“Nobody lives life backwards,” said Eliot Cohen, a founding member of the Project for a New American Century and later a top aide to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “At the time, reasonable people could disagree over whether to go to war in Iraq. It’s really a silly hypothetical, and the people who ask it should know better. You don’t get to relive history that way.”

“It reflects more on the media’s obsession with a new litmus test,” said Danielle Pletka, the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “One isn’t president or commander in chief in hindsight.”…

Bill Kristol, the founder and editor of the hawkish Weekly Standard, said that even knowing what we know now, he would have still pushed for an invasion…

But Kristol doesn’t hold it against Republicans like Bush and Rubio for thinking differently: “Can’t blame candidates for not wanting to spend time and effort taking on the politically correct No position,” he said.