Still Winning : Our Last Hope to Be Great Again (9781546085287)

by Hurt, Charles

  John Kerry, who did not read the complete assessment, was unrepentant: “I read the summary, but I didn’t read the full report because I got it from them straight,” referring to personal briefings he had with senior Bush administration officials.

  John Edwards told a town hall gathering that, in fact, he had read the whole report. That was not true. But it was in the run-up to yet another presidential election so, you know, whatever. Say what you need to say to get what you need to get regardless of the consequences to anyone else.

  When confronted with Edwards’s false statement, his campaign later acknowledged that Edwards had not, in fact, read the report.

  To be fair, few people on either side of the aisle felt any responsibility to read the full intelligence report. After all, it was a whole ninety-two pages long.

  “A lot of people on both sides of the aisle are getting whacked around with this,” lamented one Republican who voted for the war. “You have to understand that the briefings are so thorough that it’s common for members not to read entire reports.”

  Complained a Democrat who also voted for the war: “Well, I don’t think anybody read the entire report. Everybody gets summaries of it.”

  As wrong as John Edwards may have been to vote for the war in Iraq, he never displayed an ounce of humility about it. “I was wrong to vote for this war,” he said during a debate running up to the 2008 election. “Unfortunately, I’ll have to live with that forever and a lesson I learned from it is to put more faith in my own judgment.”

  His own judgment!

  One of my very first assignments when I arrived in Washington in 2001 was to cover John Edwards, then a rising new Democrat heartthrob serving a term as a North Carolina senator. His only claim to fame was that he had been passed over as Al Gore’s running mate in the 2000 campaign. I covered him for the Charlotte Observer and fairly soon figured out what a slickster he was and his penchant for playing fast and loose with facts—and, as it turned out, with other people’s lives.

  His wife, Elizabeth, was another matter. She could be blisteringly honest and often hilarious. I spent a good deal of time with her in the run-up to the 2004 election.

  Later, after she had battled and battled cancer, John Edwards was exposed for his lecherous ways. Most famously, of course, he got caught by the National Enquirer for fathering a child with a videographer who was following his campaign.

  As all of those revelations tumbled out into the public, I was haunted by something Elizabeth told me sometime after People magazine named her husband the “sexiest” politician.

  “Anybody who knows anything about John knows that he’s lived his life in a personal way considerably different than how President Clinton did,” she told me. Her friends, she said, would gush about him and tell her she had landed “one of the good ones.”

  In his political decision to abandon the brave youngsters he had voted to send to war, he was right in line with the way he ultimately trashed his devoted wife. The only silver lining is that was about the last we ever heard from John Edwards.

  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about John Kerry.

  One of the great forgotten ironies about President Bush’s successful reelection in 2004 was just how much that election was a referendum on the war in Iraq. That is kind of funny when you consider that everybody on both sides of the ticket agreed to go to war in Iraq in the first place.

  It was just that the Democrats—mainly presidential candidates John Kerry and John Edwards—had abandoned the war just as soon as it was politically expedient for them to do so.

  Even more curious about that whole election is that it wasn’t just the general election that became all about the war. The Democrat primary was also all about the war. Remember Howard Dean? And his crazed orange-hatted “Deaniacs”? The scream?

  The former governor was the first major candidate to really capitalize on the growing regret inside the Democrat Party that so many party leaders had voted America into war in Iraq.

  Just about every Democrat surveying the cornfields of Iowa that year had actually supported the invasion. Yet Howard Dean’s antiwar ravings were manna to starved voters. So while some of those boys who grew up in the cornfields were fighting in a desert more than six thousand miles away, the men who sent them there were calculating the political benefit of saying it was all a mistake.

  The crazy scream after Dean faltered in Iowa was like dynamite unleashing avalanches of snow. Calculations fed upon calculations and Democrats who loved Howard Dean and his antiwar credentials instead lined up behind John Kerry, who voted for the war but was now campaigning against it. Democrats were unashamed of straddling the line of supporting the war when it was popular but agreeing it was a mistake when national sentiment changed.

  “Dated Dean, Married Kerry,” was the bumper sticker back then. And then Kerry picked Edwards and the ticket sounded like some sorority cheerleading duo, not to insult cheerleaders. The bet was misplaced, however, and the duo found that walking the line between war and peace was a lot harder than expected.

  Four years later, Democrats were not about to make the same mistake again. Cashiered were all the fakers, especially the ones who had voted in favor of the war. John Kerry was gone. Edwards’s goose was cooked. In 2008, Hillary Clinton made a valiant effort that would have exhausted Cujo, but even she eventually surrendered. Instead of going with an antiwar faker who had voted for the war, Democrats at least chose in Tim Kaine an antiwar faker who at least had not actually voted for the Iraq War.

  OBAMA THE WAR MONGER

  The whole reason America suffered eight years of President Barack Obama was the Iraq War and the 111 Democrats in Congress who voted to invade Saddam Hussein’s thugocracy in the aftermath of 9/11.

  In the first place, it is entirely probable that if Democrats had fielded a decent candidate in 2004 who had not voted for the war, they could have won the general election. John Kerry was a blowhard embarrassment from the start and even Democrats could not take him seriously.

