Jeb! Bush's campaign has apparently decided that the way to make his
rolling disaster of Iraq war positions go away is to make it all President Obama's and Hillary Clinton's fault. Either that or the
team of advisors he inherited from his brother are using him as their tool to revise the history of the Iraq debacle. Whichever, Jeb! is proving to be a most willing tool. Here's
some of what he said Tuesday in his highly anticipated
it-wasn't-my-brother's-fault foreign policy speech.
Arguing that Clinton, as secretary of state, “stood by” while Iraq fell apart and as the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, took root across Iraq and Syria puts Bush on offense, shifting the conversation away from whether the war itself was a mistake. (Bush admits now, after stumbling on this question for four days in May, that the invasion was a bad idea.)
“ISIS grew while the United States disengaged from the Middle East and ignored the threat,” Bush said. “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.” […]
“Why was the success of the surge followed by a withdrawal from Iraq, leaving not even the residual force that commanders and the Joint Chiefs knew was necessary?” Bush asked in his speech. “That premature withdrawal was the fatal error, creating the void that ISIS moved in to fill.”
Anyone have an answer to that question? Well, yes, plenty of people. Like Richard LeBaron, George W. Bush's ambassador to Kuwait and a seasoned diplomat has an answer, and that is to say that the very question "distorts history." Because, for one thing, the agreement to leave Iraq in 2011 was made by Jeb!'s big brother when he signed the U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement in 2008. He adds that "if there was any 'fatal error' that led to the rise of ISIL […] it was George W. Bush's dissolution of the Iraqi military in May 2003 rather than Obama’s U.S. troop drawdown in 2011." Also, too, the surge was never intended to win the war—it was intended to give the Iraqis the opportunity to have some breathing space to negotiate a new government so that the U.S. could get the hell out. "The Bush administration was looking for an exit strategy; the whole country was looking to get out," says LeBaron. "The surge was designed to get us out of Iraq, not to keep us involved there."
That's history that the Jeb! team, better known as the Bush/Cheney team, is hoping the nation will forget. And if there is any question at all about who is in charge of Jeb!'s foreign policy, here's another snippet from his speech: "What we are facing in ISIS and its ideology is, to borrow a phrase, the focus of evil in the modern world. And civilized nations everywhere, especially those with power, have a duty to oppose and defeat this enemy." That's rhetoric ripped from the pages of the 2004 campaign.