[T]he ghosts of history are never all that welcome in Washington. It’s a place that has a hard time looking back and an even harder time doing anything to rectify past mistakes. The capital has a case of “permanent historical amnesia.”
[...]
Which made it all the more notable when the Senate met on Thursday to take a key procedural vote on a measure to repeal the two-decade-old authorization that provided the legal basis for Bush’s invasion of Iraq. [...] “The last time we’ve had a stand-alone vote on the floor,” for something like this Iraq repeal measure, [Democratic Senator Tim] Kaine noted, “is probably before anybody in the Senate was born. It’s just something that we’ve abdicated.”
[...]
This scheduling offered not only a chance to reassert Congress’s constitutional power to declare war but also the nearly irresistible opportunity to make a political point about the historic folly of that particular war. In their remarks before the Senate overwhelmingly voted, 68–27, to invoke cloture and clear the way for a vote next week.
New Yorker
But, does the House have to agree?
Two decades ago, Bush and the Republicans were nearly united in their embrace of a brash militarism that sought to topple Saddam and transform Iraq and the broader Middle East in the process. [...] [B]acklash to the conflict arguably gave rise to the Presidencies of both Barack Obama—who first rose to fame as an antiwar state legislator—and Donald Trump. Trump is a Bush-basher of long standing, and he often framed his takeover of the Republican Party as an explicit repudiation of the extended Bush family and its internationalist legacy. Trump has said Bush “lied” to start the war, that he should have been impeached for how badly it was conducted, and that, over all, Bush had a “failed and uninspiring Presidency.”
There's one point on which I'm in agreement with Trump.
Much as the Vietnam War did for a previous generation, the failures in Iraq shattered American confidence, shaped future debates over the use of military force, made the concept of democracy promotion itself suspect, distracted from rising threats posed by the revisionist great powers Russia and China, and splintered the previously unquestioned Republican commitment to a robustly internationalist American foreign policy.
[...]
DeSantis, back in the pre-Trump era of 2015, publicly bashed Obama for not providing enough arms to Ukraine. His flip-flop is so telling. There may still be Bush-style internationalists left in Washington, but it says everything about the trajectory of the Party’s foreign-policy thinking that both of its 2024 front-runners think that’s not where the primary voters they seek stand.
[...]
In a remarkable statement dismissing the [Russian invasion of Ukraine] as little more than a “territorial dispute,” DeSantis seemed to signal how much he thinks Republican sentiment has shifted since the Bush era. You don’t have to support the disastrous invasion of Iraq to acknowledge that Russia’s barbaric war of aggression against its neighbor Ukraine is wrong, and yet that is where both Trump and DeSantis have now landed. [...] DeSantis’s comments to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson [...] drew strong pushback from the remaining Republican hawks in the old Bush mold. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called it his “first big mistake.” Lindsey Graham called it a “Neville Chamberlain approach” of appeasement. Nikki Haley pointedly observed that DeSantis was just “copying” Trump with his new position.
[...]
Many officials other than Bush himself, of course, have admitted the invasion was a mistake, “a grave and costly error,” as the former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote in The Atlantic this week. I believe there is a straight line that leads from that debacle to the political mess we are in today.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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