Many officials have admitted the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. “I believe there is a straight line that leads from that debacle to the political mess we are in today,” sbg1 writes.
recalling the 2008 Wall Street crash that disrupted the end of his Presidency and the twentieth anniversary, this weekend, of Bush’s catastrophic decision to invade Iraq. And yet the ghosts of history are never all that welcome in Washington. It’s a place that has a hard time looking back and an even harder time doing anything to rectify past mistakes.
Which made it all the more notable when the Senate met on Thursday to take a key procedural vote on a measure to repeal the two-decade-old authorization that provided the legal basis for Bush’s invasion of Iraq. When I spoke with Senator Tim Kaine, the Virginia Democrat who has spent years sponsoring the effort, he told me this was the first time Congress was poised to roll back such a measure since 1971, when it repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that authorized escalating U.S.
Timing is everything in politics, and, for Democrats, the fact that the debate was happening the same week as the twentieth anniversary of an invasion that Kaine called “a huge mistake” was no coincidence. This scheduling offered not only a chance to reassert Congress’s constitutional power to declare war but also the nearly irresistible opportunity to make a political point about the historic folly of that particular war.
It’s hardly surprising that Democrats would want to speak out against Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Many of them, including President Joe Biden, supported it at the time in 2003, but soured on the project after the extent of the military debacle became clear and Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction—the ostensible pretext for launching the war—turned out not to exist. What is more remarkable about the current debate is the extent to which Bush’s own party has been transformed since then.
Two decades ago, Bush and the Republicans were nearly united in their embrace of a brash militarism that sought to topple Saddam and transform Iraq and the broader Middle East in the process. Iraq, after paying a terrible price in the death of hundreds of thousands and disruption of millions of lives, was indeed transformed.
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