Thank You, Jeb Bush!

Thanks to his faux pas about the question they asked him on television about the war in Iraq (“Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the [2003] invasion?” His answer: “Yes.”), the official version of that conflict has been shattered.

Up until recently, it was said that that war had been useful and necessary, and although errors were acknowledged, such as the absence of weapons of mass destruction, those errors were made by those who handled the intelligence in George W. Bush’s government, and to question the validity of the war retrospectively was to insult the U.S. troops. But with Jeb Bush’s response, that version was exposed as a colossal lie, and by hiding behind the troops to avoid answering basic and legitimate questions, an unprecedented cowardice was exposed.

Because the truth is very different. And Jeb Bush’s attempt at justifying the war, as well as the improvised post-strategy that followed the invasion, sparked an outraged and forceful reaction from the country’s most influential media, and these clarified, once and for all, that which is no longer disputed: that that conflict was concocted by his brother’s government, which cost trillions of dollars, which sacrificed the lives of thousands of Iraqis and U.S. soldiers, and that it had no justification. And that, from now on, shall be the official history of what happened.

It is indeed now known that it was not an intelligence error that brought the country to war, but rather it was that the government desired war and manufactured the intelligence and arguments to justify it. “[It] was a failure of policy, not intelligence,” states Stephen M. Walt, from Harvard. Unable to capture bin Laden, but with Saddam Hussein within reach, the country suddenly changed enemies and orchestrated a bloody and useless invasion based on lies.

The line that it was necessary to take out Saddam because he had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction was blatant deceitfulness. And the line that it was necessary to do it because Hussein was a tyrant and a murderer was sickening hypocrisy. Many of us said at that time: Just how many dictators did the U.S. not impose on Latin America for decades? And why was it not urgent to overthrow those despots that often resembled butchers more than heads of state?

The good thing is that the correct narrative is now public. Because the worst part of all was the triumph of the false narrative, the dishonest version by Bush and his friends. And Paul Krugman summed up the new narrative like this: “The [war in Iraq] wasn’t a mistake, it was a crime.” And now whoever says that the war was noble and just, like various Republicans have said, are instantly burned. Infamy will not be accepted at this point. The leadership in power at the time, among them President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, should go to prison. But before that, we need to thank George’s brother Jeb (life’s little ironies) for his foolishness, since because of Jeb’s faux pas, the truth is now being loudly proclaimed, and that will be the new version of that criminal war. Perhaps for at least once, the official history will resemble the real one.