So if Trump doesn’t get the nomination, whoever does is planning on running a campaign that defends the war in Iraq as a good thing we should do again if given the option? That doesn’t exactly sound like a winning general election strategy, and if one of the other GOPe candidates who’s bashing Trump for not sticking to the neocon RNC talking points manages to win the nomination, it’s going to come up in the general election over and over and over again.
Hope if that happens we can all survive a Bernie administration, because sticking with the failed Bush Doctrine is how we ended up with 8 years of Obama.
There’s a world of difference between saying somebody bungled and somebody lied.
And Trump has neatly and effectively taken it off the table. While getting to beat on poor Yeb a little more.
“Hope if that happens we can all survive a Bernie administration, because sticking with the failed Bush Doctrine is how we ended up with 8 years of Obama.”
First, and again, welcome to Free Republic. Glad you can join us in the fight against diabolical liberalism, even if you found your speaking voice a little late in the game (6 months ago, joining up here).
You are WRONG, WRONG, WRONG on what got us Obama. Milquetoast, middle-of-the-road moderates of the GOPe type is what got us Obama.
That is why the not-so-moderate outsiders — Trump and Cruz are performing so well. No one wants another McCain or Dole or Romney. In other words, no Yeb Bush.
Trump’s mistake on this was to attack W for lying. W did not lie about WMDs. He believed they were there. If he did not, he would have planted them to cover for his lie. We had bad intel, and Bush is responsible for his decision and for which advisors he followed.
Bush had two main arguments for going into Iraq. WMDs. And Sadam being a state sponsor of terrorism. Sadam may have had WMDs which were smuggled to Gaddafi who then surrendered them to us in hopes of staying in power. Even if he did not have them, he did want us to think he had them in order to deter us. He definitely had them at some point, because we know he used them on Iraqi’s.
Sadam definitely spent lots of money (much of his money was also counterfeited US dollars) funding terrorism, though this was primarily directed toward Israel.
We had some good reasons to remove Sadam. Only in retrospect it has been a poor decision. And who could have guessed just how badly Obama would execute the war on terrorism.
When Bush was still in office, the evening news helpfully posted photos of fallen soldiers for hours and hours. They reported daily on how many more of our soldiers had died. When Obama entered office they quit doing this. And that helped Obama hide the fact that there were far more fatalities under him.
Trump would have been wise to simply say the war was a bad decision, and one he had sense enough to oppose from the start. Calling out Bush as a liar does not help him, even for those of us who are very disappointed with or even despise the Bush presidency. Trump should have also focussed on how much worse Obama has done than Bush. Hillary and Bernie want to continue Obama’s legacy.