While he hasn’t yet made an official announcement, it’s pretty clear to everyone that Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, is running for president. So you would think he’d be prepared to answer reporters’ questions — especially ones about his brother’s policies in Iraq.
And yet, when Fox News personality Megyn Kelly tossed one to him, Bush stumbled badly in his response. In a pre-recorded segment aired a week ago Monday, Kelly asked: “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?”
Bush replied, “I would have,” and pointed out that Hillary Clinton, who was then in the Senate, had voted to authorize the invasion. His reply stirred up a hornet’s nest of response. The next day, he said he had misunderstood the question. On Wednesday, he tried to defuse the growing controversy by saying it would be a disservice to people who lost love ones in the conflict to consider such hypothetical questions.
By last Thursday, the candidate had come full circle. His latest (and presumably final) response was: “Knowing what we know now… I would not have engaged. I would not have gone into Iraq.”
The whole thing made Bush look vacillating and unprepared. How on Earth could he not have expected such a question to come up during the campaign? How could his team have not helped him be ready with a forceful and positive response? It made the candidate and his handlers look weak and uncertain.
Of course, Clinton could face the same sort of problem, if the mainstream media weren’t so eager to give her a free pass. After all, she did vote in favor of the war, as Bush pointed out. And even in the 2008 presidential campaign, she continued to defend that vote.
It wasn’t until last year that she finally admitted she had made a mistake. In her book “Hard Choices,” she offered this turnaround:
I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had. And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong.
There are many Democrats who have not forgiven Clinton for that vote. When he announced last month that he might oppose her for the Democratic nomination for president, former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chaffee said, “I don’t think we should have a president of the United States who voted for the huge mistake that is the Iraq war.”
Chaffee doesn’t seem to be getting much traction among Democrats — not even the progressives to the left of Hillary. Their hearts seem to belong to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who so far says she won’t enter the race.
Needless to say, reporters love this sort of “gotcha” journalism. They couldn’t wait to ask the same thing of other Republican contenders for the White House. I’m sure they were hoping they’d find someone who would stumble as badly as Bush.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) didn’t back off from his anti-war position. “Invading Iraq was a mistake,” he declared. “And I thought the war, even at the time, was a mistake, given the intelligence.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Paul’s chief challenger for the Tea Party vote, said: “Now we know that intelligence was false, and without that predicate there’s no way we would have gone to war.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tried to give former President George W. Bush an out, as well as himself, when he said: “Not only would I not have been in favor of it, President Bush… has said he regrets that the intelligence was faulty.”
There’s no doubt public sentiment has shifted dramatically regarding the war in Iraq. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll taken last October, 66 percent of those questioned said the war wasn’t worth it. That’s a huge increase from the response a decade earlier. In December 2003, only 37 percent held that position.
Meanwhile, ISIS continues to advance in Iraq, while slaughtering thousands of Christians and fellow Muslims. How are they going to be stopped? How will Islamic terrorism be defeated?
Republicans better come up with better answers than we’ve heard so far.
Until next time, keep some powder dry.
–Chip Wood
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