Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said there was no contradiction between his positions that President George W. Bush made the right decision to invade Iraq and that knowing what we know now he would not have ordered the 2003 invasion had he been president.
“The question was whether it was a mistake and my answer is that it was not a mistake. I still say it was not a mistake,” Rubio told Chris Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday.” He added later that this was based on “what the president knew at the time.”
Pressed on the issue by Wallace, Rubio added, “The world is a better place because [former Iraqi dictator] Saddam Hussein is not there.”
Rubio then reiterated his earlier claim, first made after a speech Wednesday at the Council on Foreign Relations, that neither he nor President Bush himself would have invaded had they known at the time that the weapons of mass destruction Hussein was widely believed to have had were not there.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a candidate for the Republican nomination in 2016, kicked off a week of controversy on Monday by stating that he did not think it had been a mistake to invade Iraq, even knowing what we know now. After several days of questions on the issue, Bush walked back his position somewhat, stating that he would not have invaded given what we know now.
Rubio, who was not a senator during the Iraq debates, attracted a similar controversy on Wednesday with his Council on Foreign Relations comments.
As this comment on Fox News shows, Rubio is trying to walk a fine line between defending the president and the GOP’s history on the issue while also acknowledging the problems the invasions caused. Most of the other GOP presidential candidates have unequivocally said the invasion was a mistake.
