It’s no secret there has been widespread bipartisan support among Washington elites for continuing the Afghanistan War indefinitely since it was launched nearly two decades ago. A new report from the Washington Post details how federal government officials misled the public for years on how well the unwinnable war was going.
As far back as 2004, then-Sen. John Kerry predictably went after President George W. Bush for the Iraq debacle but also stressed, “Now we have to succeed” in the “right” war in Afghanistan. In that same election, one-time liberal favorite Howard Dean wanted to double down in that mission. These two candidates could feasibly be forgiven for seeing some potential victory in Afghanistan, given the proximity of their races to the beginning of that war.
The first presidential candidates of any note to declare Afghanistan a failure and demand we bring the troops home wouldn’t happen until 2008.
The first one to do so was a Republican.
Ron Paul
Years before Barack Obama ran against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2008, the most libertarian member of the House had been sounding that alarm for some time.
Most Republicans didn’t like fellow GOP member Ron Paul when he ran for president in 2008 precisely because he spent so much time bashing Bush’s foreign policy. Even Republicans who eventually warmed to the strict, small-government constitutionalist would often say, “I like Ron Paul, except on foreign policy.”
The other 2008 Republican candidates mocked Paul constantly as an “isolationist” or worse for daring to say the Iraq War was a mistake and that the never-ending Afghanistan War had become one, too (Paul voted for the 2001 U.S. strike on the Taliban for the role it played in the Sept. 11 attacks).
Still, Paul received 1 million votes in the 2008 GOP primaries, outpacing and arguably “killing” the campaign of one-time front-runner and neoconservative favorite Rudy Giuliani. In the 2012 election, Paul sounded the same anti-war themes, where he was equally mocked by the Republican establishment yet still doubled his primary votes to 2 million.
The entire Washington elite insisted Paul was crazy, particularly for his foreign policy views and especially for challenging the conventional wisdom regarding Afghanistan.
Barack Obama
While Paul was an anti-war outlier in the Republican Party in 2008, the eventual Democratic presidential nominee that year attracted enough votes to win by promising to get the United States out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama’s primary challenge that year was overcoming hawkish establishment gatekeeper Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s Senate vote for the Iraq War hurt her significantly in 2008, as did her insistence that we stay in Afghanistan.
Clinton often portrayed Obama as a novice not fit for the White House, particularly for the foreign policy views he held during his campaign. Yet it was his perceived independence and correlating anti-establishment credibility that put him over the top with many voters.
During his 2008 run, Obama promised to end the Afghanistan War 16 months after he was elected. That never happened.
The same establishment Clinton represented that was once weary of the onetime peace candidate eventually warmed to Obama when he finally reneged on many of his foreign policy promises. Many would eventually blame Obama for decimating the anti-war movement that once mobilized against Bush.
Still, there was no question that in 2008 the Washington foreign policy elite would have preferred a President John McCain or Clinton over Obama until he became more like them.
Rand Paul
Before Trump rose to dominate the 2016 presidential election, Sen. Rand Paul threw his hat in the ring and was considered an early front-runner by many mainstream outlets.
Just like his father, Ron Paul, ending reckless wars was a primary theme for Rand Paul. Just like his dad, Paul was attacked by the Washington foreign policy establishment for pursuing a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and other hot spots.
The early neoconservative favorite that year, Sen. Marco Rubio, blasted Paul as an “isolationist” for his foreign policy views.
But Rubio didn’t just attack Rand Paul as a supposed isolationist, he also went after Trump.
Donald Trump
In some ways, one could call Trump the Republican Obama regarding his stance on war in that he railed against the establishment foreign policy consensus.
But an anti-war, anti-Bush fervor had already energized Democrats before Obama arrived. It was integral to the party at that time.
The same was not true of the Republican Party before Trump, who won his nomination and ultimately the presidency almost unbelievably running on anti-war and even anti-Bush themes.
Trump declared the Bush administration “lied” the country into the Iraq War during a 2016 GOP debate. This kind of sentiment was not new for Trump. In 2011, he tweeted, in response to a Republican presidential primary debate, “Ron Paul is right when he says we are wasting lives and money in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
As president, Trump declared that he would pull troops out of Afghanistan and was met with the same kind of bipartisan establishment backlash Obama once faced.
Will Trump eventually follow through? Time will tell.
Still, however much he lives up to his foreign policy promises, the same entrenched government officials who insist we must stay in Afghanistan forever and who were exposed as frauds in the Washington Post’s explosive report still detest Trump.
His foreign policy remains central to their ire.
Tulsi Gabbard
In the current presidential election, the only candidate that leads with an anti-war message similar to former candidates Ron Paul, Obama, Rand Paul, and Trump has been Rep. Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii.
The Iraq War veteran has spent every debate asking her fellow Democrats if they will oppose the ongoing “regime change wars” in places such as Syria and challenges them to support bringing the troops home from Afghanistan.
To say the Washington establishment loathes Gabbard would be an understatement.
In an October Democratic debate, front-runner (and somewhat ironically, Obama’s vice president) Joe Biden said in response to Gabbard wanting to bring U.S. troops home from Syria that if our military doesn’t remain engaged in Syria, “ISIS is going to come here.”
Biden’s comments were pure Dick Cheney. The exchange sounded like pro-war McCain tussling with Ron Paul over Iraq in 2008.
In their anti-Trump fervor, some Democrats have come full circle.
The establishment politicians and figures in both parties who went after these anti-war presidential candidates are not the same people cited and quoted in the Washington Post story, but they parroted and enforced the same false, forever-war narrative, mocking and minimalizing anyone who dared challenge it.
They all echoed the “Swamp.”
Yet, if you follow the logic of the Washington Post expose, these various anti-war candidates were right all along.
Those who were the loudest voices for getting out of Afghanistan were right then and have been proven so now. The most “extreme” among them were actually the shrewdest.
In retrospect, Ron Paul was no kook. He was a truth teller early on when virtually no one would listen. The other peace candidates who followed were more right than wrong.
The real crazies are Washington foreign policy establishment leaders who still consider still their own “expert” consensus truth, even when every fact screams the opposite.
Even when the Washington Post shoves it in their faces.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
