Jeb Bush: 3 Days, 4 Different Answers About Iraq
--IT ALL STARTED WITH ONE QUESTION posed by Fox News' Megyn Kelly: "Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion" of Iraq in 2003? And over the last few days,
Jeb Bush, who is not yet an official presidential candidate, has struggled to grab hold of one answer. Here's a look back:
1. YES. "I would have and so would have
Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got."
--Jeb Bush on Fox News' "The Kelly File" (aired Monday, May 11)
2. I DON'T KNOW. "I interpreted the question wrong, I guess. I was talking about, given what people knew then, would you have done it ... knowing what we know now, clearly there were mistakes as it related to faulty intelligence in the lead-up to the war and the focus on security ... the simple fact is, in the last few years of my brother's presidency, the surge was quite effective to bring security and stability to Iraq, which was missing in the early days ... that security has been totally obliterated by [this] president's pulling out too early, and now these voids are filled by this barbaric, asymmetric threat ... I don't know what that decision would have been. That's a hypothetical."
--Jeb Bush on The Sean Hannity radio show (Tuesday, May 12)
3. I WON'T SAY BECAUSE TALKING ABOUT IT DOES A DISSERVICE TO THOSE WHO SERVED. "The problem with hypotheticals is two-fold. One, when I was governor I got to -- I felt it a duty, I didn't have to -- to call all the family members of people who lost their lives and I don't remember the total number but it was easily over 100. And I felt it a duty to do that because I admired the sacrifice of their families. And I admired the men and women -- mostly men -- that made the ultimate sacrifice. So, going back in time and talking about hypotheticals -- what would have happened what could have happened, I think, does a disservice for them."
--Jeb Bush at a town hall meeting in Reno, Nevada (Wednesday, May 13) http://abcn.ws/1IBKjWr
4. PROBABLY NOT. "Talking about the future is more than fair. Talking about the past and saying, how would you have done something after the fact is a little tougher. ... Of course, given the power of looking back and having that -- of course anybody would have made different decisions. There's no denying that. But to delve into that and not focus on the future is where I need to draw the line."
--Jeb Bush in a gaggle with reporters after a town hall meeting in Reno, Nevada (Wednesday, May 13) http://abcn.ws/1IBKjWr
ABC's RICK KLEIN: Jeb Bush's explanations for whether he would have authorized the
Iraq War have now consumed most of the week. And they are now virtually guaranteed to linger deep into the campaign, far beyond the current period where his rivals see political benefit in piling on. His latest answer to the if-we-knew-then-what-we-know-now question -- or among his latest -- is perhaps the least tenable: that if we "get into hypotheticals I think it does a disservice for a lot of people that sacrificed." To state the obvious, all that presidential candidates really do is answer one big hypothetical, based on the presumption that they would be president. For Jeb Bush, there's another layer of hypotheticals: He's not even formally a candidate for office, so answering anything is based on the hypothetical of him possibly running. (That hypothetical has legal and campaign-finance implications.) Bush is also presuming that veterans and the families of those who lost their lives automatically presume that the war was worth the cost, or think a debate would automatically question their courage or patriotism. What it's done is that Jeb Bush suddenly has many in his own party worried that he's rusty, and that he hasn't thought through the implications of running for a third Bush presidency, in terms of broad perceptions as well as policies. He has also guaranteed that Iraq will be a recurring issue in the campaign -- even if the Democratic nominee is the only presidential candidate who actually voted for the war.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/note...s-iraq/story?id=31037863#.VVSw2y3oTgU.twitter
