Pat Robertson, who assured Christians in 2003 that the invasion of Iraq would result in few civilian casualties and was thus “on solid ground, not only in terms of Christian, biblical concepts, but also in terms of public relations” and later claimed that criticism of the war amounted to “treason,” said today that he knew all along that the Iraq war was “a bad mistake.”
Robertson made similar comments last year, saying “we were sold a bill of goods” on the war.
“We don’t really gain anything by looking back at what would you have done and couldn’t have done and so forth,” Robertson said today on “The 700 Club” in response to the recent remarks of GOP presidential candidates on the Iraq war. “The thing is, what are you going to do now? You’ve got an immediate threat and you’ve got to deal with it.”
“But the truth is, going into the Iraq in that war was a big mistake,” he said. “We interviewed on this program, I interviewed Saddam’s bombmaker, he was the man who was supposedly in charge of thermonuclear weapons for Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and he basically said they do not have the technology and ability to bring out a nuclear bomb.
“And I knew it, I hope the CIA knew it, I hope the president knew it. But he was being fed a tissue of lies, and you’re hearing all these reports about yellow cake and all this nonsense. And it was a snow job to try to sell that war, and we shouldn’t have gone into it, it’s cost a trillion or more dollars, it was a big mistake, and going in then, we shouldn’t have, and looking at it in hindsight you shouldn’t have. It was a bad mistake.”
“But,” he added, “what was done later by Obama has been a worse mistake.”
