Jeb Bush Hopes You Forget His Brother’s Iraq Fail
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The surge of weaseliness is working – or maybe not:
In a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., [Jeb!] Bush said Mrs. Clinton “stood by” as secretary of state as the situation in Iraq worsened and the Obama administration pulled troops out, a vacuum that he said the Islamic State had rushed in to fill.
The Clinton campaign, in turn, cast the blame further back, saying that President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in the first place created the group. “ISIS grew out of Al Qaeda in Iraq,” said Jake Sullivan, the Clinton campaign’s senior policy adviser, “It emerged in no small part as a result of President Bush’s failed strategy.”
… as Mr. Bush made clear on Tuesday, Republicans will press the issue with Mrs. Clinton on foreign policy and over the Obama administration’s approach — whether over the spread of the Islamic State, the “reset” of relations with Russia or the nuclear deal with Iran.
To quote President Obama from about three years, “Please proceed, governor!”
Today, hawkishness is the hottest thing on the American right. With the exception of Rand Paul, the GOP presidential contenders are vying to take the most aggressive stance against Iran and the Islamic State, or ISIS. The most celebrated freshman Republican senator is Tom Cotton, who gained fame with a letter to Iran’s leaders warning that the United States might not abide by a nuclear deal. According to recent polls, GOP voters now see national security as more important than either cultural issues or the economy. More than three-quarters of Republicans want American ground troops to fight ISIS in Iraq, and a plurality says that stopping Iran’s nuclear program requires an immediate military strike.
What explains the change? Above all, it’s the legend of the surge. The legend goes something like this: By sending more troops to Iraq in 2007, George W. Bush finally won the Iraq War. Then Barack Obama, by withdrawing U.S. troops, lost it. Because of Obama’s troop withdrawal, and his general refusal to exercise American power, Iraq collapsed, ISIS rose, and the Middle East fell apart. “We had it won, thanks to the surge,” Senator John McCain declared last September. “The problems we face in Iraq today,” Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal argued in May, “I don’t think were because of President Bush’s strength, but rather have come about because of President Obama’s weakness.”
… The surge was not intended merely to reduce violence. Reducing violence was a means to a larger goal: political reconciliation. Only when Iraq’s Sunni and Shia Arabs and its Kurds all felt represented by the government would the country be safe from civil war. As a senior administration official told journalists the day Bush announced the surge, “The purpose of all this is to get the violence in Baghdad down, get control of the situation and the sectarian violence, because now, without it, the reconciliation that everybody knows in the long term is the key to getting security in the country—the reconciliation will not happen.”
But although the violence went down, the reconciliation never occurred.
Yeah, thanks, Hillary… wait… what? Simon Maloy explains the flaw in Jeb!’s “strategery”:
Jeb was a full-throated supporter of the Iraq war, and he can’t really distance himself from it given that the strategic calamity of the Iraq invasion is, for him, a family heirloom. But by rewriting a bit of history and retroactively shifting a few goalposts, he can once again preach the virtues of the Bush Doctrine while chiding Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for losing the war his brother “won.” Thus we’re left with a surreal and infuriating situation in which a member of the Bush family is accusing someone else of refusing to take ownership of our failed Iraq policy.
‘Nuff said.
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