  Four years later, Democrats were hardened in pursuit of a nominee who had not voted for the war. For all the talk in D.C. and elite political party circles about how Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in, regular Democrat voters from California to Iowa to New York and across the country were clearly hungry for a candidate who could freely prosecute an argument against the war without any reservation.

  Incredibly they ended up with Hillary Clinton as that nominee. As much time and energy as she spent blaming her loss on her gender, it was actually all about her vote for the Iraq War. That and the fact that she always seemed to be lying and after a lifetime in the political spotlight, she remained terribly unlikable (or, as Obama would observe about her, “likable enough”).

  It really did not matter to Democrats that the only reason for Barack Obama’s sterling record on the war is that he simply never faced a vote on the war during his short tenure in the United States Senate.

  In the Illinois state legislature, Obama was famous for voting “present” to avoid casting ticklish or uncomfortable votes. Had he been in the U.S. Senate in 2002, he could not have gotten away with avoiding a vote on the war. His seat-mate, Senator Dick Durbin, confidently voted against the war so perhaps it would have been an easy call for Obama.

  To be fair, Obama was always consistent in saying he would have voted against the war if he had been given a chance. Obviously, his voters took him on his word about that. But the amazing thing is the way that Obama entirely abandoned those antiwar voters and the entire platform that got him elected just as soon as he got into the White House.

  Even though the Obama campaign kicked me off his campaign plane over a column I wrote—ironically enough, about the Iraq War—I admired the positive, unifying, hopeful, and even nonpartisan campaign that he ran in 2008. “There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America,” he told us during the 2004 Democrat convention.

  Ha! If
only he had governed that way.

  Same with all his promises about war.

  The first clue that President Obama had no intention of keeping his antiwar promises came before he even got into the White House, when word leaked that he was sneaking around with his great pro-war nemesis, Hillary Clinton herself.

  He wanted to put her in charge of diplomacy around the world.

  Stop and think about it. Hillary Clinton had lost the Democrat nomination because she voted for the Iraq war. The whole party had lost the previous election because they picked a pro-war nominee to head their ticket. And here was President Obama picking Hillary Clinton to be secretary of state, where she would be in charge of Obama’s supposedly antiwar policy agenda around the globe.

  This would be no different than President Trump getting elected on promises to disengage from military entanglements around the world and then picking former vice president Dick Cheney to be his secretary of state. Rightly, Trump supporters would have gone bananas.

  Making further mockery of his antiwar campaign pledges, President Obama later picked pro–Iraq War flip-flopper John Kerry to replace Hillary Clinton after she got done delivering so much world peace as secretary of state. For her tenure waging peace around the world, Clinton will be best remembered for the U.S. drone attack that led to the killing of ousted strongman Muammar Gaddafi after he had surrendered Libya’s weapons of mass destruction to previous president George W. Bush.

  “We came, we saw, he died,” Clinton joked in 2011, laughing.

  Peace.

  Her tenure of peace will also forever be remembered by the subsequent attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, a year later in which four Americans were killed. In typical Clintonian fashion, she immediately lied about the attack, refusing to acknowledge that it was a coordinated attack planned for the anniversary of 9/11. Instead, she falsely blamed an anti-Muslim Internet video for the attack. Clinton’s promotion of the video caused the video to go viral around the world. That in turn sparked outrage among Muslims around the world in response to the video. In the aftermath, dozens of people were killed in riots around the world. Hundreds more were injured.

  Peace.

  None of this is to say that President Obama was going to be held to account for his desertion of antiwar voters. At least not from the globalist elites around the world who seem to really love spending your money and sending your boys into war zones.

  In 2009, not even a year into office, much of the world was shocked when President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In announcing it, the Nobel Committee cited Obama’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

  For a mere mortal, this would have been rather awkward. Obama had not ended the war in Iraq as promised and he had not ended the war in Afghanistan. Several years later, according to the BBC, Geir Lundestad, who was secretary of the Nobel Committee when Obama’s award was given, expressed regret over the decision. Stating that the committee had hoped the award would strengthen Obama’s resolve, it had not done so. Stated Secretary Lundestad: “Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake.” In fact, even as he was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama was planning a massive troop surge in Afghanistan from roughly 25,000 troops when he came into office to 100,000 U.S. troops.

  Before Obama’s terms were over, he would also expand U.S. engagements around the world. In addition to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the U.S. would launch air strikes into Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, all under Obama’s orders. When he left office, Obama was the only two-term president in history to oversee eight years of war.

  Good thing he won his Nobel Peace Prize so early in his presidency.

  In the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump’s foreign policy platform was as simple as it was popular: Maintain a mighty military that can destroy anything on earth, enforce strong borders around our homeland, and stay out of unnecessary foreign entanglements as much as possible. Don’t get mired in foreign conflicts where U.S. interests are not at risk and where the objective is not clearly defined.

  Throughout American history, this has always been the most popular foreign policy platform. Such a position would have clearly spared us involvement in Vietnam and Korea and plenty of other painful adventures. It probably would have allowed for our involvement in World War II. Same with Afghanistan after 9/11.

