Tom Cotton, the Iraq war veteran from Arkansas turned Republican senator, has a message to fellow soldiers: “We should not be ashamed of the war we conducted in Iraq.”
Leading Republicans are sticking by the Iraq war, declining to follow the Democrats into full retreat and regret.
Cotton, while conceding that there are lessons to be learned from the conflict and that it might have been handled differently in retrospect, maintains that President George W. Bush made the best decision he could at the time based on the available intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s presumed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
“Knowing what we know now, I absolutely would have sent the Pacific Fleet out of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 4 to intercept the Japanese Fleet,” Cotton told the Washington Examiner during an interview in his Capitol Hill office. “I say that to highlight how foolish the question is. You don’t get to live life in reverse. What a leader has to do is make a decision, at the moment of decision, based on the best information he has. George Bush did that in 2002 and 2003 and he was supported by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and John Kerry and every western country’s intelligence agency.”
“There are lessons we can learn from the early days of the Iraq war. One is that we clearly should be more critically analytical about our approach to intelligence assessments,” Cotton added.
Hillary Clinton lost the 2008 Democratic presidential primary to now-President Obama in part because he was a consistent opponent of the Iraq war and never voted for it.
Taking no chances this time around, Clinton reiterated this week during a brief interview while campaigning for president in Iowa that she regrets her vote as a New York senator to authorize the 2003 invasion that led to the fall of dictator Saddam Hussein.
Biden, now vice president, and Kerry, Clinton’s predecessor at the State Department, were senators when they voted to authorize the war. They long ago joined Clinton in retracting their support for the war and apologizing for their vote to authorize military force in Iraq.
In the past 10 days, nearly every Republican presidential contender has submitted that they would have handled Iraq differently had they known that Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction. But they have stood by their support for the initial decision, made by Bush and backed by Congress and the United Nations, even though none were serving on Capitol Hill or in the president’s cabinet at the time of the vote.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, brother of George W. Bush, during a campaign appearance last week said, “Knowing what we know now, what would you have done? I would have not engaged — I would not have gone into Iraq. That’s not to say that the world [isn’t] safer because Saddam Hussein is gone. It is significantly safer.
Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Sunday on Fox News Sunday said, “It was not a mistake for the president to go into Iraq based on the information he was provided as president … Presidents don’t have the benefit of hindsight.”
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, on Tuesday during an interview on Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier said that “Any president, I don’t care which party, I think given that information at the time would have made a similar decision … People are questioning [but] I think it made sense at the time.”
It’s been more or less the same for Republican hawks elected to Congress since major fighting by U.S. troops in Iraq ended, among them Iraq war veterans including Cotton and Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Ryan Zinke of Montana.
Their frustration stems from the Democrats’ claims that the Iraq war led to the rise of the Islamic State, a new incarnation of al Qaeda that today is roiling Iraq and menacing the Middle East. The 2003 invasion isn’t the problem, Cotton says. Rather, it is Obama’s decision to pull troops out of Iraq after the Bush-led military “surge” of 2007 succeeded in defeating local al Qaeda forces and stabilizing the country.
“The indictment of President Obama’s policy is much worse than the purported indictment of President Bush’s policy because everyone questions if we had known then what we know now,” Cotton said. “It’s hard to analyze hypotheticals in history; I’m confident that the world is a better place and the world is a safer place with Saddam Hussein removed from power.”
“President Obama knew then what was going to happen, because his military commanders were advising him that they needed a small stay-behind force of 10,000 to 15,000 troops,” he added. “President Obama, for political reasons, knowing what he knew then, still made the decision to withdraw all our troops from Iraq.”
Cotton has not endorsed in the Republican presidential primary, and doesn’t have plans to do so any time soon. He does plan to do his best to keep national security as a front and center issue in the 2016 campaign.
The senator declined to directly address the politics of the Iraq war and what impact it might have on a contest that Republicans are hoping will focus on the foreign policy choices made by Obama and Clinton. But he said U.S. troops fought a “just and noble” war to liberate Baghdad, and should feel proud of what they accomplished.
“We should not be ashamed of the war we conducted in Iraq,” he said. “The troops won the war in 2007 and 2008 and 2009.”
Disclosure: The author’s wife works as an advisor to Scott Walker.
