Yes, Jeb Bush really did say that he still would have invaded Iraq, even knowing everything we know now. Personally, I think that that is so incredibly stupid that it should automatically disqualify him from being president.
It also makes him blaming Obama for creating the mess in Iraq even that much more hypocritical. If you refuse to learn from the past, you are doomed to repeat it. His father invaded Iraq (although he didn’t go far), as did his older brother. Is he so willfully ignorant that he will follow in their footsteps?
UPDATE: Obama responds: “One of the central flaws I think of the decision back in 2003 was the sense that if we simply went in and deposed a dictator, or simply went in and cleared out the bad guys, that somehow peace and prosperity would automatically emerge, and that lesson we should have learned a long time ago.”
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Q. Is he so willfully ignorant that he will follow in their footsteps?
A. Yes.
IK – with all due respect, and perhaps you have mis-remembered or misstated here, but GHW Bush did NOT invade Iraq, he invaded Kuwait to oust the invading Iraqi army, in what is referred to as The First Gulf War, but then refrained from largely invading Iraq in return (beyond some near border skirmishes, I believe). Bush Jr., did invade Iraq, of course, arguably under false pretenses and cherry-picked intel (Cheney and Rumsfeld are legendary for this and leaned hard on Junior to follow suit), leading to the chaos and ISIS related atrocities we see today. I understand many of ISIS’s leadership is composed of former officers from the disbanded Iraqi army, so blaming Obama for the current mess or ISIS there is beyond disingenuous, it’s repugnant scapegoating.
Hearing that Jeb now has his brother and other neocon veterans of that era on his team of foreign policy advisers is reason enough for me to dismiss him as a credible candidate for president, regardless of how badly he fumbled that hypothetical question. Anyway, these election campaigns are absurdly too long, imho. It’s still 18 months until the election and these guys (and gal) are already in the news cycle on a daily basis. Politicians run 24/7/365 these days, no wonder they never get anything done! Compare Great Britain, where election campaigns run for six weeks, start to finish. But I guess that’s just another one of our “exceptional” traits.