Source: PressTV

Republican Senator Rand Paul has criticized Washington for its reckless foreign policy, saying both Iraq and the US are worse off following the 2003 invasion.Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council on Tuesday, Paul said US intervention in the Middle East had created a chaos there.Paul, who is seen as a potential Republican presidential candidate in the 2016 election, said, “It’s a mess there.”He cited Iraq as an example saying, “Iraq’s worse off now”.The Kentucky senator said, “Intervention has unintended consequences,” adding if he were the commander in chief he “will not want to take the country to war” and that he “want(s) less [war]”.War would be “a last resort,” he said, noting he would begin war only when the country is united in saying “we must fight”.Paul supported a smaller role for the US in world affairs as many in the country are now calling the Iraq war a mistake.In 2003, former President George W. Bush ordered the invasion on Iraq under the pretext that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. In October 2004, however, a CIA report revealed that Saddam did not possess any weapons of mass destruction at the time of the invasion.The US war in Iraq cost American taxpayers $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, according to a study called Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.