Much has been made in the last few days of Jeb Bush's seemingly insane statements that he would have supported the invasion of Iraq that occurred under his brother's leadership even knowing what we know now.
On Monday, Fox's Megyn Kelly asked Bush, "Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?"
"I would have," Bush answered, "and so would have Hillary Clinton. just to remind everybody. And so would have just about everybody that was confronted with the intelligence that they got."
Some have suggested that he was too lazy to prepare for the question.
Others that he is too stupid to have realized that the question would be asked and too stupid afterward to realize that it might be asked again, 'causing him to offer up this bumbling evasion:
“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.”
The reason for his difficulty in saying that he would do things differently knowing what we all know now, though, is far simpler than that. I suspect he is simply answering honestly a question based on a lie about a lie. The first lie, of course, was that there was a legitimate reason to invade Iraq. The lie about the lie is that the Bush family and their cronies believed
at the time that there was a legitimate reason.
More below the beautiful DK squiggle of separation.
When journalists ask Jeb Bush the question, "Would you authorize the invasion of Iraq as your brother did knowing what we know now?" the underlying assumption is that his brother did not know what we know now.
As a society we have all tacitly agreed to pretend that we believe when George W. Bush and his war-with-Iraq mongering cohort told us there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, they believed it to be true. Without ever actively agreeing to do so, we have entered into a culture-wide conspiracy of self-deception, acting as though the Bush administration cherry picked intelligence without knowing what they were up to. The journalists who failed to call the administration on its misleading statements about the presence of WMDs in a country where none existed back in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, now compound that failure by lazily buying into a new false narrative; this narrative says George W. and company genuinely believed the stories they told the public. Yet we know that they used their media lackey Robert Novak to out CIA agent Valerie Plame as punishment for her husband's honest reportage that Iraq had not tried to purchase yellow cake plutonium from Niger as the American war mongers had claimed. If they actively sought retribution against those who exposed their deception, it cannot be argued that they did not know they were acting deceptively.
This idea that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz cabal was a bunch of well-meaning but misinformed gentlemen who made the best decisions they could with faulty information is comforting, but it requires a willful kind of self-serving amnesia. It makes us all less culpable in the unjustifiable destruction of sovereign nations abroad if we did not actually elect (okay, that's debatable that first time around) and empower a group so evil that they would lie to the nation they are sworn to serve in order to further their own selfish ends. Sadly, that is exactly what we did.
When Jeb faces the question of whether he would do what his brother did, his answer has to be, yes. Of course he would. He is beholden to the same group, friends with the same group, part of that same despicable circle of soulless folk who knew then exactly what we all know now. The follow-up question that should be asked of Jeb Bush, if anyone had the courage to ask it, is simply this, "So, sir, just to be clear, you would tell the same lies your brother did to garner public enthusiasm for an unjust war of pure imperial aggression?"
We've started to view the question, "What did they know and when did they know it?" as a bizarre default point of inquiry. They knew. We know they knew. The question is, when did we all start making believe that the lies we were fed deliberately and systematically were some sort of innocent misunderstanding?
It would all infuriate and depress me horribly were I not seeing a strict Huxlian therapist who medicates me against political outrage.