GOP presidential hopefuls revisit war in Iraq

Suddenly, Republicans aiming for the White House find themselves knee-deep in the big muddy.

Twelve years after the United States invaded Iraq, the party's presidential hopefuls are rehashing the decision to go to war, after former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said in an interview that aired Monday that he would have made the same decision as his brother, former President George W. Bush.

Jeb Bush has since tried to clarify his comments, but he has been dragged into a three-day political quagmire as, one after the other, his likely rivals have said they would not have ordered the 2003 invasion of Iraq, given the erroneous intelligence that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction.

The episode shows how deep the controversy over the wisdom of the Iraq war runs in American politics, even as polls show that with the rise of the Islamic State, many Republican voters want a more forceful foreign policy - and the candidates are competing to demonstrate their hawkishness.

It also could complicate Jeb Bush's careful attempts to demonstrate differences from his brother and father, who also was president.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who has long voiced opposition to the Iraq war, was the most blunt of the bunch. "To say that nothing would happen differently means we're going to get George Bush 3," he told the Associated Press on Tuesday. "That's a real problem if he can't articulate what he would have done differently."

In an interview Wednesday with CNN, Paul went further, urging the media to keep asking Bush and other candidates their thoughts on Iraq, on the 2011 intervention in Libya, and on how far the United States should go in Syria.

"There's a consistent theme here," Paul said. "Is it a good idea to go into the Middle East, topple governments, and hope for something better out of the chaos? Recent history seems to suggest you get something worse."

It all began when Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly asked Bush in an interview that aired Monday whether "knowing what we know now," would he have authorized the invasion of Iraq.

"I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody," Bush said, referring to the Democratic front-runner's vote to approve of war with Iraq as a U.S. senator from New York. "And so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got."

On Tuesday, speaking on Sean Hannity's nationally syndicated radio show, Bush said he had misinterpreted the question and thought he was being asked whether he would have authorized the invasion based on the information available at the time.

"Clearly there were mistakes as it related to faulty intelligence in the lead-up to the war and the lack of focus on security" afterward, Bush said. Pressed by Hannity, he wouldn't say what he would have decided. "Yeah, I don't know what that decision would have been - that's a hypothetical."

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz answered the question when it was posed by the Hill newspaper Tuesday. "We now know in hindsight, those intelligence reports were false," he said. "Without that predicate, it is difficult to imagine the decision would have been made to go into Iraq."

On Wednesday, after he delivered a foreign-policy speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said there would have been no Iraq war if the bad intelligence estimates had been exposed at the time. "Not only would I have not been in favor of it," he said, "President Bush would not have been in favor of it."

At other times, Rubio has said the world was better off with Saddam Hussein out of power. He called for "moral clarity" in foreign policy during the speech, using U.S. might to promote and protect freedom around the world - a thought that would have been at home among President George W. Bush's neoconservative advisers.

"If the question is, if there were not weapons of mass destruction should we have gone, the answer is no," Ohio Gov. John Kasich said in an interview with the Columbus Dispatch. "I wouldn't have seen it as vital to national interests."

Gov. Christie, in New Hampshire on Tuesday, told CNN's Jake Tapper that invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do, in hindsight. "I don't think you can honestly say that if we knew then that there was no WMD, that the country should've gone to war," he said. But Christie also said he thought the president made the best decision he could with the information at hand in 2003. "You don't get to replay history," he said.

Asked again Wednesday about Jeb Bush's comments, Christie told conservative radio host Laura Ingraham that "I think you have to answer questions like this. These are questions of extraordinary importance for the country."

In Nevada on Wednesday, Jeb Bush tried again to quell the furor. He said that the frenzy of "hypotheticals" does a disservice to the military personnel who were killed or maimed in Iraq.

"Of course, given the power of looking back and having that, of course anybody would have made different decisions," he said. "There's no denying that. But to delve into that and not focus on the future is, I think, where I need to draw the line."