New Jersey governor Chris Christie told CNN’s Jake Tapper Tuesday that it “wasn’t” the right decision to go to war in Iraq, given what we know now about the intelligence failures leading up to the invasion in 2003.
“Now, I think President Bush made the best decision he could at the time, given that his intelligence community was telling him that there was WMD and there were other threats right there in Iraq,” said Christie. “But I don’t think you can honestly say that if we knew then that there was no WMD, that the country should have gone to war. So my answer would be ‘no.'”
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Christie, a Republican who may run for president, also said that Americans should avoid going “backwards” on these questions. “We need a forward-looking foreign policy that talks about how to reassert American authority and influence around the world,” he said. “We don’t get to replay history.”
Christie, like Texas senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz, was responding to an interview of Jeb Bush by Megyn Kelly of Fox News. Kelly asked Bush if he would have authorized the war in Iraq, “knowing what we know now.” Bush’s answer—”I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, and so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.”—seemed to be responding to a question Kelly hadn’t asked. A Bush ally later told CNN that the former governor from Florida had “misheard” Kelly’s question.
