Scott Walker is the latest entrant into the “would you have invaded Iraq” sweepstakes.
“Any president would have likely taken the same action [President George W.] Bush did with the information he had, even Hillary Clinton voted for it, but knowing what we know now, we should not have gone into Iraq,” the Wisconsin governor and likely 2016 Republican presidential candidate told the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin.
Walker went on to praise Bush’s surge and criticize President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for a hasty withdrawal in 2011.
This question has been giving Republican presidential candidates fits since former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush flubbed his response to Fox News’ Megyn Kelly at the beginning of the week. The consensus seems to be that the Iraq war was a mistake based on what we know now about the weapons of mass destruction, but a mistake that was understandable at the time and compounded by the Obama administration’s error in bugging out before the gains made during the surge could be consolidated.
For a party that often talks about a “neo-Reaganite” foreign policy, there’s a difference between how most Republican presidential candidates are talking about Iraq and how Ronald Reagan talked about Vietnam, another war that was more popular with the GOP base than the public at large.
Reagan and other conservatives lamented the way the United States left Vietnam — the demoralizing scene of the helicopters evacuating the embassy in Saigon, the boat people, the victims of communist tyranny. But he also defended the war as a “noble cause,” saying, “We dishonor the memory of 58,000 young Americans who died in that cause and over a quarter of a million wounded when we give way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful.”
The 40th president of the United States never called Vietnam a mistake. Yet he also rather conspicuously avoided Vietnam-sized military interventions while in office. This is something Rand Paul has emphasized. So has Ted Cruz, who just this week noted on Fox News that Grenada was the biggest country Reagan invaded.
But most of the 2016 GOP field seems to take the opposite approach: conceding that Iraq was a mistake, at least in hindsight, while continuing to apply a lot of the assumptions about WMD and regime change used to justify the Iraq war to contemporary foreign-policy problems.
That, as I’ve argued, is why people keep asking Republican presidential candidates about Iraq. It’s not simply the new, “Would you attend a gay wedding?” They aren’t just asking about hypotheticals and hindsight. They want to know if the GOP candidates would do something like Iraq again.
Maybe, based on past experience with Reagan and Vietnam, they wouldn’t. Reagan defended the justice of the cause, but didn’t do it again. But the 2016 contenders undoubtedly know a lot of voters suspect they would.
“Unlike the other wars of this century, of course, there were deep divisions about the wisdom and rightness of the Vietnam War,” Reagan acknowledged in a speech at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial toward the end of his presidency. “Both sides spoke with honesty and fervor.”
Reagan added, “Perhaps at this late date we can all agree that we’ve learned one lesson: that young Americans must never again be sent to fight and die unless we are prepared to let them win.”
The American people want to know whether Hillary Clinton and her Republican challengers have learned any lessons from Iraq.
