Posted on 05/14/2015 1:36:11 PM PDT by VinL
After several days of shifting responses panned by Republicans and Democrats alike, Jeb Bush has arrived at his final judgment on the 2003 invasion of Iraq: No, he would not have authorized the war had he known the Iraqis did not have weapons of mass destruction.
"Knowing what we now know, I would not have engaged," Bush said during a visit to Arizona on Thursday. "I would not have gone into Iraq."
The former Florida governor, a Republican who's weighing a 2016 presidential bid, suggested the thousands of Americans who lost their lives in the war did not die in vain. "Their sacrifice was worth honoring, not depreciating," he said.
But his comments nonetheless mark a repudiation of the war launched by his brother, former President George W. Bush, who sold the invasion to the American public based on intelligence that later turned out to be false. Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, as the former president claimed, nor was it affiliated with the September 11 terror attacks.
Jeb Bush, hoping to follow his brother's path to the White House, has struggled in recent days to articulate a clear answer to the question of whether he'd have invaded Iraq, given the benefit of hindsight.
In an interview that aired Monday, Fox News' Megyn Kelly asked him, "Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?"
Bush, though, answered the wrong question: "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."
In a later interview with conservative radio host Sean Hannity, Bush said he'd "interpreted" Kelly's question incorrectly - but he declined to say whether he would have authorized the war, knowing what he knows now, calling it a "hypothetical"
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Jeb is all over the map.
He’s coming firmly down on both sides of the issue.
Channeling some John Kerry it appears.
The only question I want to know the answer to from any of these losers is, “when you addressed Congress on September 16, 2001, would you have asked for a declaration of war on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan?”
That photo makes me want to blow chunks.
Right answer: “If we knew that a future President would pull out of Iraq too soon, wasting the lives of our military men and women, and leave a power vacuum for extremists...I would not have gone into Iraq. How is BO not responsible for leaving the fertile ground for ISIS?”
Along with...”why do you keep repeating that there were no WMD’s in Iraq?”
My right answer from Jeb Bush:
My old man should have taken out Saddam in 1991.
Thursday’s Answer
None of this "great field" of GOP candidates have the balls to say the following...
"That is a stupid question, even the New York Times ran a story that their were WMD's and that doesn't even bring into the equation the 300 Metric Tons of Yellow Cake our Canadian Allies took for processing as was written about on 10/8/08', I think the bigger question is when will you a member of the Press really do your job"...
It's pretty simple: IF the Bush Doctrine was so important to him (Bush) and he really meant what he said - IRAN (Not Iraq) should have been the very first target after the Taliban. We should have targeted them and Hezbollah first and beefed up the intel for Iraq and shut Saddam down by containment.
ANYONE with any bit of common sense and ANY understanding of the way Iraq worked should have been able to predict 1) It's a pie in the sky dream to think you could have made them a democratic island in the ME that spread democracy throughout the region and 2) They should have known what would happen once the Sunni's lost power. 3) Anyone with ANY understanding of the region should have understood that, UNFORTUNATLY, some people just need a dictator to make them behave.
Been saying this for a decade (since before I found out I was going to Iraq...which was Feb 2003). Was saying it in 2002 when all the debate was going on. Airstrikes? Yes. Keep him boxed in? Yes. Sanctions? Yes.
Invade? No.
exactly ... plus we really do not know that there were no nuke or bio WMDs. They could have been buried in the sand or carted off to Syria or someplace. We do know there were chemical WMDs.
Then if you want to talk hypothetical - you can’t leave out Obama’s fumbling over the last 6 years. Iraq was in decent shape when Bush left. So the hypothetical question is — knowing what we know now and knowing that Obama would follow Bush and screw up everything Bush did ... would you have invaded Iraq?
But it doesn’t matter. The only question really worth asking is what would you do NOW and contrast what you would have done over the last 6 years.
And people bashed Romney for changing positions over a number of YEARS....
We did find wmd, thousands. Just not the new production stuff all intelligence said he had. We also found seed stock for biologicals, parts and plans for centrifuges and yellowcake. Together with testimony that he planned to start production once sanctions were lifted it’s damning. Remember Oil for Food?
I just woke from a dream where a nuke went off in Iraq and no one knew who did it. It must have been something Jeb said to make me dream that.
“Their sacrifice was worth honoring, not depreciating,” he said.
Do you mean deprecating, you muddled moron?
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