Posted on 02/20/2016 4:54:05 AM PST by VitacoreVision
Presidential candidate Donald Trump's continued condemnations of former President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003 have irritated many of his political opponents, including Bush's younger brother and Trump's rival for the Republican nomination, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. During the recent Republican candidates' debate in Greenville, South Carolina, Trump, in addition to calling the invasion of Iraq "a big fat mistake," responded to Jeb Bush's defense of his brother's record by reminding listeners that the 9/11 attacks had occurred while George W. was president.
The heated exchange was prompted by a question posed to Trump by moderator John Dickerson, who asked Trump about an interview he'd had back in 2008 with Wolf Blitzer. During that interview, they had discussed George W. Bush's conduct of the war in Iraq. Dickerson reminded Trump of a statement he'd made to Blitzer: that he was surprised that Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi hadn't tried to impeach him.
Trump had told Blitzer at the time: "Which, personally, I think would have been a wonderful thing."
When Blitzer asked Trump what he had meant by that, Trump explained: "For the war, for the war, he lied, he got us into the war with lies."
When Dickerson asked Trump if he still believes that Bush should have been impeached, Trump answered:
Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right? Now, you can take it any way you want, and it took -- it took Jeb Bush, if you remember at the beginning of his announcement, when he announced for president, it took him five days.
He went back, it was a mistake, it wasn't a mistake. It took him five days before his people told him what to say, and he ultimately said, "It was a mistake." The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don't even have it. Iran has taken over Iraq, with the second-largest oil reserves in the world.
Obviously, it was a mistake...
George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East...
You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.
Bush said of Trump's criticism of his brother's presidential policies: "I am sick and tired of him going after my family. My dad is the greatest man alive in my mind."
After the audience applauded, Bush continued: "And while Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe. And I'm proud of what he did."
Whereupon Trump delivered his zinger: "The World Trade Center came down during your brother's reign, remember that."
Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also jumped into the debate by defending former president Bush against Trump's charges, saying: "I thank God all the time it was George W. Bush in the White House on 9/11 and not Al Gore."
As Rubio continued he -- perhaps unthinkingly -- gave away a facet of our nation's invasion of Iraq that is rarely discussed: how our nation's submission to UN authority has a tendency to draw us into war after war, as happened in Korea and Vietnam (as part of SEATO). Rubio said:
And you can -- I think you can look back in hindsight and say a couple of things, but [Bush] kept us safe. And not only did he keep us safe, but no matter what you want to say about weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein was in violation of U.N. resolutions, in open violation, and the world wouldn't do anything about it, and George W. Bush enforced what the international community refused to do. [Emphasis added.]
On December 19, 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell stated that Iraq was in "material breach" of Security Council resolution 1441, offering Iraq "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations" that had been set out in several previous resolutions. On September 12, 2002, Bush addressed the General Assembly and outlined a catalogue of complaints against the Iraqi government.
Under our Constitution, Congress is responsible for declaring war, and the president is responsible for serving as commander in chief of our military when we are engaged in such a war. There is no provision in the Constitution for our president to seek permission from the UN to defend our nation, nor to go to war without a declaration of war from Congress to enforce UN resolutions. This point was lost on members of the Bush administration, has subsequently been lost on members of the Obama administration, and is lost on Rubio, as well.
Trump countered Rubio's statement:
How did he keep us safe when the World Trade Center… I lost hundreds of friends. The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush. He kept us safe? That is not safe. That is not safe, Marco. That is not safe.
Rubio countered by saying: "The World Trade Center came down because Bill Clinton didn't kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance to kill him," after which Trump responded: "George Bush -- by the way, George Bush had the chance, also, and he didn't listen to the advice of his C.I.A."
Regarding Rubio's assertion, the day before the 9/11 attacks, former President Clinton told a group of businessmen in Australia:
I nearly got [bin Laden]. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn't do it.
As for Trump's counter-charge about Bush, an opinion piece in the New York Times on September 10, 2012, "The Deafness Before the Storm," noted that several weeks before 9/11, on August 6, 2001, Bush had received a classified review of the threats posed by bin Laden and his terrorist network, al-Qaeda. Furthermore, noted the article, this was not the only such warning:
The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that "a group presently in the United States" was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be "imminent," although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.
The most significant point of this back-and-forth debate may not be speculation about who was responsible for 9/11 and whether or not our government could have prevented the attacks. We will never know that for certain. Of more significance is how these attacks were exploited to further an increasingly interventionist U.S. foreign policy and the creation of an invasive domestic spy network conducted by the NSA, following the passing of the PATRIOT Act, that has greatly undermined our Bill of Rights.
A discussion of the effects of our invasion of Iraq and the interventionist foreign policy that has continued ever since came up during a the CNN Republican presidential town hall in Columbia, South Carolina, on February 18. During that town hall, the moderator, Anderson Cooper introduced an attendee named Orrin Smith, who asked Trump if he still stood by a statement he made about five years ago asserting that Bush had lied to get us into war in Iraq, noting that the statement had stung him very deeply.
Trump sidestepped the question somewhat and without saying that Bush had definitely lied, replied:
Let me ... tell you something. I'll tell you it very simply. It may have been the worst decision -- going into Iraq may have been the worst decision anybody has made, any president has made in the history of this country. That's how bad it is, OK?
When the man, as well as Cooper, pressed him, he never did say definitively that Bush had lied. The closest he came was: "I don't know what he did. I just know it was a terrible mistake."
