The candidates for the presidential nomination in the USA today, 12 years later, agree that the war in Iraq was a mistake, AP reports.
Politicians who hope for the presidency rarely come out with positions before the opinion of public opinion, according to the American agency, evaluating it as a "surprising moment" that the main candidates for the presidency from the ranks of both parties agree that the war, in which 4.491 Americans and countless Iraqis lost their lives , it should not have been conducted.
It was not an "easy evolution" for politicians like Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, the front-runner for her party's presidential nomination, who voted to invade Iraq in 2002 while a senator.
Her support for the war, as well as her refusal to renounce her position, cost her the loss of the party's nomination in 2008, when Barack Obama, who was not in the Senate in 2002 but opposed the war, was elected as the Democratic candidate.
In a memoir published last year, Clinton wrote that she voted based on the information available at the time, but admitted she was "wrong."
Most of the Republican candidates said last Sunday that they would not have supported the attack on Iraq if they had known today that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, which was President George W. Bush's argument for the 2003 invasion.
Bush's brother and the most likely candidate for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, Jeb Bush, said, however, that "going back in time and talking about hypothetical things" is not fair to the families of soldiers who gave their lives.
However, last week he too, under pressure to state his position, rejected in principle the war that his brother started.
"Everybody accepts it now," said another Republican candidate, Rick Santorum, who, however, did not always view the war in Iraq that way, having voted for the invasion as a senator and continued to support it for years.
The question was far easier for presidential candidates who were not related to the family, nor were they members of Congress in 2002, such as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
They did not, however, go as far as a critic of the war, Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, who said it would have been a mistake to attack Iraq even if Saddam had such weapons.
Paul believes that Saddam was a counterweight to Iran, and that his removal from power led to the unrest that shakes the Middle East today.
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