Running for president in 2016, Donald Trump said he hadn’t supported the war in Iraq.
In a GOP debate in South Carolina, he stated his position with characteristic bluntness: “Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake,” he said. “George Bush made a mistake.”
One of Mr. Abraham Lincoln. Now Mr. Trump is posting on Truth Social an image of himself looming large above the sepia-tinted memory of Mr. But Mr. Trump hasn’t accomplished his mission in Iran. The president himself alternates between solemn promises of annihilation and cease-fires. To keep promising decisive action to end the war only to pull back at the last minute leads friend and foe alike to conclude that such threats are empty, passing storms that Tehran will survive. So he made the unpopular call to double down with the surge—adding more troops in a wholesale change in strategy. Everyone wanted out, including many conservatives. Doubters included some of the highest-ranking members of his administration. Inside the White House, where I was chief speechwriter, we were never in doubt. It made for a lonely presidency. Say this for Mr. Bush’s critics back then, including retired generals and Republicans in Congress. Not to mention the utter humiliation of Joe Biden’s exit of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
Bush’s stumbles was a May 2003 speech from the deck of the U.S.S.
No one remembers what he said, but people remember the “Mission Accomplished” banner that flew behind him. Bush’s failure, declaring “Mission Accomplished”—implying this time it’s real. The military operation he said would take four to six weeks is in its seventh month. Americans may wonder how Iran can be so defiant if we are as victorious as the president says. “The entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night,” President Trump said in April. “Billy,” the president told me, “we are not going to abandon the people of Iraq the way we abandoned the people of Vietnam, from the rooftop of an embassy. Their open dissent sure beats the sneaky way Barack Obama announced at West Point in 2009 a surge of 30,000 additional troops for what he had called “the necessary war” in Afghanistan—and in the next breath undermined it all by announcing they’d begin leaving in 18 months.
