Same policies, same advisers, same rhetoric. So what's changed?
The news is filled with stories about presidential protocandidate Jeb Bush distancing himself from his terrible brother's universally acknowledged terrible presidency. Less reported is the part where he didn't actually do that, which once again raises the questions of (1) whether any pundits actually listen to the speeches these candidates give and (2) what might constitute actually distancing Jeb Bush from the movement, advisers, philosophies and actual specific policy positions that characterized the presidency that brought us incompetent wars and global economic catastrophe.
That last one would seem like a fairly important question, and in a speech widely covered under banners like "Jeb Bush: I am my own man" you would think examples of this supposed independence might get included, here and there. "I am my own man" is not an actual example of ideological independence, it is just the title of the Hallmark card you send someone when you want them to think so.
To be sure, he gave a speech on foreign policy in which he clarified that he was a separate physical entity from his brother, for anyone out there who was still suspicious that perhaps he was just his brother in a mask and better-tailored suit:
“I love my brother. I love my dad,” Bush told an audience of business leaders and politicos during a foreign-policy speech at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “But I am my own man—and my views are shaped by my own thinking and own experiences.”
... but in an entire (rather excruciatingly generic) speech on foreign policy (hurriedly and dully delivered, as if he were very late to some other more important speech and needed to wrap things up), that was seemingly the only break from Bush-era decisions he was willing to clarify. He fessed up to only very slightly more after the speech was over:
“There were mistakes made in Iraq,” Bush acknowledged during a question-and-answer session, saying George W. Bush’s administration should have focused on ensuring security after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Mistakes were made. Milk was spilled. Stategeries were botched, and repeatedly. The only other substantive objection to George W. Bush administration policy of the night was offered up only because Jeb mistakenly thought it was an
Obama-originated plan.
So, is Jeb Bush his own man from a foreign policy perspective? Head below the fold to find out.
Again, the question is whether or not Jeb Bush is his own man from a foreign policy perspective, and if so, what might that entail. Bush hails from a party that has had no noteworthy evolution in foreign policy thinking at all, post George W. Bush fiascos. Well, no one other than the gadfly Paul family whose both the neo and not-so-neo conservative declaration that the main problem with foreign policy today is that blunt force is not being more vigorously applied in each and every one of the world's hot spots remains very much unchanged. Negotiations are bad; military action is better; military action undertaken by Obama is bad; similar military action undertaken under the auspices of a(ny) conservative would be better. Suggesting that chaos in Iraq and Syria might have direct ties to an opportunistic American war that destabilized that precise region is not an allowable consideration, but every conservative running for any office is certain that whatever history might have brought us to this point, the solution is more force, applied more broadly, and Bush's speech hit each of those necessary buttons in the same order and with the same cadence that any of the other candidates could have provided.
If you're going to give a speech whose only takeaway line is "I am my own man," it would behoove you to come up with a better example of that than reading the entrees off a Project for the New American Century luncheon menu and calling it a day.
There seems damn little evidence to support the theory. Of less import than whether Jeb is or is not willing to throw his own family name under the bus is the simpler and far easier question of whether he can name a substantive difference between his own "thoughts" on policy and the "thoughts" of the movement that brought us those forced errors. At the very least, an observer might want to see that the precise advisers whose shoddy thinking and incompetent policymaking were going to be cut out of the loop this time, but Jeb I am my own man Bush has staffed his foreign policy team with those very names. Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Hadley, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden—if you were looking to create a solid space between the mistakes of the past and yourself, inviting each of the architects of those mistakes to craft your future policy would seem to show, if nothing else, that you are an incompetent when it comes to staffing decisions. Unless you gathered all of those people together for the purposes of quarantining them?
Taking advice from Paul Wolfowitz does not suggest you are a man that has learned from past foreign policy mistakes. On the other hand, however, there are probably literally no current conservative "foreign policy experts" who did not have a direct role in either facilitating the catastrophes of the Bush era or defending them; the pickings there are, admittedly, slim.
