@PatriciaMazzei
Jeb Bush on Thursday tried, finally, to exorcise the ghost of the Iraq war that has haunted him politically for most of the week. Speaking at a small brewery in Arizona, Bush said, “Knowing what we know now, I would have not engaged, I would not have gone into Iraq.”
He made the declaration without any prompting — a sign that Bush knew he had to clean up the muddled responses that began in a Fox News interview taped Saturday. His shakiness was the first significant misstep in his early campaign, and it gave an opening to his likely 2016 Republican presidential rivals to pounce, with one after the other clearly stating they would not have authorized the invasion.
Bush’s trouble began when anchor Megyn Kelly asked him the most obvious of questions about his brother’s scarred Iraq legacy: “Knowing what we know, would you have authorized the invasion?”
“I would have,” Bush said, “and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.”
Kelly pressed Bush on whether the war was a mistake, and he conceded the intelligence was “faulty.” She later opined he had misheard her question. But the damage had been done by the time her interview aired Monday.
“If we knew then what we know now, and I were the President of the United States, I wouldn’t have gone to war,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a likely Bush rival, told CNN on Tuesday.
Bush said on the radio that afternoon that he had, in fact, misunderstood Kelly. But when host Sean Hannity asked it again, Bush said, “I don’t know.” He called the query a “hypothetical.” That only further emboldened his critics, who pointed out that most of a presidential campaign (or soon-to-be campaign, in Bush’s case) involves discussing hypotheticals.
By the time Bush arrived in Nevada on Wednesday, he was repeatedly getting asked about Iraq. “I respect the question, but it does a disservice to a lot of people who sacrificed a lot,” Bush said in Reno.
By Thursday, he had had enough. He took Kelly’s original question head on.
This time, on his fourth try, Bush didn’t hesitate.
More here.
This post has been updated.
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