  The Iraq War remains an open question, though not in Donald Trump’s mind. “Such a waste of money,” Trump told me. “What? We spend three, four, five trillion dollars? That’s ‘trillion’ with a t!”

  Nothing animates Donald Trump like throwing money away. In his mind, it is not just stupid, it is actually immoral. “And what do we get out of it? Nothing. We didn’t even get any oil out of it. Such a waste!”

  Trump’s honesty is so refreshing here. Even supporters of the war in the so-called neocon wing of the Republican Party were aghast at the accusation that President Bush would launch a war in the Middle East over oil. That would be so low and grubby and dirty. But to President Trump, fighting for oil is at the very least a winning proposition. If you are going to fight a war to fix somebody else’s country, you might as well get compensated for it.

  That is, after all, a pretty American way of looking at it.

  Still, from the start Trump was not buying into the Iraq War.

  In February 2016, Trump turned his sights on the South Carolina primary. He had just won a blowout victory in New Hampshire. Now, Trump might be cheap when it comes to spending money on unnecessary wars, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe in spending big on things that matter. He views political capital the same way.

  Sitting in his suite in Trump International in Las Vegas during an interview, I wondered whether Trump liked to gamble. There is not a casino in his hotel there.

  For some reason, he did not seem to want to answer my question. I asked him every way I could think of and he kept evading my question.

  Finally, he threw open his hands, cocked his head, and flashed that gangster smile he’s got. “Hey, look,” he said, almost defensively, “my whole life is a gamble.”

  Indeed. I could only laugh.

  And in South Carolina, Trump aimed to prove that point after building plenty of capital with his big New Hampshire victory. South Carolina is one of the most conservative states in the country. It has a huge military presence. You will not find a greater display of patriotism on the campaign trail than in South Carolina.

  Also, South Carolina loves George W. Bush. That is where the insurgent John McCain’s primary campaign against Bush died in 2000. Bush would go on to beat Al Gore there by 15 points in 2000 and trounce John Kerry there by 17 points in 2004. The state was a make-or-break race for Bush’s little brother, Jeb Bush, who had once been considered the 2016 front-runner.

  So South Carolina is by no means some kind of hotbed of antiwar hippies. If anything, quite the opposite.

  But Trump went into South Carolina with a full attack on George W. Bush and eviscerated the argument for the Iraq War. Talk about a gamble. He called the Iraq War a mistake and said it did nothing to keep America safe. He said it was a waste of money and accused the Bush administration of lying about weapons of mass destruction.

  Voters were stunned by the harshness of Trump’s assault on the war effort and their beloved President Bush. But many also could not help but agree with the brash New Yorker. Jeb had long since lost his place as the front-runner but the latest attack was devastating.

  One supporter told CNN at the time that he supported President Bush and the war effort but that he was voting for Trump: “I just don’t think we have time and room for another Bush,” he said. “I think the country needs a change.”

  The gamble paid off, of course. Trump beat Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz by 10 points and George W. Bush’s little brother, Jeb, quit the primary after losing to Trump by more than 22 points.

  The Bush dynasty in the Palmetto State was over.
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  In the final desperate days of the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton was walking a duplicitous line that was complicated even for a Clinton. She felt she had finally been forgiven by Democrat voters for her vote to invade Iraq. (We would later discover that she probably had not actually been forgiven, since leaked emails show that clearly antiwar Bernie Sanders would have won the nomination in 2016 had the Democrat National Committee not stolen the nomination from him and finally handed it to Clinton.)

  Whatever. By the general election, Clinton was calculating to accuse Donald Trump of being a dangerous war-monger who could not be trusted with the nuclear codes. Yet at the same time, Trump himself was arguing that it might not be a bad idea to try getting along with Russia in the mutual interest of killing terrorists.

  “What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria,” he said in an interview. But he was also acutely aware that at least in voters’ eyes, Clinton was still vulnerable for her hotly pro-war record.

  “You’re going to end up in World War III over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton,” Trump said.

  Moreover, he was acutely aware of the lessons that should have been learned from Korea and Vietnam and, to some extent, Afghanistan. “You’re not fighting Syria anymore. You’re fighting Syria, Russia, and Iran, all right? Russia is a nuclear country.”

  Soon enough, Hillary Clinton and deranged Democrat leaders would be accusing Trump of being in bed with Russia and President Vladimir Putin. But for now, they had an election to win so they were claiming the opposite.

  As Election Day neared, Clinton and her allies released the most fear-mongering ads since Lyndon B. Johnson. Mushroom clouds, nuclear launch control buttons, the whole works. Anything to get elected.

  “The thought of Donald Trump with nuclear weapons scares me to death. It should scare everyone,” a former doomsday officer, posing inside a nuclear silo, said in one of the final ads of the campaign. Another ad that ran in Ohio featured a mushroom cloud and the savage remains of Hiroshima. “One nuclear bomb can kill a million people,” the narrator intoned. “That’s more than all the men, women, and children living in Columbus, Ohio.”