Democracy in America | Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio

Waffling hawks

How could these otherwise savvy politicians botch a simple question about Iraq?

By W.W. | CHATTANOOGA

IT'S hard admitting a mistake. Over the course of four days last week, Jeb Bush, a former governor of Florida and Republican presidential hopeful, could not quite decide how to answer an obvious question about the war in Iraq, which his younger brother George W. Bush started in 2003. Knowing what we know now, Megan Kelly of Fox News asked, would he have authorised the invasion of Iraq? First Mr Bush said "yes". Then, a day later, he said he hadn't properly grasped the question. Then, at yet another event, he suggested that dwelling on "hypotheticals...does a disservice for a lot of people who sacrificed a lot". Finally, he said "no": in hindsight, he would not have invaded Iraq.

Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida, seemed to capitalise on Mr Bush's feckless inconsistency when he appeared last week at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and said, quite resolutely, "Not only would I have not been in favour of it, President Bush would not have been in favour of it, and he said so." The part about the former president is simply false. Mr Bush "and most of his top aides have insisted that the invasion was still justified despite the failure to find [weapons of mass destruction]", writes Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post "Fact Checker" column. It would seem that Mr Rubio, seeking to stick it to Jeb Bush, overplayed his hand. But he may have misplayed his hand in another way, too.

Previously when asked, "Was it a mistake to go to war to Iraq?"—not a counterfactual question prefaced with "given what we know now"—Mr Rubio has said, "No, I don’t believe it was. The world is a better place because Saddam Hussein doesn’t run Iraq". When Chris Wallace of Fox News confronted him with this apparent contradiction, Mr Rubio flailed miserably. What he was trying do, it seems, was to square two superficially inconsistent statements: that is, Mr Bush hadn't made a mistake, given the information available to him at the time, but he probably wouldn't have invaded Iraq if he knew what we know today. But Mr Wallace was asking Mr Rubio about his own view of the war, not of Mr Bush's decision, which the senator couldn't seem to answer without spending several excruciating minutes of air-time appearing not to understand the question. His wish to not get caught out in an embarrassing Jeb Bush-like reversal led Mr Rubio to act evasive and flustered, which may have been even more damaging than a flip-flop. His time on Fox News undermined his surefootedly presidential performance at the CFR.

What exactly is going on here? One would have expected that Messrs Bush and Rubio's talking points on the Iraq war would have been scientifically triangulated, rehearsed to death and polished to a high sheen. Instead, they were tripping over their own feet. What gives?

According to Joan Walsh of Salon, the problem is that these candidates are both in the thrall of neoconservative advisers who simply don't believe that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. There's a lot to be said for Ms Walsh's diagnosis. Mr Rubio's refrain that "the world is a better place because Saddam Hussein is not there" is a no-regrets neocon bromide (never mind whether or not it's true). And a recent rundown of Mr Rubio's foreign-policy brain trust, by Pema Levy in Mother Jones, reads like a neocon most-wanted list, full of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney protégés. At his CFR speech last week, Mr Rubio made the case for a hawkish foreign policy of "American strength [as] a means of preventing war, not promoting it"—another classic neocon formulation. Meanwhile, Jeb Bush's initial take on the invasion—that it was not a mistake—accords with his brother's statements, and with his brother's neocon advisers, many of whom he has inherited.

Given their choice of advisers, it's likely that Messrs Bush and Rubio hew to the current neocon line on Iraq, which is that America was on the path to decisively winning the war, which would have vindicated the effort in the public's mind, WMDs or not. Furthermore, according to this line of thinking, it was not the American invasion and occupation that destabilised the region, leading to the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, but Barack Obama's premature withdrawal of American forces. This is, in fact, precisely how Mr Bush has addressed the charge, pressed on him last week by a brave University of Nevada student, that "Your brother created ISIS". According to Mr Bush, his brother had nothing to do with it. "This administration created the void that created this emerging caliphate that is far bigger than anything that existed before", he said days later at a fundraiser in Iowa City, "and there is no long-term strategy on how to deal with it".

Suppose you feel confident that America was about to win the war and establish a strong democratic ally and an American strategic foothold in the Middle East, which was the plan all along and would have justified the invasion both in fact and in the public's mind. Suppose further that you honestly believe that the main reason it's gone sour is that Mr Obama went wobbly. The logical implication, then, is not that the invasion was the mistake, knowing what we know now. Rather, it is that Mr Obama's choice to withdraw troops was the mistake. It then follows that the smart thing to do—the best "long-term strategy on how to deal with it," in Mr Bush's words—is to get American boots back on the ground and vindicate the invasion by finishing the job. The problem for hawks like Messrs Bush and Rubio is that this is an impolitic thing to say.

According to the most recent polls, conservatives are almost evenly split in their views of the Iraq war. A slim plurality of 46% still say that it was worth it, while 44% say it wasn't. So when it comes to campaigning for the GOP nomination, coming down on the side of the war and blaming the failure on Mr Obama is sensible. However, given the ambivalence of conservative voters, it is best to not be too firm about this. The idea of sending ground troops to combat IS also polls dismally, even among Republicans. Then there's the general election to think about. More than seven in ten Americans think the war wasn't worth it. If the eventual GOP nominee is going to have a shot at the White House, he will need to say that the invasion was a mistake. So it is wise to be on the record saying a version of that now.

But this can be awfully hard to do if you don't fully believe it. Messrs Bush and Rubio's botched answers show what happens when politicians vacillate between what they probably really think and what is, all things considered, the politically wise thing to say. The fact that these candidates must also try to appeal to both hawkish Republican-primary voters and the more remorseful general voting public merely complicates matters. But in an effort to cover all bases, Messrs Bush and Rubio have served up the kind of awkward, elliptical rhetoric that raises important questions about their basic competence as retail politicians.

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