A Refusal To Remember

Ask a Republican presidential wanna-be how they feel about the Iraq invasion and watch them tie themselves in knots.

The semi-presumptive nominee, non-candidate Jeb Bush, was at first his own man, then would've done exactly what brother George did, then maybe not, then would have definitely not gone into Iraq.  Fellow fluctuating Floridian and actual candidate Marco Rubio gave a similar variety of tortured, baloney-slicing answers.  What the GOP contenders would like to do is pretend it's all ancient history, just bad intel, all hypothetical, not important now, and any current Middle East problems are all Obama's fault.  (Really?)  It's a damn near party-wide, willful refusal to remember accurately.  "We wanna fuh-getta-bout-it!"

What horseshit!  Few political decisions of our generation have had more disastrous and long-lasting effects than Dubya's Iraq War.  We destroyed a country, killed a quarter-million of its citizens, plus a bunch of our own troops, and destabilized an entire region for the foreseeable future.  Iraq was America's defining moment, our signature move of the 21st century (so far).  This legacy is about a million times more important than Hillary Clinton's email habits or who contributes to the Clinton Foundation.  Gimme a break!

Yes, damn near everyone (including Hillary) voted to invade Iraq, but they were lied to, repeatedly and heinously.  In her column "He's Heavy. He's My Brother.", NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd remembers accurately:
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/opinion/sunday/maureen-dowd-he-is-heavy-hes-my-brother.html?_r=0

It isn't about what we know now.  It's about what we knew then.

It's simply not true, as Republican presidential aspirant Scott Walker said, that "any president would have likely taken the same action Bush did with the information he had."

That's not giving enough credit to Dubya and his frothing band of Reservoir Dogs.

It took a Herculean effort of imagination, manipulation and deception to concoct "the information" that propelled the invasion, occupation and destruction of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

It took a 19-year-old college student to explain to the 62-year-old Jeb that ISIS is not the virulent spawn of Obama's policies, but of his brother's.  
         
And consider:  Jeb hasn't even been asked any questions yet about Dubya's dark contributions on waterboarding, the deficit, and the near-total collapse of the American economy.
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Will Jeb and his GOP cohorts refuse to remember those things as well?