Karl Rove: Trump Didn’t Oppose the Iraq War

There’s no record of his clear opposition before March 2003, despite his claims

By Karl Rove

The Wall Street Journal

February 17, 2016

Donald Trump went loony-left during last Saturday’s GOP debate in South Carolina. In a heated moment the reality TV celebrity told the crowd that President George W. Bush had “lied” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

This wasn’t the first time that Mr. Trump went off the deep end as a candidate. In October he blamed President Bush for the Sept. 11 attacks, telling CNN: “They knew an attack was coming. George Tenet, the CIA director, knew in advance there was going to be an attack, and he said so to the president.” He expanded this accusation Saturday, saying that Mr. Bush “had the chance” to kill Osama bin Laden before 9/11 but “didn’t listen to the advice of his CIA.”

Mr. Trump obviously has not read George Tenet’s memoir, “At the Center of the Storm.” Though the CIA picked up an increasing stream of warnings about possible terror attacks at home and abroad in the months leading up to September 2001, this intelligence did not point to when, where, how and even whether the terrorists would strike. It was “frightening but without specificity,” Mr. Tenet wrote.

Intimating that Mr. Bush knew about the coming attacks but did nothing to stop them makes Mr. Trump sound like a 9/11 truther. And the idea that the Bush administration blew a chance to kill al Qaeda’s leader in its first nine months is a fairy tale. There was no such opportunity.

Mr. Trump was body slammed for these charges Saturday, first by former Gov. Jeb Bush (“While Donald Trump was building a reality-TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe”) and then by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (“I thank God all the time it was George W. Bush in the White House on 9/11 and not Al Gore”).

The Donald, though, is cunning. The day after the debate, he claimed, “I’m not blaming anybody,” but only after first repeating his smear by saying, “the CIA said there was a lot of information that something like that was going to happen.”

Mr. Trump also claimed Saturday that he alone opposed the Iraq war. “I’m the only one on this stage that said, ‘Do not go into Iraq,’ ” he asserted. “I said it loud and clear, ‘You’ll destabilize the Middle East.’ ”

This, too, is a fabrication. PolitiFact reviewed newspaper archives and TV transcripts and found that he did not publicly oppose the war before it began in March 2003. In January of that year he did discuss Iraq on Fox News, saying that President Bush “has either got to do something or not do something, perhaps, because perhaps shouldn’t be doing it yet and perhaps we should be waiting for the United Nations, you know.”

This is incoherent. Of course the president was either going to do something or not do something. And the U.N. did authorize military action by finding Iraq in material breach of the surrender agreement that Saddam signed to end the first Gulf War.

In the same interview, Mr. Trump said that President Bush was “doing a very good job.” He said that “if you look at the polls, a lot of people are getting a little tired. I think the Iraqi situation is a problem.” But that is as far as Mr. Trump went—and then he added, “I think the economy is a much bigger problem as far as the president is concerned.”

Then on March 25, 2003, in an interview after the Oscars, he called the war “a mess” and said: “If they keep fighting it the way they did today, they’re going to have a real problem.” The key to understanding his statement is the phrase “the way they did today.” Mr. Trump had clearly heard about that day’s bloody, confused fighting in the battle for Nasiriyah, which ended a few days later with a complete U.S. victory.

None of this was a “loud and clear” warning “not to go into Iraq.” None of this was a “loud and strong” declaration that “you’ll destabilize the Middle East.” They were instead the ramblings of a half-informed real-estate developer who now wants to sound like Henry Kissinger.

The whole Trumpian shtick—slandering a president, embracing ridiculous conspiracy theories, pretending to be a foreign-policy prophet—is what we’ve come to expect. If Republican voters hand such an unstable individual their party’s nomination, they will do immeasurable harm to it. Fortunately, there is still time to stop him.

Article Link to the Wall Street Journal:

Trump Didn’t Oppose the Iraq War

Share this post