by Byron York
It’s been two decades since, on March 19, 2003, United States forces invaded Iraq. President George W. Bush ordered the invasion to neutralize what he said was the threat of weapons of mass destruction posed by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Except it turned out Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction. U.S. forces searched and searched and searched, and never found them. In all, 4,586 American servicemen and women died in the war and 32,455 were wounded.
It was the largest military and national security blunder of anyone’s lifetime, a mistake so enormous it beggared belief. In the years after, Bush wrote in his memoir, just thinking about it made him sick. “I knew the failure to find WMD would transform public perception of the war,” Bush wrote. “While the world was undoubtedly safer with Saddam gone, the reality was that I had sent American troops into combat based in large part on intelligence that proved false. That was a massive blow to our credibility — my credibility — that would shake the confidence of the American people. No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.”
Bush had spent months before the invasion making the case that Saddam had weapons. He passed two big milestones in that effort. The first came in October 2002, when the House and Senate voted to authorize the use of military force in Iraq. Bush had substantial majorities in Congress. But still, there was by no means unanimity in support of what was a war of choice.
The other milestone in Bush’s effort was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003, presentation to the United Nations, in which Powell powerfully made the case for war. It turned out that some of the evidence he presented was, unbeknownst to him, false. Powell was later mortified to learn the truth. “I feel terrible,” he said in 2005. Giving the speech, Powell said, was a “blot” on his record in government.
Making a mistake of such immense proportions was not a politically survivable event, and by his final months in office, with the war widely seen as a failure, Bush’s job approval rating sank to 25% in the Gallup poll. (It didn’t help that Bush also oversaw an economic meltdown at the end of his term.)
The aftereffects have rippled through U.S. politics ever since. They were a factor in Democratic presidential primaries in 2004, when Sen. John Kerry defended his vote for the war to a skeptical party base; in 2008, when Sen. Barack Obama benefited from not having been in the Senate in 2002, and thus did not have to vote on the issue; and 2016, when former Sen. Hillary Clinton, like Kerry, defended her vote for the war. By 2020, when former Sen. Joe Biden ran — having voted for the war 18 years earlier — it was not the issue it had been earlier.
Republicans in presidential politics remained hawkish in 2004, when Bush won reelection in part because Americans did not want to change commanders-in-chief during wartime; in 2008, when the very hawkish Sen. John McCain ran; and in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the party nominee. All defended the war.
That changed with Donald Trump in 2016, when his unorthodox candidacy invited many Republican voters to reassess their feelings about the war.
Now, a new poll from Ipsos and Axios asked all Americans, not just Republicans, a few simple questions about the war. Starting with this: “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: The United States was right to invade Iraq in 2003.” Thirty-six percent agreed, either strongly or somewhat, while 61% disagreed — a nearly 2-to-1 margin now saying the U.S. was wrong to invade Iraq.
Another question: A third question: “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: The Iraq War has made America safer.” A minority, 31%, agreed, and 67% disagreed — a more than 2-to-1 margin who believe the war did not make America safer. That was, of course, the ultimate reason war proponents gave for invading Iraq at the time.
During the run-up to the Iraq War, and during the war itself, some in the Bush administration, and especially some of the most vociferous supporters outside the White House, attacked those who asked questions about the war. Democratic lawmakers complained that the Bush administration was not being transparent on the war’s cost. They asked questions about the intelligence. They were skeptical about claims of progress. That led to some pretty heated rhetoric on both sides. It was common to hear critics of the war say that Bush supporters were questioning their patriotism, especially after the false intelligence on weapons of mass destruction became central to the argument.
Now, 20 years on, public opinion on the war has changed dramatically. In light of a far different public mood, even some of its most aggressive defenders have confessed that they got things terribly wrong.
It’s a different war in a different time, and thankfully no American troops are fighting in Ukraine. Still, some are attacking critics of aid to Ukraine, or even those who just want to limit the aid, as pro-Putin, much the way some criticized skeptics of the Iraq War as soft on terrorism or even anti-American. Indeed, some of the very same people who promoted the Iraq War and attacked the war’s critics are promoting U.S. aid to Ukraine and attacking critics of that aid.
