Charlie Rose: “If you look at the Iraq war, after finding out there were no weapons of mass destruction, would you, if you knew that, have been in favor of the Iraqi invasion?”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.): “Well, not only would I not have been in favor of it. President Bush would not have been in favor of it, and he said so.”

— exchange at the Council on Foreign Relations, May 13, 2015

This exchange was prompted by the apparent flub by former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R), the brother of former president George W. Bush, in answering a similar question. It took Jeb Bush several days to answer that he would not have invaded.

Oddly, most of the news reporting on Rubio’s comment has truncated it, leaving off the last part. So his quote has appeared in news reports like this:  “Well, not only would I not have been in favor of it, President Bush would not have been in favor of it.”

This makes it seem as if Rubio is speculating on how the former president would react. But actually, his full statement (“and he said so”) indicates that Rubio believes that the former president has already made his position clear. If that’s the case, it would make it doubly strange that Jeb Bush would tie himself in knots for several days until he, too, came out and said he would not have invaded.