White House hopefuls agree: Iraq war a mistake

FILE - In this April 3, 2007 file photo, President Bush speaks about the congressional debate on Iraq war spending, in Rose Garden of the White House in Washington. A dozen years later, American politics has finally reached a rough consensus about the Iraq War: It was a mistake. Liberals have been saying that for years, of course, and polls show most of the public already had judged the war a failure. Even many Republican politicians have allowed that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq undermined the rationale for the 2003 invasion. Now the nation has come to the point where presidential candidates find it safer to acknowledge that 4,491 Americans and countless Iraqis died as a result of a colossal blunder than to defend President George W. Bush's war. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak. File) FILE - In this April 3, 2007 file photo, President Bush speaks about the congressional debate on Iraq war spending, in Rose Garden of the White House in Washington. A dozen years later, American politics has finally reached a rough consensus about the Iraq War: It was a mistake. Liberals have been saying that for years, of course, and polls show most of the public already had judged the war a failure. Even many Republican politicians have allowed that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq undermined the rationale for the 2003 invasion. Now the nation has come to the point where presidential candidates find it safer to acknowledge that 4,491 Americans and countless Iraqis died as a result of a colossal blunder than to defend President George W. Bush's war. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak. File)

By Associated Press May 18, 2015 6 min read

WASHINGTON (AP) – A dozen years later, American politics has reached a rough consensus about the Iraq War: It was a mistake.

Politicians hoping to be president rarely run ahead of public opinion. So it’s a revealing moment when the major contenders for president in both parties find it best to say that 4,491 Americans and countless Iraqis lost their lives in a war that shouldn’t have been waged.

Many people have been saying that for years, of course. Polls show most of the public have judged the war a failure by now. Over time, more and more GOP politicians have allowed that the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq undermined Republican President George W. Bush’s rationale for the 2003 invasion.

It hasn’t been an easy evolution for those such as Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, who voted for the war in 2002 while serving in Congress. That vote, and her refusal to fully disavow it, cost her during her 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama, who wasn’t in the Senate in 2002 but had opposed the war.

In her memoir last year, Clinton wrote that she had voted based on the information available at the time, but “I got it wrong. Plain and simple.”