Charles Pierce Asks GOP Candidates: "Are You Smarter Than A Bush Brother?"
Forward, Into The Past: Are You Smarter Than A Bush Brother?
In which we speculate our way into the past over the Iraq War.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
The current brawl over the question Are You Smarter Than A Bush Brother?—the primary casualty of which so far has been an actual Bush brother—centers on the question of whether or not the bloody mayhem of the Iraq fiasco was "worth it" or not and, in addition, whether the current candidates would have committed the same blunders and/or the same crimes. The most popular answer seems to be that, given the "available intelligence," the current candidates would not have done the same thing, but they understand how C-Plus Augustus came to the conclusions he did, and that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and the world is better off without him. (The last part is extraordinarily arguable.) But, seriously, do you see anybody in the Republican field who would have been able to resist the war fever of the time, who would have been able to ignore the tidal wave of misinformation that came flooding out of the intelligence community? Certainly, it's possible that, back then, a Walker Administration might not have been chockful to the gunwales with neoconservative fantasts and the gremlins of the extended Cheney political family, but there's nothing that I've seen that indicates any of these guys would have done anything much differently. The country was primed and ready for war against somebody, somewhere, and Donald Rumsfeld was correct—there wasn't enough rubble to make bounce in Afghanistan. The question is not what you would do now, but would you have been able to control a reeling nation and an ambitious intelligence community back then. I see no reason to give any of them the benefit of the doubt.
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