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The Media Is Spreading A Myth of ‘Donald The Dove.’ It’s Wrong.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures during a campaign event in Hartford, Conn., April 15, 2016. CREDIT: AP PHOTO/CHARLES KRUPA
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures during a campaign event in Hartford, Conn., April 15, 2016. CREDIT: AP PHOTO/CHARLES KRUPA

In the wake of Donald Trump’s big foreign policy speech, a strange idea is entering the media: the myth of “Donald the dove,” who warned against America’s hawkishness in the Middle East.

In most tellings, Mr. Trump put his self-described “great judgment” and “vision” to work in opposing both the Bush administration’s 2003 war in Iraq and the Obama administration’s 2011 military intervention in Libya. His wariness of changing other societies even led him to counsel against supporting the ouster of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. As Trump’s speech succinctly listed, U.S. foreign policy “went from mistakes in Iraq to Egypt to Libya.”

There’s just one problem with this narrative: none of it actually happened. Today, Trump may indeed hold all of these views, but at the time, he held none of them, at least as far as the public record shows. And by obscuring the difference between judgments in real-time and in retrospect, we risk allowing unaccountable Monday-morning quarterbacking to pass for an ability to make tough calls from inside the huddle.

Take, for example, Iraq. To give just one example among many, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently noted, without comment or correction, that “the prime example of commander-in-chief judgment Trump offers is the fact that, like Obama, he thought the invasion of Iraq was a stupid idea.”

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In stark contrast to Barack Obama’s anti-war speech in October 2002, however, there is zero public record that Trump opposed the war before it began. On the contrary, asked if he was pro-war in September 2002, Trump said, “Yeah, I guess so. You know I wish… the first time it was done correctly.” As the invasion began, Trump added that it “looks like a tremendous success from a military standpoint” and predicted the market would “go up like a rocket.” A few days later, after a U.S. missile mistakenly downed a British jet, Trump did opine that “the war’s a mess.” But it was only in September — six months into the war and with no WMDs discovered — that public record exists of Trump saying the United States should not have gone into Iraq.

The same is true of Libya. Anyone listening to Trump’s critique of Hillary Clinton for removing Qaddafi and leaving behind instability could be excused for assuming Trump opposed the intervention at the time. But again, this is Trump-in-retrospect. Trump-in-real-time argued for the very military intervention that the Trump of today now so fiercely condemns.

The Forgotten Conflict in Libya, ExplainedWorld CREDIT: AP Photo/Mohamed Ben Khalifa Five years after the Libyan Revolution toppled longtime autocrat Muammar…thinkprogress.org“I can’t believe what our country is doing. Qaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around, we have soldiers all [around] the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage,” he said in a video blog in 2011. “Now we should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick.” He then declared that Libyan oil should “pay us back” for the war.

And it’s not just these two serious matters of war and peace where Trump-in-retrospect barely resembles Trump-in-real-time. Last week, Trump also specifically mentioned Egypt in his litany of U.S. diplomatic mistakes — critiquing the Obama administration for endorsing the 2011 revolution and failed transition that followed. But Trump at the time said it was “a good thing” that Mubarak had fallen given the scale of his corruption.

Certainly, it’s only natural in public life that people reevaluate their positions over time. They’re then held to account by the public. But in the case of Trump, very few people even recognize that he has held such contrary positions — let alone ask him what he’s learned from past mistakes.

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For many reasons — from his embrace of torture to his mocking the Geneva Convention to his boast that “I’m the most militaristic person there is” — Trump is no dove. But his positions on matters of war and peace have also significantly been more hawkish and less prescient than he might like others to think. The media should be demanding answers on national security from Trump in real time. Because in retrospect could prove dangerously too late.

Daniel Benaim is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. You can find him on Twitter at @danielbenaim.