Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson on Wednesday said that he would not have authorized the invasion of Iraq.
“I’ve said definitively that I was never in favor of going into Iraq,” he told The Hill. “And since we did go in, the big problem is that we didn’t secure victory there, and that’s a huge problem.”
Ben Carson said he would have removed Saddam Hussein from power “some other way.”
“When you go into a situation with so many factions and such a complex history, unless you know what you’re doing or have a long-term strategy, it just creates more problems,” he said.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s (R) struggled last week to answer whether he would have invaded Iraq given what he knows now, which prompted other 2016 hopefuls to weigh in on the Iraq invasion.
Bush initially said he would have authorized the Iraq invasion, but quickly backtracked and said he misheard the question. He finally said that he “would not have gone into Iraq.”
Did he go on to say, “As a conservative, I would have favored a non-invasive procedure. The larger question is: who should have paid for the surgical strike? You don’t want to free a people, and then have the result be worse than slavery.”
Pray tell us - just how would he have removed Saddam if that was so necessary and desirable. Looks like he’s dancing, too. The GOP just can’t own up to the voluntary disaster of Iraq. The implication is that Obama is the culprit.
TPM:
And there goes the GOP’s neo-con wing waving bye-bye in the distance.
Finally, Carson delivers his first inkling of a lick of common sense. But he doesn’t quite connect the dots. American Presidents good and bad have a long, bipartisan, Cold War history of choosing our friends poorly. Ben Carson is no likelier than any of them to know what he’s doing. A “strategy” is no better than a guess under those conditions.
Me either, Ben. But like me, you will never be president.