Rove: Jeb Bush will learn from Iraq flap

A top political adviser to then-president George W. Bush says Jeb Bush will learn the right lessons from this week's series of shifting comments about the Iraq War.

"He's a very smart guy," Karl Rove said Friday on NBC's Today show. "He's not a guy who needs the lesson taught to him twice."

Just days after saying he would still have authorized the 2003 invasion -- after misunderstanding the question, he later said -- Bush declared Thursday that “knowing what we know now, I would have not engaged. I would have not gone into Iraq.”

Potential Republican primary opponents and Democrats pounced on Bush for equivocating about the war authorized by his brother.

"He's had a bad week," Rove said of Jeb Bush.

But it's early, noted Rove, who helped George W. Bush win the presidency.

"When you get in to this kind of contest, you find out that more is required of you, and you're going to make mistakes," Rove told Today. "I went through two key presidential campaigns where mistakes were made, and yet at the end of the day, the fellow who made the mistakes won."