Rupert Murdoch should be forced to divest from U.S. 'news' as well as all other Zionists,NY Times,CNBC,CNN,et.al.
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/iraq-war-persists-as-awkward-election-issue-1431653886
Iraq War Persists as Awkward Election Issue
Questions dogged Jeb Bush as other 2016 hopefuls scrambled to explain their positions
Jeb Bush offered a new answer Thursday to the question of whether, in retrospect, the Iraq War was a good idea. Why has this been a week of ‘oh brother’ moments? WSJ’s Jason Bellini has #TheShortAnswer.
More than a decade after it began, the war in Iraq is still tying American politicians in knots, posing awkward questions for 2016 presidential candidates of both parties.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, after recasting his answers to questions about the war during the past few days, tried to put the issue to rest Thursday by saying he wouldn’t, in hindsight, have supported the invasion his brother launched in 2003 based on flawed intelligence.
With that, he joined an array of potential GOP rivals who had scrambled this week to distance themselves from a war their party supported at the time.
The issue also is complicated for Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential candidate. She faces lingering liberal skepticism for voting for the war while in the Senate, as well as GOP criticism of Obama administration policies that left Iraq unstable after U.S. troops withdrew in 2011.
Few people in either party seem eager to make the Iraq war central to the 2016 campaign. But the long, inconclusive conflict has shadowed U.S. politics for more than a decade, much as the Vietnam War did in the 1968, 1972 and 1976 elections in its aftermath.
The Iraq war already is surfacing again in the 2016 campaign, as a bludgeon for candidates to attack each other and as a proxy measure of their judgment and willingness to take risks and use military force.
WHAT CANDIDATES ARE SAYING
- Jeb Bush: ‘I would have not engaged, I would not have gone into Iraq.’
- Sen. Marco Rubio: ‘Not only would I not have been in favor of it, President Bush…has said he regrets that the intelligence was faulty.’
- Sen.
Rand Paul : ‘Invading Iraq was a mistake, and I thought the war, even at the time, was a mistake given the intelligence.’ - Sen. Ted Cruz: ‘Now we know that intelligence was false, and without that predicate there’s no way we would have gone to war.’
- Gov. Chris Christie: ‘If we knew then what we know now…I wouldn’t have gone to war.’
- Hillary Clinton: ‘I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had…But I still got it wrong.’
Democrats will use Republicans’ past support for the war to accuse them “of being way too ready to use military power,” saidAaron David Miller, a former State Department official under Democratic and Republican administrations. “On the Republican side, it is a way to blast [President Barack] Obama and his first secretary of state for heading to the exits too fast.”
One risk for Republicans is that, while polls show that voters generally trust them more than Democrats to handle defense and foreign policy, the Iraq war debate shifts attention to past policy blunders.
“A clear message about the future is obscured by the bickering back and forth about the past,” said Phil Musser, a GOP political consultant. “This election could well be a foreign policy election, and, if it is, it will be a vision for the future that prevails, not a re-hash of the past.”
The Iraq war debate was abruptly thrust to center stage this week as Mr. Bush was asked on several occasions whether he would have supported the Iraq invasion if he knew what is known today: That his brother, George W. Bush, was mistaken in believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Bush handled the issue awkwardly. In an interview that aired Monday he said, “I would have.’’ The next day, he said he had misunderstood the question but didn’t say whether he would have acted differently than his brother. On Wednesday, he said it would be a disservice to people who lost family members to consider such hypothetical questions.
On Thursday, Mr. Bush said: “Knowing what we know now ... I would have not engaged, I would not have gone into Iraq.”
The flap gave his rivals fresh ammunition for arguing it is too risky for Republicans to nominate a third Bush for president.
“That’s a real problem if he can’t articulate what he would have done differently,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who is a presidential candidate and said he opposed the Iraq war from the outset.
Although the majority of the public supported the war at first, polls show it since has soured. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll taken in October, 2014, found that a record high 66% of adults thought the war wasn’t worth it, up from 37% in December 2003.
The war was a central issue in two other presidential elections—in 2004, when George W. Bush faced re-election, and in 2008, when Mr. Obama’s early opposition to the war gave him a winning issue on which to challenge Mrs. Clinton in the Democratic primary.
At the time, Mrs. Clinton wouldn’t call her vote a mistake, an unpopular position among Democrats furious about the war’s toll. She belatedly did so in her 2014 book, “Hard Choices.”
“I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had,” she wrote. “And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong.”
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on Thursday said he wouldn’t have backed the Iraq war his brother launched in 2003 based on flawed intelligence. PHOTO: DEANNA DENT/REUTERS
Even so, Mrs. Clinton faces lingering resentment among some Democrats.
“I don’t think we should have a president of the United States who voted for the huge mistake that is the Iraq war,” former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee said last month in announcing he may run for the White House.
Criticism of Mrs. Clinton from the left may not resonate as it did in 2008. She has since recanted the vote, time has passed and no strong challengers have emerged to take her on.
Republicans, however, are likely to criticize Mrs. Clinton for opposing the 2007 surge in military troops that helped turn the course of the war. They already are trying to blame her for the Obama administration’s withdrawal of troops from Iraq, which they say occurred to too quickly and early, fueling the rise of Islamic State.
Some Democrats see that as a toothless argument among voters, because most Americans were pleased to see U.S. troops leave, even given the disarray that followed. In her book, In her book, Mrs. Clinton said she opposed the additional troops because she didn’t think then-president Bush had the proper diplomatic strategy to match the military movesand because Americans were so deeply opposed to the war.
