By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, February 15, 2016
Donald Trump’s star turn as an unexpected ally of Code
Pink was widely panned last Saturday evening. Standing next to Jeb Bush at the
Republican party’s fractious South Carolina debate, Trump seemed determined to
indulge the most idiosyncratic of the anti-war movement’s critiques. The
invasion of Iraq, he proposed, was based upon a “lie.” Its advocates, he
submitted, were engaged not in a mistake, but in a conspiracy. And, worst of
all, George W. Bush was to blame for 9/11.
For now, I shall let those chips fall where they may, and
focus on a question that is related but a touch less explosive. Certainly,
Trump sounded at times like Michael Moore, and he brought back into the fray a
host of poisonous questions that have not been seriously re-litigated since the
election of 2008. But of far more concern to me going forward is that Trump’s
whole line of attack is built upon a highly questionable premise: To wit, that
he was a consistent and outspoken opponent of the Bush administration’s
post-9/11 foreign policy.
As Buzzfeed’s
Andrew Kaczynski has recorded in depth, there is no
evidence whatsoever that Trump opposed the Iraq War, and, in fact, solid proof
that he was in favor of doing something about Saddam Hussein and his
weapons programs before George W. Bush was even inaugurated. These facts being
as they are, that Trump so triumphantly stakes his claim as a modern day
Cassandra is little short of extraordinary. There is, of course, nothing
inherently wrong with his arguing that Iraq was a mistake; indeed, as
remarkably popular as the war was at the time, this is now the assessment of
the majority of the American people. But, by retroactively characterizing this
judgment as initial rather than reflective, Trump is claiming an at-the-time
prescience that there is no proof he exhibited, and he’s using it to hit his
Republican rivals for their supposed stupidity.
Absent any new information, it is reasonable for voters
to believe that Trump has a clean slate in this realm — not because he had some
special insight that allowed him to correctly predict the future in 2004, but
because he was not a politician until the summer of 2015 and can therefore not
be blamed for the decisions of those who were. Whether this innocence is a
strength or a weakness will depend upon your perspective; personally, I would
rather have somebody who knows what he’s doing in the White House, lest he be
easily rolled by the permanent bureaucracy and the lobbyist class. Either way,
though, I hope that I will be forgiven for being rather amused by the protean
manner in which Trump’s novelty is regarded by his fans. As I understand it, we
are supposed to look back to the swirling debate over Iraq and praise Trump’s
purely private skepticism, and to do so without question or doubt; at the very
same time, we are expected to willfully ignore the rest of his concrete record
on the grounds that he’s an “outsider.”
Or, put another way, Trump wants us to rig the game so he
will always emerge as the winner. Irritated that Trump repeatedly gave money to
the Democrats, including before the 2008 wave? Upset that Trump praised Nancy
Pelosi as “terrific” when she picked up the gavel that would pass Obamacare?
Annoyed that Trump called for an assault-weapons ban just as the right to keep
and bear arms was being restored piece by piece? Angry that, just three years
ago, he was slamming Mitt Romney for his harsh stance toward illegal
immigration? Don’t be. He “wasn’t a politician” back then, and besides, “that’s
just what businessmen do.” If, on the other hand, you are impressed that Trump
isn’t on record anywhere supporting the War in Iraq . . . well, that’s because
he has always had brilliant instincts and will make a top-notch commander in
chief.
Trump’s role as a supra-political Rorschach test has by
now been well-established — the man does, without doubt, have a keen knack for
malleability, most evident in matters of foreign policy. Simultaneously, Trump
manages to appear as the strongman crusader who will bomb the s**t out of the
bad guys, submit terrorists to techniques worse than waterboarding, and
intimidate every other government with one narrowing of his eyes, even as he
plays the Taftite opponent of foreign adventurism who will bring back your tax
dollars for some “nation building at home.” If that is what a good portion of
the Republican base is looking for in a president, that is its prerogative;
all’s fair in love and war, and profitable will be the man who can flit
seamlessly between the two. But for the rest of us — many of whom have grown
tired of the intellectual incoherence and practical vacillation that have
marked the unlovely Obama years — elasticity and expedience are not virtues,
and nor is the cynical retconning of recent history. In keeping with his
penchant for playing all sides of every game, Donald Trump was silent on Iraq
right up to the moment at which it turned nasty. He must not be allowed to
pretend otherwise.
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