20 years after Iraq, no doubt from Bush
President who pushed for ’03 invasion seems to understand cost but has shown little regret
DALLAS — Twenty years later, veterans are reflecting on their service and remembering fallen comrades. Iraqis are talking about how their country has changed and how it has not. American lawmakers are debating whether to finally repeal the legislation authorizing the invasion.
One person not heard from in recent days: former President George W. Bush.
That is how he wants it. He has no interest in being part of the debate anymore. He did what he did and does not engage in second-guessing, at least not out loud. He knows the questions he would be asked if he spoke out now: Was it worth it? Does he regret it? What would he have done differently? How will history remember it? As far as he is concerned, the world is better off without Saddam Hussein, and he has told advisers he has not changed his mind about that.
In the two decades since he ordered the invasion of Iraq, Bush has been indelibly associated with the war that will define his place in history even as he has left the judgments to others. Living here in Dallas, he is most energized by his post-presidential interest in painting and his public policy institute. For years, he sponsored a 100-kilometer bicycle race with injured veterans, or “wounded warriors,” as they are called, and even published a book of paintings of some of his favorites who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If he is exorcising demons or working through his own emotions about the war through his painting or his work with veterans, he would never say so and would surely scoff at the idea. Even as president, he always resisted efforts to “put me on a couch,” as he would put it to journalists.
“I think Bush is an extraordinarily complex person,” said Melvyn P. Le±er, a University of Virginia historian who just published Confronting Saddam Hussein, a book examining the war. “On the one hand, he appears to believe that his decision to invade Iraq was correct. On the other hand, looking at his book of paintings, you have to imagine that deep in his soul he feels a great deal of agony, of responsibility, of regret for those whose lives were scarred forever and for those who perished.”
Those who have worked with him since he left office, however, said he never talks in such terms, at least not in their presence. He understands the war went wrong, and in his memoir, Decision Points, acknowledged two mistakes: the false intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and the failure to respond more decisively when security began to deteriorate. But he does not revisit the underlying decision or dwell on his responsibility.
Bush’s silence at this anniversary, in the view of his critics, has hardly erased the stain of the decision he made. Opponents of the war argue he and his administration did not simply make a good-faith error in believing faulty intelligence but distorted the case to sell a war they were predisposed to wage. A death toll that reached hundreds of thousands and the shame of the American abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, they said, have not been forgotten by history.
“Bush will never wash the blood off his hands,” said Gary J. Bass, a scholar of human rights at Princeton. “Twenty years after his disastrous aggression, it only looks worse. He can’t escape this.”
The invasion succeeded in toppling Saddam, by all accounts one of the world’s most brutal dictators, but touched off a virulent insurgency and relentless sectarian civil war that ultimately killed 4,600 U.S. troops and 3,650 contractors, at least 45,000 members of the Iraqi military and police, at least 35,000 insurgents and an estimated 200,000 civilians. Today’s Iraq is far freer than it had been, but it remains haunted by the devastation and under the influence of neighboring Iran.
The scars remain deep and painful even after 20 years, and if anything the consensus that the war was a mistake has only hardened. In a new Axios/Ipsos poll, 61% of respondents said they did not believe the United States made the right decision. Polls have found that even veterans share that view in roughly the same proportion as the general population.
“I don’t think there’s a person in their right mind who looks at the Iraq War now and says that was the right thing to do,” said Jon Soltz, who served two tours in Iraq and in 2006 helped found VoteVets, a group of former military service members who opposed the war. “I don’t think that’s even a debatable question anymore.”
Paradoxically, former President Donald Trump helped cement the bipartisan view that Iraq was a disastrous error — while also helping to make Bush himself look better in hindsight by comparison.
“That’s the irony of it because Democrats view Bush as not anti-democracy and not a liar,” said Soltz, who said he still thinks about the war every day. “And sometimes I feel like people forget we invaded Iraq for frivolous or false reasons.”
Some of Bush’s critics are frustrated by this line of thinking.
“Today George W. Bush is the target of a perverse rehabilitation campaign, rooted in the idea that his criticism of Donald Trump’s election lies makes him some kind of savior of our democracy,” Sara Haghdoosti, the executive director of Win Without War, founded to oppose the Iraq War, wrote on the website of Jacobin magazine. She added the men are “more alike than not — two presidents who used their power to inflict horrible harm around the world.”