Jeb! Bush has finally figured out how to answer the Iraq war question: turn the tables and blame it on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Ascribing to what Peter Beinart
calls the "Surge Fallacy,"
Jeb! will attack Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for "losing" the war his brother George W. Bush was on the verge of "winning" when he left office.
Bush, who will speak at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley on Tuesday evening, will argue, as he often does on the campaign trail, that Clinton and Obama are to blame for the spread of ISIL across Iraq and Syria and for the broader instability in the Middle East.
The potent attack against the former Secretary of State and likely Democratic nominee is shrewd politics: focusing on America’s failure to keep the peace at the end of the Iraq War ignores the war’s beginning—enabling Bush to conveniently shift the the blame from his brother, who started the war he now admits was a mistake, to the Democrat he’d likely face should he become the GOP nominee.
“That premature withdrawal was the fatal error, creating the void that ISIS moved in to fill—and that Iran has exploited to the full as well,” Bush will say, according to excerpts of his speech released Monday night by his campaign.
“ISIS grew while the United States disengaged from the Middle East and ignored the threat. And where was Secretary of State Clinton in all of this? Like the president himself, she had opposed the surge … then joined in claiming credit for its success … then stood by as that hard-won victory by American and allied forces was thrown away.
It's a bit of revisionist history that all Iraq war cheerleaders embrace in order to live with themselves and what they've done. Their story goes that victory was secured, only to be lost by the weak foreign policy of Obama—and Clinton. Had some 10,000 American troops remained on the ground, they argue, al-Qaeda in Iraq would not have gained strength to splinter and become ISIS. Never mind that al-Qaeda would never have been in Iraq in the first place if not for the destabilization brought on by the Bush/Cheney war.
But it's also ignoring the fact, as Beinart points out, that the surge was already losing in terms of its primary goal during the Bush/Cheney administration. What the administration and General David Petraeus were aiming to do, in the words of a Bush administration official, was political reconciliation, 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." That reconciliation was failing as early as 2007, when prime minister Nouri al-Maliki began persecuting the Sunnis and driving them to what would become ISIS.
ISIS exists because of Jeb!'s brother's war. No neoconservative retelling of the story can obliterate that fact. It's true that Obama and Clinton did not step in and clean up W's mess. They made the calculation that more American bloodshed was not a price they were willing to pay, a reasoning the Bush crowd of neocons will never understand.