The only 2016 presidential candidates getting grilled by the press this month on the Middle East and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq are the ones who had no part in authorizing the use of force.
The one candidate to vote for the invasion, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, stated that she regrets her vote to go to war in Iraq, and reporters have pretty much let it go at that.
Republican hopefuls have not gotten off so easily.
GOP candidates are likely having a harder go of it than Clinton for the simple fact that they are actually talking to the press. Prior to Tuesday, the Washington Post had counted 40,150 minutes, nearly a full month, since she last took a question from a reporter.
But there may be another reason for why things have been tougher for Republicans: Certain potential candidates on the right have flubbed their responses to hypothetical questions about invading Iraq. Botched answers create headlines.
Newsrooms smelled blood in the water after likely candidate former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush gave a less-than-clear answer on whether he would have invaded Iraq as did his older brother, President George W. Bush. Jeb Bush offered multiple responses over the course of several days before saying finally, “Knowing what we know now, I would not have engaged. I would not have invaded Iraq.”
The press was both unimpressed and surprised that after 12 years, Bush had no answer prepared for the question.
“Tortured as it was, though, Bush’s response did not introduce Iraq into the presidential race so much as elevate an issue whose offshoots had been there all along, lying just below the surface,” the Los Angeles Times wrote.
Having taken down one quarry, reporters shifted to other Republican frontrunners.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who announced his candidacy in April, faced the hypothetical in a Sunday interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace. After parsing out the question for several minutes, Rubio finally said that the invasion was not a mistake, even in hindsight.
“He was dealing with Saddam Hussein,” he said, referring to George W. Bush. “The world is a better place because Saddam Hussein is not there.”
Bloomberg News characterized the discussion as a “long and confusing exchange, rife with interruptions,” while the New York Times and the Huffington Post accused Rubio of “struggling.”
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has yet to declare his candidacy, had a different answer.
“Any president would have likely taken the same action 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,” he told the Washington Post.
“President Bush deserves enormous credit for ordering the surge, a courageous move that worked. Unfortunately, President Obama and Secretary Clinton hastily withdrew our troops, threw away the gains of the surge, and embarked on a broader policy of pivoting away from the Middle East and leading from behind that has created chaos in the region,” he added.
The press immediately played up the GOP infighting angle, with numerous headlines noting that Walker had chosen to capitalize on Bush’s botched handling of the Iraq question.
For her part, Clinton reiterated her position this week that she regrets voting as a U.S. senator to authorize the invasion.
“I know that there have been a lot of questions about Iraq posed to candidates over the last weeks. I’ve made it very clear that I made a mistake, plain and simple, and I have written about it in my book. I’ve talked about it in the past,” Clinton told reporters at a campaign event in Iowa Tuesday.
The former secretary of state has declined to comment any further on the issue, leaving reporters with nothing more to go on than her declared regret. As a result, newsrooms have focused more on quotable Republican candidates, none of whom were involved in authorizing the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and less on Clinton, who said in a 2002 senate speech that she was “attuned” to the “risk of not acting” on Iraq because she and the Empire State had “gone through the fires of hell.”
