Jeb Bush has found already that it's hard to be taken seriously as "his own man" when his entire foreign policy team is comprised of sloppy seconds from his brother, his father, and even Ronald Reagan. Now he's finding out that
attacking the current president without attacking his predecessor (aka, his brother) doesn't go so well, either.
During a wide-ranging speech on foreign policy matters at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on Wednesday, Bush criticized the Obama administration for staking out a negotiating position that, he claimed, would endanger Israel and the world by merely managing the Iranian nuclear program rather than eliminating it altogether.
"The administration no longer seeks to prevent nuclear enrichment, now it seeks merely to regulate it," Jeb Bush said. "Prevention of nuclear weapons in Iran was once a unifying issue in American foreign policy. Leaders of both parties agreed to it."
Congress, he said, "should pass bills to reinstate sanctions in advance if negotiations fail and require approval if an agreement is reached."
Managing Iran's nuclear program = bad. The problem for Jeb is this:
As the New York Times points out, George W. Bush officials eventually conceded during his presidency that "there was no way to reach a deal without Iran retaining at least a face-saving amount of enrichment capability."
The paper reported in July of 2008 that the administration's final diplomatic effort before leaving office urged Iran to accept a formula known as "freeze-for-freeze" under which "Iran would not add to its nuclear program." Only then would the United States not seek "new international sanctions for six weeks to pave the way for formal negotiations."
That's pretty much not at all eliminating Iran's nuclear program. Seems like someone from Jeb's vaunted foreign policy team who was around when W decided that policy could have pointed that little problem out. Or is Jeb taking a page from his brother? We know W felt that Poppy Bush didn't finish the job in Iraq so he had to go in and do it. Does Jeb feel he same about his brother's Iran policy? Is he previewing the next Bush war?