Midway through the GOP debate Tuesday night, Republican poll leader Donald Trump offered a blunt and brutal denunciation of the last Republican president's main foreign policy initiative — the Iraq War.
Indeed, Trump went further even than most Democratic politicians would, calling the war "a tremendous disservice to humanity" — and added that it achieved nothing whatsoever, except to leave the Middle East "a total and complete mess." Here's what he said:
"We've spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that, frankly, if they were there and if we could have spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems — our airports and all the other problems we have — we would have been a lot better off, I can tell you that right now.
We have done a tremendous disservice not only to the Middle East — we've done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have been wiped away — and for what? It's not like we had victory. It's a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized, a total and complete mess. I wish we had the 4 trillion dollars or 5 trillion dollars. I wish it were spent right here in the United States on schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart!"
As Matt Yglesias pointed out on Tuesday, this, like much of what Trump says, exists outside the bounds of normal political discourse. Even for Democrats who criticize the Iraq War, it's considered gauche to say that so many veterans died and were injured for nothing (though many likely believe this in their hearts).
And even those Republicans who now think the war was a mistake would hesitate to call it "a tremendous disservice to humanity." Beyond that, they certainly wouldn't suggest the money spent on the war could have been plowed into increasing domestic spending, which they generally argue won't improve things.
Yet again, Trump has identified an opportunity left open by the polarized two-party system. By pairing his tough rhetoric and persona and avowed nationalism with various efforts to play to Americans' racial anxieties on immigration and terrorism, he can convincingly tell conservatives the Iraq War has been a disaster. And here again, he may come off to voters as more honest and straight-talking than the other candidates.
