Is Jeb Bush his brother’s keeper?
The presumptive Republican presidential candidate has stumbled twice this week when questioned about whether he thought his brother George W Bush made the right decision in invading Iraq in 2003.
In an interview with Fox News’s Megyn Kelly on Monday night, Jeb Bush was asked: “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?”
The former Florida governor replied: “I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.”
The answer provoked an immediate firestorm. Both Democrats and potential Republican opponents went after Jeb Bush’s apparent support for the decision to invade Iraq even in hindsight.
Even George W Bush called much of the intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq “false” in his recent autobiography Decision Points, and expressed angst about the decision to invade.
On Tuesday, Jeb Bush called in to the syndicated radio show of Fox News host Sean Hannity in an attempt to clean up the mess. The former Florida governor told Hannity he had misunderstood Kelly’s question and said he simply thought she was asking whether he supported the war “given what people knew then”.
Then Hannity asked the likely GOP presidential candidate if, in hindsight, he would have made the same decision to invade. Bush whiffed. The former Florida governor told Hannity: “I don’t know what that decision would have been. That’s a hypothetical, but mistakes were made, as they always are in life.”
Jeb Bush’s likely presidential campaign has long struggled with the lingering skepticism towards George W Bush among many Americans. The former president even admitted in a private gathering in April that he was “a political liability” for his younger brother’s presidential campaign, according to Bloomberg View.
With Jeb Bush’s reluctance to offer even mild criticism of his brother on a deeply unpopular decision, the former Florida governor has done nothing to reduce that liability.
