While there are certainly foreign policy issues that will be more difficult for Hillary Clinton to answer, she
dispensed quickly with the Iraq question when she addressed reporters Tuesday.
"I've been very clear that I made a mistake, plain and simple and I have written about it in my book, talked about it in the past," she continued, according to MSNBC video of her response.
Knowing what we know now, would you have invaded Iraq? Clinton says she would have voted differently as a senator. But it's the question that
foiled Jeb Bush for all of last week and then
tripped up Marco Rubio over the weekend (as if he hadn't had all week to prep for it).
“It’s not a mistake,” he said repeatedly. “I still say it was not a mistake because the president was presented with intelligence that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it was governed by a man who had committed atrocities in the past with weapons of mass destruction.”
When Wallace pushed him to say whether he’d call it a mistake, even knowing about the faulty intelligence, he still seemed to say no: “The world is a better place because Saddam Hussein is not there…” he began.
Okay, senator, definitely heading into dicey territory. Do most Americans really think ISIS has been an improvement over Saddam Hussein? Doubtful.
Then he seemed say yes: “I don’t think George Bush would have moved forward on the invasion, and he certainly wouldn’t have gotten Congressional approval.” Wallace missed the chance to say that George W. Bush did not, in fact, admit the invasion was a mistake once he knew the WMD intelligence was faulty. “There are things we got wrong in Iraq, but the cause is eternally right,” he wrote in his memoir.
Eternally right, in theory. Maybe. Unfortunately, there's nothing theoretical about ISIS or the
31,951 American soldiers wounded in Iraq or the
138,000-plus civilian fatalities there (a number many analysts consider
a severe undercount).