Presidential hopefuls: Iraq War was mistake

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

A dozen years later, American politics has reached a rough consensus about the Iraq War: It was a mistake.

Politicians hoping to be president rarely run ahead of public opinion. So it’s a revealing moment when the major contenders for president in both parties find it best to say that 4,491 Americans and countless Iraqis lost their lives in a war that shouldn’t have been waged.

Many people have been saying that for years, of course. Polls show most of the public have judged the war a failure by now. Over time, more and more GOP politicians have allowed that the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq undermined Republican President George W. Bush’s rationale for the 2003 invasion.

It hasn’t been an easy evolution for those such as Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, who voted for the war in 2002 while serving in Congress. That vote, and her refusal to fully disavow it, cost her during her 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama, who wasn’t in the Senate in 2002 but had opposed the war.

In her memoir last year, Clinton wrote that she had voted based on the information available at the time, but “I got it wrong. Plain and simple.”

The fact that Jeb Bush, a likely candidate for the Republican nomination in 2016, was pressured this past week into rejecting, in hindsight, his brother’s war “is an indication that the received wisdom, that which we work from right now, is that this was a mistake,” said Evan Cornog, a historian and dean of the Hofstra University school of communication.

Or, as Rick Santorum, another potential Republican candidate, put it: “Everybody accepts that now.”

Santorum didn’t always see the war that way. He voted for the invasion as a senator and continued to support if for years.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz weren’t in Congress in 2002 and so didn’t have to make a real-time decision with imperfect knowledge. Neither was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who served an earlier stint in Congress.

All these Republicans said last week that, in hindsight, they would not have invaded Iraq with what’s now known about the faulty intelligence that wrongly indicated Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.