable Iraq that now, that was squandered in some ways when President Obama did not keep any small amount of troop level.”
In response to the young Democrat’s question about how the American presence created the environment in which ISIS arose, Bush pushed back.
“Al Qaeda had been taken out, there was a…system that could have been brought up to create, to eliminate the sectarian violence and we had an agreement that the president could have signed, it would have kept 10,000 troops, which is less than what we have in Korea,” said Bush. “It could have created the stability that would have allow for Iraq to progress. The net result was, the opposite occurred because immediately that void was filled. And so, look, you can rewrite history all you want but the simple fact is that we’re in a much more unstable place because America pulled back.”
Bush’s arguemnts may not be politically popular in a country where nearly half of Republicans say the war was a mistake. And it wasn’t great that it took him several days to say something substantively on it, instead of waffling between “yes” and “I don’t know.” If Bush is going to run for president, why wasn’t he prepared with a succinct response to the biggest elephant in the room for any candidate with his last name, namely Iraq?
But we ought to allow complex answers to complex questions. Max Boot, an original supporter of the 2003 invasion, has a thoughtful meditation on the subject. Here’s an excerpt:
But even after the U.S. went in based on false intelligence (which, as the Robb-Silberman commission found, was the fault of the intelligence community and not the White House), it would still have been possible to turn Operation Iraqi Freedom into a net positive—if, that it is, it had actually delivered Iraqi freedom rather than chaos. Despite numerous missteps in the early going from 2003 to 2007, the “surge,” which President Bush courageously ordered in 2007 in the face of nearly total opposition, actually made it possible to imagine that the administration’s high hopes for Iraq might be vindicated. Violence fell by more than 90 percent and Iraqi politics began to function again. In 2010 Vice President Biden, no less, even bragged that he was “very optimistic” about the outcome in Iraq.
That optimism was shattered by two of the Obama administration’s disastrous decisions: first, the move to back Nouri al Maliki as Iraq’s prime minister after the 2010 election (even though he was not the top vote getter; Ayad Allawi was); second, the failure to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement in 2011 to keep US troops in Iraq. Both of these miscalculations paved the way for the rise of an Iranian-dominated sectarian regime in Baghdad that victimized Sunnis and sparked a backlash in the form of ISIS. The situation was further aggravated by President Obama’s failure to do more to help the moderates in Syria’s civil war—that left Syria wide open as a staging ground for ISIS to launch an offensive into Iraq which conquered much of the Sunni Triangle.
The decision to invade by President George W. Bush can’t be measured without taking into account the subsequent decisions he and his successor made. As Jeb Bush noted on Wednesday, the decisions to implement the surge in 2007 and to withdraw troops in 2011 have to be part of the calculus. And the one presidential candidate who actually had a position of influence and power during all three of those major decision points in the Iraq war has yet to answer similar questions to the one Bush faced.
Update: Perhaps I published too soon. According to the Washington Post‘s Philip Rucker, Bush has now said he would not have entered Iraq:
Jeb NEWS: He says knowing what we now know, “I would have not engaged. I would have not gone into Iraq.”
— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) May 14, 2015
Update II: Now Bush says the war was “worth it.” From Eli Stokols at Politico:
Bush: “Yeah, Iraq was worth it.” Says those who gave their lives brought stability there by 2008; doesn’t want to “re-litigate” the war.
— Eli Stokols (@EliStokols) May 14, 2015
