John Hostettler was pretty steamed at the moderator of the first presidential debate and like many Republicans took to Facebook to vent.
“Lester Holt has just committed the unpardonable sin by attempting to equate Donald Trump’s inconsequential pre-Iraq War comments with Hillary Clinton’s undeniable contribution to the creation of ISIS and the unjustified deaths of thousands of the US’s finest!” he wrote.
Hostettler repeated this observation again the following morning. ”Last night, in the midst of the first presidential debate, the moderator prefaced a question about Sen. Clinton’s vote to authorize the Iraq War with the suggestion that Donald Trump’s comments to a shock jock prior to Sen. Clinton’s vote was equivalent to that vote,” he complained.
This wasn’t the standard Republican objection to Monday night’s proceedings and Hostettler isn’t just another social media user sounding off about the contentious campaign. He represented Indiana’s eighth congressional district from 1995 to 2007 and was one of just seven Republicans in Congress who voted against the Iraq War. With Ron Paul’s retirement, Jimmy Duncan of Tennessee is now the only one still on Capitol Hill.
After leaving Congress, defeated in the 2006 Democratic landslide that was one of the many unintended consequences of the war, Hostettler wrote a book explaining his vote. “Had we listened to Hostettler at the time, we would not have done it,” former House Majority Leader Dick Armey wrote in a blurb. “If we listen to him now, we might save ourselves the pain, regret and shame from doing it again.”
In any event, it is a matter of record that Hostettler is one Republican who opposed the war in Iraq before it began. He thinks it is significant that the timing of Trump’s opposition has become an issue as the presidential race enters the homestretch.
Yes, Trump has exaggerated the import of whatever doubts he had about the war at the time, as is his wont. To make Iraq prescience as central to his claim to having better judgment than Clinton as Trump has, his opposition should have been expressed far more widely than in private conversations with Sean Hannity.
But Clinton and various media fact-checkers have made it sound as if Trump was once an unequivocal supporter of the Iraq War. “You supported the war in Iraq before the invasion,” said Holt.
The only evidence for this contention is Howard Stern asking Trump on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks if he was in favor of the proposed invasion and getting the reply, “Yeah, I guess so.”
As someone who wrote against the war in this climate but wasn’t yet in journalism full-time, I tried to be sensitive to the still-fresh memories of 9/11 and occasionally mealy-mouthed myself.
“Perhaps we shouldn’t be doing it yet,” Trump told Neil Cavuto in late January 2003, ahead of the invasion. “Perhaps we should be waiting for the United Nations.”
Again, maybe not reaching the level of farsightedness and steadfastness Trump claims proves would make him a better commander-in-chief than Clinton. The man rarely quits while he’s ahead. But it’s more skeptical than some Democratic presidential candidates were sounding at the time.
It is also quite a bit less culpability for the Iraq War than Clinton’s actual vote to authorize the use of force. Trump may be gilding the lily, but there is simply no equivalence.
Even Howard Dean’s big 2003 antiwar speech wasn’t delivered until February 17, after the Trump interview with Cavuto. Dean was defeated by John Kerry, who along with his running mate John Edwards voted for the war.
The 2004 Esquire interview that most people acknowledge contained forthrightly antiwar Trump statements was, as the magazine’s editors remind us in a recently appended note, conducted and published after the war began. It also appeared before public opinion turned decisively against the war and long before Clinton disavowed her vote.
Finally, other Republican presidential candidates were still wrestling with whether they would have invaded Iraq in 2015. Trump delivered some of his most full-throated criticisms of the war while campaigning for the GOP nomination, especially ahead of the primary in military-heavy South Carolina.
Trump won South Carolina, where Ron Paul was nearly booed off the stage for making antiwar comments in 2007. He is supported for president by Hannity and Rudy Giuliani, two of the people who encouraged that booing.
The reluctance to give Trump any benefit of the doubt is understandable given his serial dissembling. But he does deserve at least some credit for opposing the war before most Republicans and many liberal hawks.
Hostettler thinks something important is going on regardless of one’s views of the GOP nominee. “The Republican intelligentsia,” he says, may “have finally concluded that the authorization to invade coupled with the subsequent invasion of Iraq was the single greatest blow to all things ‘conservative’ and had Sen. Clinton not voted for the authorization she would be at this moment finishing her second term in the White House.”
If so, Trump was there first.
