At the Rachel Maddow blog, Steve Benen asks:
Is Jeb Bush’s position on Iraq a disqualifier?
The answer is yes, it is.
JEB was asked by Fox News’s Megyn Kelly whether, “knowing what we know now,” he would have invaded Iraq back in 2003 like his brother. This question shouldn’t produce any genuinely enlightening answers, because of course “we” didn’t know in 2003 what we know now, or at least some of “us” didn’t know it as certainly as we should all know it now. But as a test of basic presidential mettle, or basic mental health, it’s OK; anybody who still says he would have authorized that invasion having seen its 12 year swirling shitstorm of a result probably shouldn’t be left unsupervised in public, let alone be elected President. JEB, as we all have heard by now, responded thusly:
“I would have [authorized the invasion], and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody. And so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got,” Bush told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly in an interview scheduled to air Monday.
But he acknowledged that the “intelligence that everybody saw, that the world saw, was faulty,” adding that after the invasion, the U.S. ought to have focused on securing and stabilizing Iraq in order to shield its people from sectarian violence.
“By the way, guess who thinks that those mistakes took place as well? George W. Bush. Yes, I mean, so just for the news flash to the world, if they’re trying to find places where there’s big space between me and my brother, this might not be one of those,” Jeb Bush said.
The “the invasion was good and cool, but, uh, mistakes were made afterward” line is a bog standard neocon attempt at defending their indefensible war (and JEB gets bonus points for working in the standard Hillary Clinton line), so it’s not unusual. But it is utterly disqualifying in a candidate for President. Even lots of hard right Republican voices (who admittedly may be looking for any reason to bash JEB) are saying so, as Benen notes.
The slightly more interesting question is whether the candidate would have authorized the invasion knowing what “we” knew then, which is obviously hard to answer but (if answered honestly) would offer more insight into how that person might actually perform in the job. Turns out that this was what JEB thought Kelly had asked him, supposedly. Unfortunately for JEB, this is still basically disqualifying. There were plenty of people who saw that the Iraq War was a mistake before it started, and odds are we would have been better off if any one of them had been President in 2003 instead of George W. Bush (one of JEB’s “top foreign policy advisers,” which in itself is probably disqualifying). The other problem for JEB is that, if you’re buying this explanation of his answer to Kelly, that means you may have to start wondering whether he’s capable of comprehending simple questions.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 
Even I knew that the US military would brush aside the Iraqi defenders like so many flies, and that the larger situation was so fraught with peril that some blowup somewhere was inevitable. My surprise was that it all fell apart so quickly, my guess having been that we would stage into Iran and drown in the sheer magnitude of the task.
So as a science who has dedicated his life to extracting as much wisdom – but no more – as is to be found in any experience, the Big Lesson of all this has been the awe inspiring power of simply refusing to learn. Nope. Wasn’t me. I didn’t do it. Nothing happened and it wasn’t my fault anyway. Deny and deflect until the heat dies down and the pendulum swings and then you are back to doing anything you want. Evidently your more unscrupulous operators have worked like this since time began, but in my comfortable little bubble I simply rejected the evidence of my own two eyes until the great emotional shock forced me to recalibrate my Bayesian priors.