Seeking to avoid the multi-day saga that Jeb Bush endured in publicly crafting an opinion on the Iraq War, Marco Rubio was quick to pipe up that he wouldn't have invaded Iraq based on what we now know, but
George W. Bush himself wouldn't have either.
Which raises an interesting question: Would George W. Bush still have authorized the invasion in 2003 had he known that Iraq did not actually have the unconventional weapons that intelligence agencies said it did?
It's an "interesting question" because George W. Bush never said he wouldn't have gone to war if he knew the intelligence was wrong. He said he
regretted the "intelligence failure in Iraq," but never said he wouldn't happily
jump in anyway.
"I think it was the right decision," Bush said in response Scheiffer asking if invasion was the wrong decision. "My regret is that a violent group of people has risen up again."
... because the world is "undoubtably safer with Saddam gone," after all. Despite the fact that it most pointedly isn't.
All of this, though, is a dodge, and it's a pretty shameless one at that. The fact is that we did know the intelligence was flawed at the time. Many people pointed it out; some, like Joe Wilson and his then-CIA wife, were specifically punished by the White House for doing so. The Colin Powell speech to the United Nations was strong on innuendo but weak in facts; the United Nations inspectors in charge of keeping tabs on Iraq considered the White House claims flatly wrong; nonsense about aluminum tubes was debunked in real time. The "intelligence failure" in question was caused in large part due to an independent "intelligence" operation set up by the White House to "analyze" Iraq intelligence independent of career intelligence experts who were unable to give the administration the answers they wanted.
Head below the fold for more.
So the "intelligence" leading to the Iraq war wasn't tragically proven wrong after the fact; the White House set up an intelligence operation designed to be wrong, or at least designed to have none of the checks and balances that were preventing other intelligence-gatherers from coming to the preferred conclusion. George W. Bush can't say that he would not have invaded Iraq if he had known the intelligence was wrong because the administration had ample warnings at the time that the intelligence was wrong. It ignored them all. It took action to discredit those with contrary evidence, claiming they each had an "agenda" against the administration and were not trustworthy. The Bush administration marched to war regardless of the weakness of the evidence, under the general premise that the world would be "undoubtably safer with Saddam gone," and using the rhetoric of if there's even a one percent chance and mushroom clouds to paint Iraq as a clear and present danger to the nation regardless of the flimsy nature of the evidence.
The administration knew the intelligence was flimsy. Congress knew it. Many, many experts knew it, and said it. A large portion of the public knew it, and were branded dirty peacenik hippies or anti-American malcontents for thinking so.
Greg Sargent:
[T]his leaves out a big part of the story of the run-up to the war, which is that some people were arguing at the time against invading Iraq, on the grounds that the evidence was all right there in plain sight that Iraq did not pose a threat imminent enough to justify an invasion. Some people (I’m not claiming to be among them) were publicly shouting themselves hoarse, pointing out at the time that, at the very least, there were serious questions about whether Iraq really posed the threat the Bush administration claimed it did. [...]
I’m not saying it was a slam-dunk case based on contemporaneous evidence that going in was unjustified or ill-advised. I’m simply saying that it shouldn’t be forgotten that there were real grounds for suspecting this very well might be the case, and those making this argument were marginalized or largely ignored by leading members of both parties. Public officials had all kinds of motives for closing their ears to that argument.
Precisely. After all, the rise of the blogosphere, including the rise of
this very site, was based in large part on opposition to the Iraq War and to the "intelligence" claims that were being used to justify it. The White House, both political parties and the national punditry were all keenly hostile to any expressed public opinion against the war; in the wake of 9/11, "patriotism" was used as a bludgeon to instill the notion that questioning the administrative's motives for a two-front war was anti-American. From country singers to weapons experts, opposing the
patriotic war could be a potentially career-ending move.
Jeb Bush and the other candidates can begrudgingly pipe up saying that they would not have gone to war based on what we know now, but what we know now we also knew then. None of them would listen. The Republicans were salivating for war, the Democrats were eager to jump aboard lest they be labeled weak on foreign policy, and the media, with only the smallest handful of exceptions, didn't give a flying damn so long as they got footage of bombs going off. Not a one of them should be forgiven for their attacks on those that did suspect the evidence, and not a one of them have asked for that forgiveness either.