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🗓️ 18 June 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
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0:00.0 | Before Donald Trump became President Trump, he was a candidate in a very crowded Republican primary. |
0:07.3 | And one way he stood out during his 2016 campaign was by bluntly attacking President George W. Bush |
0:13.8 | for launching the Iraq war, like in this CBS News debate. |
0:17.5 | George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty. We should |
0:22.2 | have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East. Trump criticized the war, but also |
0:28.0 | Bush's justification for the war. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There |
0:33.2 | were none, and they knew there were none. Bush did argue to Americans and to the world that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, |
0:40.2 | was building weapons of mass destruction, and that the U.S. needed to stop him. |
0:44.6 | Here's Bush talking about Iraq in 2002. |
0:47.5 | It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. |
0:52.1 | It is seeking nuclear weapons. |
1:01.0 | That assessment was, of course, inaccurate. No such stockpiles were found after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And the Iraq war would become a quagmire. It cost the U.S. more than $2 trillion by one estimate. |
1:08.0 | It killed more than 4,000 U.S. service members and well over 100,000 Iraqis. |
1:14.5 | And it outlasted Bush's presidency, only officially concluding near the end of President Obama's first term. |
1:21.6 | Today, I can report that, as promise, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. |
1:30.0 | After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over. |
1:35.9 | And Obama would end up sending more troops into Iraq in 2014 after the rise of ISIS. |
1:41.5 | There are still U.S. forces there today. |
1:45.8 | This history is important because, as we record this episode Wednesday afternoon on the East Coast, President Trump |
1:50.9 | is threatening to bring the U.S. military into another Middle East conflict. As with Iraq, |
1:57.3 | the justification for a potential attack on Iran is the alleged threat of a nuclear |
2:02.4 | weapon. |
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