Apparently, we won't learn . . .

We'll just bend the facts and distort history . . .

That will allow us to place blame rather than solve the problem as this article from the Washington Post demonstrates:



Morning Plum: The new GOP strategy on Iraq is to blame Obama

After struggling for days with questions about the genesis of the Iraq War, the GOP presidential candidates appear to be coalescing behind a new strategy: Shift the focus to what’s happening in Iraq right now, and blame it all on Obama.

As a number of us have noted, the current line of questioning for Republicans and Hillary Clinton about Iraq — “would you have supported the invasion knowing what we know now?” — is deeply flawed, and risks whitewashing the real history of the run-up to the war. Now, however, it seems possible that this weak line of questioning might actually aid and abet the current GOP strategy for talking about Iraq.

Robert Costa has the goods on the Republican rhetorical shift that’s underway:

After more than a decade bearing the political burden of Iraq, Republicans are making a dogged effort to shed it by arguing that the Islamic State’s gruesome ascent is a symptom of Obama’s foreign policy, rather than a byproduct of the 2003 invasion they once championed….

At the least, it is an attempt to have Iraq seen as a shared failure, begun by a Republican president and a Republican-controlled Congress but inherited and fumbled by Democrats….

The political endgame for Republicans is a general election where Clinton can be portrayed as someone who initially backed the U.S. mission but did not see it through. In that sense, foisting blame on Obama is only the first step in the GOP’s aims. Knowing their ownership of the invasion in the eyes of voters has not faded, they would like to distance themselves from the messy debate over weapons of mass destruction and make the Islamic State — how it rose and how to stop it — the central political battleground on foreign policy.

Jeb Bush is already testing out this new strategy. It’s hard to say whether it will work: While blaming Obama is a sure-fire winner among GOP primary voters, the middle of the country may still have firm memories of Iraq as Bush’s War. The strategy also risks putting more pressure on Republicans to detail what they would do in Iraq instead. Of course, with the situation in Iraq deteriorating, and with Obama’s numbers on foreign policy ailing, perhaps many Americans will be open to spreading the blame around.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) is taking heat for a series of answers he gave on whether he would have authorized the war in Iraq. Here’s what he said this week. (Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post)

It’s also worth noting, though, that the current sanitizing of the history of the Iraq War could help in this effort. The “knowing what you know now” question simplifies the genesis of the Iraq War by blaming it all on a supposed intelligence failure. That alone whitewashes away the fact that many critics warned at the time that the intelligence might not actually indicate what Bush and company claimed it did, and that Bush might be cherry-picking intel to help build the case for an invasion. Worse, as Peter Beinart and James Fallows explain, this narrative also obscures the fact that invading was a bad idea regardless of whether Saddam had WMDs — because it risked creating all kind of unintended consequences.

The simplistic line of questioning could help the new GOP rhetorical strategy. The story now becomes: Hey, we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq based on what we know now, and it was a mistake, given the intelligence failure. But since we did, what really matters is how we prosecute the current conflict. This is now all about Obama’s strategy — Bush’s “mistake” is old news — and Obama’s weakness is really to blame for the current mess.

It is of course legitimate, and desirable, to have a forward-looking debate over what we should do now, as well as over Obama’s role in helping create the status quo and his strategy there going forward. But the current chaos should not be divorced from the original decision to invade and the wrong-headed thinking that actually drove it. That decoupling also risks burying the question of whether the candidates have learned anything from that failed thinking as they discuss what should come next. The flawed line of questioning about the run-up to the war risks enabling all of this.

It will be on Democrats to prevent that from happening. But they might find themselves constrained in their ability to do that, since Clinton and Democrats, too, have an interest in keeping the questions safely confined to shallow “based on what you know now” waters.