“So, Mr. Republican Candidate, if you had known then what you know now, would you have gone into Iraq if you had been president?”

“Well, George, of course it is the human condition that you don’t know the outcome at the time you make a decision.”

“Yes, but still, given what has happened, you must have thought about it.”

“Well, yes, I have thought about it, and since you ask, here is what I would say to you, and to America.  There are a lot of things about the Iraq War that surprised me and that I would not have expected at the time we went in.  What are they?

• “I would not have expected the leaders of the Democratic Party in Congress to break with the custom of politics stopping at the water’s edge, of our foreign policy, and certainly of our war policy, being bipartisan or at least nonpartisan
• “I would not have expected to see several leading Democrats who voted for the Iraq War in October 2002 turn around and attack that very war once we were in it.  I was surprised that they took a lax attitude to their duties at the time they voted for going into Iraq.  For them to send our young men and women into harm’s way without being committed to the mission is something we know now, but did not know then.
• “I did not think that to cover their vacillation on a matter as critical to the country as the Iraq War, they would then attack and try to weaken the president as war leader.  Some people might think there is a word for that.
• “I would never have expected that once we did secure victory, we would abandon it by a premature exit of our forces under this president.  We learned the lesson after World War I that victory is not the final step.  We must stay to assure that local forces do not abrogate that victory.  I would never have expected a president of the United States to simply throw away what had been gained by the sacrifices of our troops.

“So there are things we know now that we did not know then, but George, I would say that they would not alter my view then or now.  The problem that the country faced was that the Saddam regime, while still keeping control of Iraq, had descended to a level of savagery toward the Iraqi people such that that regime would not have lasted much longer.  There was a moral issue in removing it.  We had the resolutions of the Clinton administration and the U.N. to remove Saddam because of his many violations, and we had the uncertainty of his intentions on WMD.

“The WMD problem arose from 9/11.  It was not that Saddam was directly involved in 9/11.  It was that 9/11 deterrence failed.  We and the Soviet Union had deterred ourselves from attacking each other during the Cold War.  That protocol was breached in regard to the Islamic world on 9/11.  Our margin of error on the security of the country was thus reduced to the vanishing point.  Intelligence, for all the efforts of our people, had not been useful in identifying risks to the country, whether it was Saddam’s nuclear program in 1991 or 9/11 itself.  So we did not have a roadmap of what the risks were, what was going to happen next.

“So yes, I would still have gone into Iraq even if I had known that Democratic support for the war would be withdrawn for political purposes, the customary approach of seeing a mission through was going to be abandoned by the other party, and that the next president would walk away from our victory.”