To say that "mistakes were made" in Iraq is an effective way for Republican politicians and pundits to imply that invading Iraq was a mistake without outright saying so, but Florida senator and GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio does not believe that any mistakes were made.
“It was not a mistake for the president to go into Iraq based on the information that he was provided as president,” Rubio told host Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” [...]
“The world is a better place because Saddam Hussein is not there,” Rubio added of the invasion’s aftermath.
It really is amazing to me that the Republican party intends to wed itself to the Iraq war for the foreseeable future. We're still paying for the mistake, among many other mistakes, and we'll be paying for it for a long time; not just in treasure but in the physical and emotional scars of tens of thousands of wounded veterans and their families.
As a Democrat I'm pleased that Republicans have decided to become Bush administration apologists and, to varying degrees, pledge to follow the Bush playbook in 2016. But that doesn't mean it makes any sense for them.
This is a political wedge issue with no wedge. There is no significant pro-Iraq war demographic to score with and there will never be.
While I digress, I have to address Rubio's assertion that President Bush made the decision to "go into Iraq" based on "information that he was provided."
The Bush administration based the decision on information that they demanded be provided to them and, when that didn't work out, they simply made shit up.
Rubio is not the only Iraq war apologist to use this line of reasoning. Others, including Jeb Bush, have used phrases such as "given what we know now" to imply that George W. Bush was an innocent victim of faulty intelligence.
It strikes me that if the next president were a Republican, they would be at odds with the intelligence community on day one following nearly two years of campaigning on the idea that they, rather than the Bush administration, are responsible for Iraq.