How the 2016 election postpones the Republican reckoning on Iraq

Because Donald Trump is so obviously a flawed candidate, he allows Republicans to spend yet another election cycle learning nothing from the past 15 years

President Bush speaks to Marines in California in 2004.
(Image credit: David McNew/Getty Images)

Because Donald Trump is so obviously a flawed candidate, he allows Republicans and conservatives to spend yet another election cycle learning nothing from the past 15 years. He allows Republicans to continue denying one of the great and unacknowledged political truths of our time: Barack Obama is president today because George W. Bush took our nation to war in Iraq.

History keeps conspiring to hide from Republicans the fact that Americans no longer trust their party to conduct foreign policy. It threatened to dawn on them after the electoral "thumpin'" they took in 2006. It might have occurred to them when the diminutive libertarian crank from Texas, Ron Paul, began raising millions of dollars and placing well in 2008 contests. But everything went according to plan and the GOP nominated the experienced hawk, John McCain, in 2008. When he lost, they attributed his defeat to either Sarah Palin's incompetence or Barack Obama's speechifying (which they overrated). After that the Republicans received a boost in the arm from the midterm elections of 2010. The Tea Party may have brought some cranks into the House, but it demonstrated that they were not so unpopular after all. That's true, even though four years after the Tea Party comeback, 71 percent of Americans said the Iraq War wasn't worth it.

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Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is the founder and editor of The Slurve, a newsletter about baseball. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ESPN Magazine, Slate and The American Conservative.