Republican Sen. Tom Cotton argued in an interview published Thursday that the U.S. shouldn’t be ashamed of the Iraq War and that President George W. Bush made the best decision based on the intelligence he was given.
“Knowing what we know now, I absolutely would have sent the Pacific Fleet out of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 4 to intercept the Japanese Fleet,” the Iraq War veteran from Arkansas told The Washington Examiner.
“I say that to highlight how foolish the question is,” Mr. Cotton said. “You don’t get to live life in reverse. What a leader has to do is make a decision, at the moment of decision, based on the best information he has. George Bush did that in 2002 and 2003 and he was supported by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and John Kerry and every western country’s intelligence agency.”
His comments come as leading Democrats, including presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, continue to express regret over the war. Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul has also repeatedly called the invasion “a mistake.”
“We should not be ashamed of the war we conducted in Iraq,” Mr. Cotton told the Examiner. “The troops won the war in 2007 and 2008 and 2009.”
“There are lessons we can learn from the early days of the Iraq war,” he said. “One is that we clearly should be more critically analytical about our approach to intelligence assessments.”
Nearly every Republican presidential contender has recently declared they would have handled Iraq differently, responding to Democratic claims that the 2003 invasion is what ultimately led to the rise of the Islamic State.
Mr. Cotton, however, blamed the terrorist group’s success on President Obama’s decision to withdraw troops from Iraq, the Examiner reported.
“The indictment of President Obama’s policy is much worse than the purported indictment of President Bush’s policy because everyone questions if we had known then what we know now,” he told the paper. “It’s hard to analyze hypotheticals in history; I’m confident that the world is a better place and the world is a safer place with Saddam Hussein removed from power.
“President Obama knew then what was going to happen, because his military commanders were advising him that they needed a small stay-behind force of 10,000 to 15,000 troops,” Mr. Cotton added. “President Obama, for political reasons, knowing what he knew then, still made the decision to withdraw all our troops from Iraq.”
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.