Jeb Bush’s real mistake? Hiding behind the troops

Critics are right to blast Jeb Bush’s defense of his brother’s decision to go to war in Iraq. Earlier this month, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) told Megyn Kelly of Fox News that, even knowing what we now know, he still would have authorized the 2003 invasion. As Paul Krugman has observed, the decision to go to war was based on “falsified pretexts” as we were “lied into war.” This was clear even at the time, though the problems with the decision to invade should be even clearer now as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has taken advantage of the post-Saddam Hussein era to gain control of cities in Iraq.

{mosads}It is perfectly reasonable to question Jeb Bush’s judgment in defending the catastrophically bad decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. Bush is trying to respond to these criticisms by revising his original answer and now saying “I would not have gone into Iraq.” That’s not a satisfactory response, as it is impossible for Bush to make his very recent defense of the decision go away. But, even assuming Bush could somehow magically make his conversation with Kelly disappear, he’d still have an important problem to confront.

In attempting to back-pedal away from his endorsement of the Iraq War, Bush has tried to use the troops as camouflage, claiming that “If we’re going to get into hypotheticals, I think it does a disservice for a lot of people that sacrificed a lot. … Going back in time and talking about hypotheticals — what would have happened, what could have happened — I think, does a disservice for them. What we ought to be focusing on is what are the lessons learned.”

As Amanda Terkel points out, Bush is arguing that “questioning him about what he would have done on Iraq [is] essentially unpatriotic.” He’s suggesting that those who question the decision to go to war are questioning the troops themselves.

This ought to be out of bounds in political debate. It’s one thing to argue, on the merits, about whether going to war in Iraq was a good idea. It’s another thing to claim that those who disagree with you are undermining the troops. As Terkel recalls, this line of argument is not new: “During the presidency of Bush’s brother, it was common for Iraq War critics to be branded as anti-military or undermining the troops. Republicans labeled calls for withdrawal as a desire to ‘cut and run’ and a ‘surrender to our enemy.'” It’s time for this pernicious tactic to be exposed and rejected, once and for all.

It’s well worth noting that not everyone who served in Iraq thinks the war was a good idea. The group Iraq Veterans Against the War was founded in 2004 and described one of its goals as “giv[ing] a voice to the large number of active duty service people and veterans who are against this war, but are under various pressures to remain silent.” Iraq War veteran Kevin Powers’s novel The Yellow Birds describes a war devoid of any clear meaning for U.S. soldiers, other than the goal of surviving the war.

These are hardly the first veterans to speak out against war. World War I veteran and poet Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated British officer, declared: “Let no one ever from henceforth say a word in any way countenancing war. … For war is hell and those who institute it are criminals.”

My point is not that Sassoon or other more recent critics of war speak for all veterans. I don’t mean to hide behind them myself. My point is simply that it is wrong to claim that those who question the war in Iraq are somehow undermining the U.S. servicemembers who fought there. That can’t be right, as some of those very servicemembers have themselves raised questions about the war.

U.S. veterans of Iraq and other wars deserve our support and respect. They face real problems that did not end when the war ended. We all have an obligation to do right by them. Elected officials and candidates for office ought to focus on meaningful ways to fulfill our obligations to veterans instead of using them as campaign props or ways to distract attention from their own missteps.

Edelson is an assistant professor of government in American University’s School of Public Affairs. He is the author of Emergency Presidential Power: From the Drafting of the Constitution to the War on Terror, published in 2013 by the University of Wisconsin Press.