Then there is another, separate problem, and that is whether a media so eager to report that Jeb stated once that he was His Own Man, thereby making it true, has either stomach or capacity to point out that Jeb Bush in fact has not distanced himself at all from the clusterfuck of the last Republican administration. CNN, for example, presents the whole thing as a question not of whether Jeb Bush does have substantive policy disagreements with the catastrophe-planners, but as a he-said, she-said collection of Republican and Democratic strategists wondering whether him merely saying so will be sufficiently plausible. When we are done hearing from the election wonks on whether or not it will work, we are treated to the pressing question of how the candidate might best dodge the question, because he really wants to.
There are deeper reasons why Bush will find it hard to skip a full discussion on Iraq or Afghanistan. Neither war produced a clear-cut U.S. victory and both nations still face intractable political, military and sectarian challenges, including the rise of ISIS and the resilience of the Taliban, which will be among the most pressing foreign challenges for the next president.
The politics of the Iraq war, meanwhile, remain toxic, and disputes over the origins of the conflict -- which have never been resolved -- cloud the debate over how to rescue Iraq from its current plight.
No. No, this is actually wrong. The "origins" of the Iraq War at this point have been "resolved" just fine, at this point. We know that it was sold under a doctrine of preemptive force, and with the specific claims that the Iraqi government had been working with Al Qaeda and were at the time engaged in specific actions to develop specific weapons of mass destruction. We know this because we were there, and because there is videotape, and there are no "disputes" over any of it other than a small collection of highly disreputable people whose only substantive counterargument is Shut Up. We also know that each of these specific claims was disproven, and we have long trails of memos and tapes and other evidence that document how each of those claims was engineered, and embellished, by administration-created and obsessively ideological groups that acted in parallel to our nation's established information gatherers, but who were given freer rein to simply ignore intelligence that discounted their needed theories.
All of this is very well documented and understood and any "disputes" over any of it among non-dullards and non-conspiracy-theorists consist not of "disputes" over any of the facts, but "disputes" of the sort that Jeb Bush is facing now: whether a foreign policy so tainted by ideologically motivated thinking that it resulted in plainly false information being fed to the public as prime motivation for an almost immeasurably costly war can best trundle forward again by continuing to mutter that it is all merely an unresolved dispute or whether that history can be ignored completely, met by the candidate only with scorn for those who would bring up the rather obvious overlap between those that most badly bungled the (1) intelligence, (2) diplomacy, (3) regional knowledge, (4) overall strategy and (5) individual tactical decisions of the last Republican administration and the precise same people formulating his own policies now.
That is more of a big deal than muttering well I am my own man can patch over, and really ought to be a focus not of grab-bag political hypothesizing over whether or not the candidate will be successful in convincing America of his ideological independence, but of actual journalistic examination over whether or not the candidate's politically mandated posture is, in fact, demonstrably bullshit. It is not often that a group of stalwart ideologues both gets the opportunity to run rampant in the foreign policy arena and so spectacularly botches that policy at every single stage of execution; pondering whether or not we should give them the keys to the nation again, after we've finally pried them out of the last wreck using the jaws of life and more than a little think-tank welfare money, is the sort of thing that necessitates the very existence of the press.
Yes, we want to know if those things might happen again. Yes, we want to know if the highest-order incompetents of the last era are going to be given new desks and a national do-over, not because it is a fascinating question of political punditry and strategy, but because it seems goddamn important to the future of the nation. We do not have another trillion dollars lying around to devote to another planet-spanning fuck-up. Whether or not this or that candidate can compete in Iowa using this or that iteration of painstakingly crafted messaging is considerably less important than knowing what that candidate actually stands for, and knowing what that candidate stands for is not the same thing as the headline that candidate's staff wants you to use at the top of the story.
Really. This stuff is important. Dear Jeb Bush, now that you have given your prepared and conspicuously generic speech on how you believe foreign policy needs to be tougher, please explain to us all how this generic concept translates into something different from, and more potentially successful than, the iteration attempted by the persons who wrote this speech for you.
We'll wait.