If the purpose of Jeb Bush’s foreign policy messaging was to back himself into a corner from which there’s no clear exit strategy very early on, this week has been a smashing success. His position on his brother’s war in Iraq is so confusing that his friends are now going on cable news to defend him with this winning line: He can’t hear no good. Alas.

Fox News’ Megyn Kelly asked Jeb Bush the following straightforward question in an interview that aired Monday night: “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?”

“I would’ve,” he responded, “and so would’ve Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody. And so would’ve almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.”

“You don’t think it was a mistake?” Kelly followed up.

“In retrospect,” Bush continued, “the intelligence that everybody saw — that the world saw, not just the United States — was faulty. And in retrospect, once we invaded and took out Saddam Hussein, we didn’t focus on security first, and the Iraqis, in this incredibly insecure environment, turned out the United States military because there was no security for themselves and their families. By the way, guess who thinks that those mistakes took place as well? George W. Bush. So just for the newsflash to the world, if they’re trying to find places where there’s big space between me and my brother, this might not be one of those.”

What we have here, reader, is an answer that does not make sense. He seems to ignore the “knowing what we know now” part. Hillary Clinton’s record on Iraq certainly has its problems, and she’s known to dodge a question or two. But she has been pretty clear that she would not have voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq knowing “what we know now” — i.e. that the intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs and purported connections to Al Qaeda were wrong. (It should be said that “what we know now” wasn’t impossible information to ascertain back then. And even if the WMD intelligence had been correct, that still doesn’t mean that the invasion of Iraq would have been a savvy move.)