"If you knew then what you know now about Iraq, would you still have invaded?" That seems to be the question di jour among the beltway stenographers who pass for journalists these days. The question is supposed to be some kind of litmus test for presidential candidates. Some have done well with the question, (Hillary said flat out, she made a mistate). Other candidates have not fared so well ( Jeb Bush finally got it right after three answers, and Marco Rubio never got it right). The obvious answer, of course, is hell no! I wouldn't have invaded. Obviously if you knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, why the hell would you invade. You would have to be a war monger to want to go to war when you knew there was no reason to invade. But for me, the real question should be, WHY DIDN'T YOU KNOW THEN WHAT YOU KNOW NOW?? To me, that question would reveal more about a presidential candidate. If you couldn't see through that Iraq war sales job based on flimsy or no evidence, you have no business being anywhere near the White House. Of course many of us knew then what we know now and filled the streets in protest, displaying our knowledge back then. More after the orange banner..
Matt Taibbi nails it again in his recent article in Roling Stone http://www.opednews.com/... He examines poor Jeb Bush's fumble on the subject and the lambastin he is taken from a number of media outlets. The same media outlets, Matt points out, who were shamelessly cheer leading for the war arguments when they should have know better..
" It's the general notion that the Iraq War issue was ome kind of tough intellectual call that we all needed hingsight to sort out. It wasn't and we didn't"
"It was obvious even back then, to anyone who made the faintest effort to look at the situation honestly, that the invasion was doomed, wrong and a joke."
But it wasn't just the so-called reporters. What about our politicians who are supposed to be smarter than us( that's why we elected them). How could they not see through this sales job? Again Taibbi...
I don't believe that most of the otherwise smart people who supported the war back then, from Hillary Clinton to the editorial boards of our major newspapers, bought any of this. What did happen is that a lot of people got caught up in the politics of the situation and didn't have the backbone to opt out.
So while Jeb Bush did fumble the question, it is totally unfair of these media outlets to jump on poor old Jeb when they should have know better at a time when it mattered the most!! A time when they could have informed the American public on what was really going on in Iraq.
When I was a young lad in high school, I couldn't understand why we wanted to invade a small country like Vietnam. It didn't make any sense to me. But my government kept saying we needed to defend American freedom. Try as I might, I couldn't understand how fighting in that far off Asian country had anything to do with keeping us free. I figured I wasn't bright enough to understand and that these politicians with Harvard and Yale degrees knew more than me. When I got into college and of draft age, I found out that they didn't know more than me. It is high time we stop listening to them ( and our media outlets) and listen to our own common sense. It seems we always know then what they later come to know now.