New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Tuesday that he would not have invaded Iraq in 2003 if he were President at the time and knew what we know in hindsight.
Christie’s comment came after former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) caused a stir for his own comments about the Iraq War. When Fox News’ Megyn Kelly asked him in an interview that aired Monday whether he would have authorized the invasion of Iraq knowing “what we know now,” Bush responded “I would have.”
A former Bush aide told CNN on Tuesday morning that the likely presidential candidate said he’d misheard Kelly’s question.
CNN’s Jake Tapper posed a similar question to Christie, another potential 2016 candidate: “Knowing then what we know now — no WMD in Iraq, et cetera — was that the right decision to go to war?”
The New Jersey governor said he wanted to answer Tapper’s question directly.
“If we knew then what we know now and I was the President of the United States, I wouldn’t go to war,” he told Tapper. “But we don’t get to replay history.”
Christie said that he believed former President George W. Bush did make “the best decision he could at the time” given the information coming from the U.S. intelligence community and the situation on the ground in Iraq.
I wouldn’t have invaded Iraq knowing what we knew then!
DOOR:
“Christie said that he believed former President George W. Bush did make
“the best decision he could at the time” given the information coming
from the U.S. intelligence community and the situation on the ground in
Iraq.” SHUT!!
Well that was a slow moving question right in the middle of the strike zone. That’s too easy of a question for anyone to mess up. Well, anyone but a Bush…
The problem Republicans like Christie have is that “knowing what we know now…” is the same intelligence that Bush/Cheney/Rice/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz “knew” then. They were briefed by the Clinton team and they even had the PDB indicating that bin Laden would strike. They were running the intelligence community then and they failed…miserably and it cost more than 3,000 lives in the Twin Towers and more than 4,500 soldiers’ lives. In this case, as well as John Ellis Bush…hindsight is not 20/20. For these folks hindsight is totally blind…and they should be called on it.
So Governor Christie, If we knew then what we know now we would have known that we didn’t know enough to start dropping bombs so what would you do to avoid these know now what we didn’t know then type of situations where we are acting with too many known unknowns?