Stopped running????

Jeb Bush defends George W.’s Iraq War legacy

The former Florida governor stops running away from his Iraq War problem.

By Eli Stokols

Jeb Bush is owning his Iraq War problem.

Bush, wrestling with his brother’s legacy of the war for the second time in three days, again sought to cast blame on the Obama administration for its failure to achieve a “fragile but secure” peace in the region that has been overrun by ISIS militants.

As he did in his speech Tuesday night outlining his own approach to combating ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the former Florida governor and presidential hopeful glossed over his brother’s decision to go to war in Iraq — and while acknowledging that mistakes were made, he seemed to view the war itself in positive terms.

“I’ll tell you, taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal,” the former Florida governor told a crowd of roughly 200 people who attended a forum on national security at St. Ambrose College.

Bush’s efforts to present himself as a strong, sensible commander in chief are complicated by the unpopular war his brother waged in Iraq — a war the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, supported at the time — and by his own tendency to view it in a more favorable light.

While Democrats are sure to mine Bush’s words for attack ad soundbites, the candidate showed no signs of tempering his praise for his brother’s war record.

To the contrary, after months of difficulty reconciling the broadly held public view that the Iraq War was a mistake with his own hawkish foreign policy views and an innate unwillingness to rehash and criticize his brother’s record, he has settled on a strategy: unapologetically arguing that the war, however misconceived, brought about an opportunity for a more stable Middle East, one that the current Democratic administration squandered.

“I’m not saying this because I’m a Bush,” he said. “I’m proud of what he did to create a secure environment for our country.”

With 17 of his 21 foreign policy advisers being veterans of George W. Bush’s White House, Bush’s position is no great surprise. And in a wild Republican primary to be decided by a conservative electorate clamoring for a more muscular approach to foreign policy, it might be a smart strategic play.

“It’s not like you can run a campaign for president and not talk about Iraq,” said Tim Miller, Bush’s campaign spokesman. “We can talk about Iraq on our terms. Terrorism and radical Islam is something the country cares about and certainly Republican primary voters are very concerned about it. He wanted to take the mantle as somebody who’s going to have a strategy and be a leader on it. There’s a primary electorate on our side that’s looking for that.”

Specifically, Bush focused again on the 2007 troop surge as a “courageous” decision that, he argues, temporarily curtailed sectarian violence within in Iraq; and he blames President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Clinton for removing American troops too hastily and creating the power vacuum that’s allowed ISIS to take root.

“We just washed our hands of the effort,” Bush said. “We declared success and then chaos occurred afterwards.”

More than anything else Bush said Thursday afternoon here, that statement underlined the political perils of this candidate talking about that war. The words he chose to criticize Obama for bringing U.S. forces home from Iraq too soon evoked decade-old critiques of his brother’s infamous declaration of ‘Mission Accomplished’ in Iraq in a show of bravado aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in May 2003.

Some Bush donors privately question the strategy of Bush focusing attention on foreign policy and, specifically, the Iraq War with his speech Tuesday night in Los Angeles and the forum on national security here Thursday. Even though Tuesday’s speech didn’t begin until after 9 p.m. Eastern time, it garnered significant media attention.

“If you’re of the view that the U.S. should do nothing about ISIS, Jeb’s not going to be your candidate,” Miller said. “And that might be the majority view of the media, so that’s something we have to contend with; but that’s not the view of the American people.”

The subject of the Iraq War was the first major thing to trip Bush up earlier this year and, whatever the campaign’s attempts to deal with it head on now, will likely be something he wrestles with for the duration of his campaign.

Back in May, Bush stumbled during an interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly when he didn’t clearly answer whether he believes the war, in hindsight, was a mistake (after four days of controversy, he acknowledged it was, in hindsight, a mistake).

“The decision to dismantle the Iraqi army was a mistake, and I think my brother would admit that today,” he said Thursday, as he pushed back at questions suggesting that he was attempting to rewrite history by suggesting that ISIS “didn’t exist” when his brother was president and that Obama bears the blame for carrying out the Strategic Forces Agreement his brother negotiated to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq.

“I reject this out of hand, this whole idea that somehow, after the surge, they’re just doing it because the agreement required them to do it,” Bush said. “Leadership requires a strategy.”

Asked whether Clinton, then Obama’s secretary of state, deserved credit for pushing within the administration to maintain a larger troop presence in Iraq, Bush hedged: “She was not very effective in her advocacy,” he said.

Bush bristled at the moderator’s suggestion that his own strategy to take on ISIS isn’t that different from Obama, but he defended the administration’s use of drones and said that he would keep detainees imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, just as Obama, despite promises to close the prison, has done.

“This is not a torture chamber,” Bush said. “There is no other option that I can see.”

In reiterating his own plan to root out ISIS, Bush called for engaging U.S. allies and working to strengthen a coalition of moderates in Syria, but his critique of Obama again brought to mind those leveled against his brother’s war.

“We can’t unilaterally go into countries,” he said.