The Republican presidential contenders’ politically expedient rush to disavow the Iraq War risks opening a rift with military veterans and their families who bore the brunt of the controversial conflict.
Americans initially supported the 2003 invasion, persuaded by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and must be removed from power. The intelligence turned out to be wrong, turning most Americans against the war after it bogged down. Support never rematerialized, even after a military “surge” spearheaded by Bush pacified Iraq.
In various forms, this is the politically defensible position most Republican White House hopefuls have claimed. In recent days, they have said that Bush made the right call based on intelligence available at the time, and they would have supported it. In hindsight, based on the knowledge that Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, they oppose the conflagration and would not have prosecuted it.
But in their drive to distance themselves from Bush and an unpopular war, the Republicans might have inadvertently sucker-punched the troops and their families who sacrificed so much for a conflict that many believe was just. Conservatives focused on national security say the move is unbecoming of a commander in chief and plays right into the Democrats’ hands.
“It is an emotional hit,” Pete Hegseth, CEO of the GOP-friendly activist group Concerned Veterans for America, told the Washington Examiner on Friday during a brief telephone interview. “The biggest frustration for many of us is that the [Republican presidential] candidates are leaning toward a narrative trumpeted by the Left that the Iraq war was an inevitable failure.”
Hegseth is a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was deployed to Iraq with the Army’s 3rd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division in 2005 and 2006, and served as an infantry platoon leader in Baghdad in 2005.
The Iraq War, which helped cost the GOP control of Congress in 2006 and the presidency two years later, received fresh attention last week after former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, brother of President George W. Bush, delivered a clumsy answer to a question of whether he would have supported the Iraq war knowing what is known now about Hussein’s lack of a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
At first, Jeb Bush said he would have backed the war anyway. By Thursday, four days after his initial answer aired during a Fox News interview, Bush reversed himself. The Floridian now says that he would have supported the invasion based on available intelligence, but that he opposed the war in retrospect. In his explanation, however, Bush touched on the dilemma of what message that sends to Iraq war veterans and their families.
“It’s very hard for me to say their lives were lost in vain. In fact, they weren’t. We have the greatest military on the face of the Earth. And the families that suffer have gone through a lot too. Their sacrifice is worth honoring, not depreciating,” Bush said during a campaign-style appearance in Arizona. According to Defense Department statistics, 4,425 military personnel lost their lives in Operation Iraqi Freedom, including 3,491 killed in action. The wounded in action numbered almost 32,000.
In a Republican presidential primary, the question is whether the GOP contenders could damage their relationship with veterans and their families by essentially saying that they sacrificed for nothing. Many in this group happen to support the GOP candidates in their near unanimous call for more aggressive U.S. leadership abroad.
Indeed, many of them still believe the Iraq war, which toppled Hussein, a murderous, authoritarian dictator who threatened Iraqis and his neighbors, to be a good and necessary war. They also believe the war was won through the hard sacrifices made in the surge of 2007, only to be squandered by President Obama’s determination to withdraw troops from the Middle East at all costs.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., is one of those veterans. Then a congressman, Cotton said during a 2013 interview on CNN to mark the tenth anniversary of the war that it was “a just and noble war. … After the surge I felt that we succeeded.”
“I would say it was worth it, but it’s also a little bit too soon to tell because there’s nothing ever certain in human affairs,” Cotton said. “But if you look at the accomplishments of our troops in Iraq, they deposed an evil tyrant who was an aggressive international dictator — he’d invaded across two boundaries. He demonstrated the ability and the will to use weapons of mass destruction.”
Cotton declined to comment for this story.
Of course, there are plenty of veterans, and those close to them, who opposed the war, both at the time and since. Some Iraq war veterans subsequently ran for and won seats in Congress as Democrats.
Meanwhile, Obama’s firm opposition to the war contributed to his victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary and general election win over Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a Vietnam war hero who supported the Iraq conflict. Clinton, who later served as Obama’s secretary of state, has said she regrets her vote to authorize the war made while she was serving as a senator from New York. Clinton is running for president again in 2016; she is the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Richard Grenell, who served as a top spokesman for the U.S. at the United Nations under George W. Bush, said rehashing the Iraq War is useless because it reveals little about how the 2016 White House contenders would handle current foreign policy challenges. Grenell also argued that Republican candidates could effectively make the case to GOP primary voters that Bush handed Obama and Clinton an Iraq that was successful — that it was the current, not the previous administration, that messed it up.
Grenell’s advice: Stop engaging with the media in revisionist history.
“There’s an innate assumption that complicated foreign policy questions can be replicated 10 years later. It would be helpful for the candidates to say you can’t replicate those data points,” he said. It’s important to ask candidates how they’d respond on national security issues, but they need to be current issues.”
Disclosure: The author’s wife works as an advisor to Scott Walker.
