TALLAHASSEE—seeking to nip controversy in the bud, Jeb Bush today laid out a clear statement of his views towards the second Gulf war, explaining that he was for the war before he was against it.

“Had I known now what I thought I knew about what we would have known then if we had known what I thought we knew now, I can definitively say that I would have had an opinion on the war,” said Bush, speaking before a gathering of veterans here today.

“You want to know what I really think about Iraq? Read my lips,” he went on to say, before mouthing something inaudible. Unfortunately, no lip-readers were in the audience at the time.

According to Bush, he has “always” thought that the war “made sense insofar as we didn’t know what we thought we knew what we knew,” but if “we hadn’t known what we thought we knew, then we would have known better.”

Reacting angrily to charges of flip-flopping, Bush said that “I don’t like ‘gotcha’ questions, especially ones that there was no way to see coming.”



“On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d say the Iraq War was about…up here.”