​Nevermind: Jeb Bush walks back comment about authorizing Iraq invasion

A few days after former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said he would have authorized the invasion of Iraq even if he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, the potential 2016 presidential candidate reversed his position.

“Knowing what we know now, I would have not engaged. I would have not gone into Iraq,” Bush said at a Thursday town hall in Tempe, Arizona.

The comments were a notable reversal for Bush, who is considered a potential frontrunner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination but has not officially entered the race, since he has spent much of the week trying to clarify an earlier response on the issue. Over the weekend, he told Fox News that“knowing what we know now,” he would have invaded Iraq in 2003 like his brother, former President George W. Bush.

“I would have [invaded], and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody. And so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got,” he said.

Since then, he has addressed the matter several times, at one point saying he misunderstood the original question.

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