"Not only would I not have been in favor of it, President Bush would not have been in favor of it."As it turns out, Rubio's claim is doubly pathetic. After all, Mr. New American Century repeatedly defended topping Saddam Hussein, including as recently as six weeks ago. More ridiculous still was Rubio's failure to check with President Bush himself: the "Decider" has never had second thoughts about the world-historical disaster he launched in Iraq.
Writing in the New York Times, Peter Baker helped catalog Dubya's defense of the indefensible. For example, in his 2010 memoir Decision Points, Bush explained:
"Imagine what the world would look like today with Saddam Hussein still ruling Iraq," Mr. Bush wrote. "He would still be threatening his neighbors, sponsoring terror and piling bodies into mass graves."As President, Bush didn't just reject the idea that the decision to oust Saddam was a mistake; he struggled to name a single mistake he made during his tenure in the White House. In an April 2004 press conference, Bush hilariously replied, "I'm sure something will pop into my head here" when asked about errors he had made in office. In 2007, he answered the same question from Scott Pelley of CBS 60 Minutes this way:"Instead," he added, "as a result of our actions in Iraq, one of America's most committed and dangerous enemies stopped threatening us forever."
"You know, we've been through this before. Abu Ghraib was a mistake. Using bad language like, you know, 'bring them on' was a mistake. I think history is gonna look back and see a lot of ways we could have done things better. No question about it."WMD or no, Bush continued to show no qualms about his Iraq cataclysm, below.