During his convoluted answer to the question, however, Trump touched on many of the devastating aftereffects resulting from the invasion. Among these was the ongoing crisis stemming from the tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the turmoil in the Middle East and going to Europe. He referred to, "The migration that you see today, the destruction of Europe, with Angela Merkel allowing millions of people coming into Germany…. You look at Sweden, the other day -- you look at Brussels -- I was in Brussels years ago. It was one of the most beautiful -- now it's like an armed camp. So crazy, what they've done."
Summing up his often-rambling recitation of the bad effects of our Iraqi invasion, Trump correctly noted:
The war in Iraq started the whole destabilization of the Middle East. It started ISIS. It started Libya. It started Syria. That was one of the worst decisions ever made by any government at any time.
Trump is obviously not afraid to criticize a Republican president if he believes such criticism is called for, which serves a valuable purpose in the current campaign. He has done a good job of slaying sacred cows and shaking up the party establishment.
However, this does not equate to being good presidential material. He lacks the depth of knowledge and consistency to put together a well-planned political program of the type previously offered by constitutionalists such as Senator Rand Paul, or former Representative Ron Paul, both of whose presidential campaigns never got off the ground.
The best the constitutionalist voter can hope for is that the party will offer a candidate in November who will do more to defend the Constitution than to dismantle it. If the GOP does not do this, the only alternative will be to build a more effective, consitutionalist Congress.
Related articles:
Rand Paul Calls Iraq War a "Mistake," Libya a "Disaster"
Chemical Weapons Found in Iraq Were Not Those Used to Justify Invasion
Although Clinton screwed it up (refusing C130 gunships, etc.), it is my understanding that GHW Bush sent our troops to Somalia for some goofball mission about feeding the locals - well, watching the well fed locals march through the streets gleefully carrying the body parts of American pilots they slaughtered made me feel just great that we fed the pigs. And I wondered why Jeb and Neil ad GW weren’t there on the front line.
Saddam was a big enemy of Iran, Now Iraq is z client state and ally of Iran. We don’t need “strategery” like this again and we actually paid 2 trillions dollars and suffered tens of thousands of casualties to produce this result. Where was the benefit to the American people?
For that region, I always go to the one core word: OIL.
Relatively few Republican Guard troops were killed getting out of Kuawait. Most made it back to Iraq. I’m fairly sure it was mostly regular army caught on highway 80.
(Sonny getting back at saddam for bush sr)
That’s exactly why the “war” happened. GWB was a fool for taking his eye off of Afghanistan. He should have focused on the Bin Laden hunt there and then deal with Saudi Arabia for whatever part they played.
It SHOULD BE noted that one of towers had been attacked before when a van was driven into a parking area and exploded.
Dubya’, evidently, didn’t think that it could possibly happen again.
Hold on. wasn’t bin Ladin our Mujadeen boy in Afganistan fighting Soviets? we trained and supplied them for a decade didn’t we?
It gets so confusing when we supported Mujadeen and fought Al Queda. ISIS is good in Syria, but bad in Iraq. It appears we support and then fight anyone with the ultimate goal of destabilization?
I want the UN out of the US. We can’t keep feeding a unless beast that bites us at every turn.
Should be USELESS beast.
“During the recent Republican candidates’ debate in Greenville, South Carolina, Trump, in addition to calling the invasion of Iraq “a big fat mistake,” responded to Jeb Bush’s defense of his brother’s record by reminding listeners that the 9/11 attacks had occurred while George W. was president.”
That’s not what he said, this is a lie because it doesn’t include what he actually said.
He said the George W Bush Lied, LIED.
This rewriting of history sickens me, notice the author omitted any of the really inflammatory Trump statements to soft peddle the crap sandwich.
I think Trump is being gentle in his treatment of our past ME policy.
One day we will be eating our shitsammy and people like you will have no idea why.
I will know, and it isn’t going to be that long now
People supporting Trump are making it happen.
The whole thing seems so garbled to me. I can not remember if Powell said emphatically that Saddam had WMD. Then there is a question of what that term really means. We know he had Sarin gas and he used it. There is also the likelihood that some of it was hauled away to Syria.
Trump nor this author have softpeddled nothing. Our present financial disasters, and out of control government on its needs to satisfy the voracious appetitites of crony capitalism are due to the decision to invade Iraq.
The federal budget was more or less balanced in the last years of Cliton - and wit Iraq it exploded out of control. We build DHS and we build a DC infrastructure of crony capitalist beltway bandits to support THE GREAT RIPOFF of the American taxpayer. Obama may have continued the tradition and converted it to social spending, but GWB and his neocons started it.
This was a strategic disaster of the same order of the Athenian expedition to Syracuse which lead to the fall of Athens under the boot of Sparta.
Now that's a deal I'd like to see Trump make. Who knows the value of NY real estate better?
Cake walk? Yeah, maybe Saddam was easy to bring down, but the war that followed — almost 5000 American young people dead, many many times more than that grievously maimed and mangled — and in the end not a sign of the lasting secure peace we hoped to put in place — this was a cake walk?
Donald Trump is a rabble rouser who says anything to get what he wants. He wants to be in the news and he wants Jeb Bush out of the race so blaming George Bush for 9/11 is what he does to needle Jeb Bush and get Trump in the news.
Bill Clinton refused to do his job, covered up the first WTC attack and failed to get Bin Laden several times when literally offered to him. He also deliberately blocked law enforcement and intelligence agencies from sharing their information and that reason was because he was selling our secrets to anyone who waved a $20 bill his way.
Donald Trump blaming George Bush is not just cheap shot but undermines the United States. I am afraid he will blame anyone for his failures in the future but himself.
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