Jeb Bush’s fumbled answer on Iraq is so troubling because the controversy is so unnecessary. The only people in the United States obsessed with re-litigating the 2003 decision to invade Iraq are on the left. Most Americans are far more concerned about what the next president is going to do about Iraq today.
And — news flash — the vast majority want to send ground forces to Iraq right now.
In March, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 62 percent of Americans support sending ground forces to Iraq to fight the Islamic State, while only 30 percent are opposed. Even a 53 percent majority of Democrats support sending ground troops to Iraq, along with 60 percent of independents. Among Republicans, support for boots on the ground is even higher, with 73 percent in favor and 18 percent opposed.
So let’s be clear: There is no groundswell among GOP primary voters for Bush or any of the Republican presidential candidates to disavow the 2003 invasion. What voters do want to hear from the presidential contenders is how they are going to deal with the terrorist threat from Iraq in the here and now. Just this weekend, the Islamic State captured Ramadi, capital of Anbar province, putting the terrorists just 80 miles from Baghdad. Despite months of U.S. airstrikes, the terrorists are on the offensive, gaining ground. President Obama’s strategy is failing, and his policy of retreat and withdrawal from Iraq is a disaster. What are the GOP candidates going to do about it?
Bush’s hesitancy to say he would not have gone into Iraq was admirable, and I suspect it had less to do with defending his brother than not breaking faith with our men and women in uniform. If he said that he would not have authorized the invasion, he would have been telling the families of the fallen that their loved ones died for a mistake. He would have been telling the tens of thousands of wounded Iraq veterans that their sacrifice was for nothing. Their sacrifice was not for nothing. They removed one of the world’s most brutal dictators and liberated 25 million people from unspeakable tyranny. The world is unquestionably safer without Saddam Hussein in power. Indeed, if they had not removed him, we would not even know what we know today — that the intelligence indicating that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction was wrong.
Given that, what should Bush have said when Fox News’s Megyn Kelly asked, “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion”? It was a fair question, to which he should have replied that in the presidency, you don’t get to make decisions with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. You make decisions based on the intelligence you have at the time. In 2003, we had flawed intelligence. Today, we have a president who was getting clear and correct intelligence that the Islamic State was on the rise, but who ignored that intelligence and dismissed them as “JV terrorists.” We need to fix the mess created by Obama’s premature withdrawal and his failure to confront the terrorist danger in Iraq.
What worries many Republicans about this episode is not Bush’s reluctance to second-guess the Iraq invasion or create distance between himself and his brother. The vast majority of Americans support the George W. Bush Doctrine of fighting the terrorists over there so we do not have to face them here at home.
What worries Republicans is that the Iraq question caught Bush by surprise and that he was completely unprepared to deliver what should have been the best-prepared, most carefully scripted answer of his entire campaign. It’s not as though Kelly hit him with a “gotcha” question. The Bush campaign has been boasting for months about the team of experienced foreign policy advisers it has assembled. So no one saw this question coming?
Calling Captain Obvious.
If Bush can’t handle an obvious question on Iraq, what is he going to do when even harder questions come — like what he’s going to do about Iraq today?
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