Seeking to turn around recent questioning over the 2003 invasion of Iraq, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on Wednesday questioned President Obama’s decision to pull back from the country, arguing the surge created a “fragile but stable” situation Mr. Obama could have built on.
“The world is radically different, and so the focus ought to be on knowing what you know now, Mr. President, should you have kept 10,000 troops in Iraq?” Mr. Bush said at a roundtable event in New Hampshire. “That’s the better answer because yesterday, Ramadi [has] now been taken over by ISIS. ISIS didn’t exist when my brother was president.
“Al Qaeda in Iraq was wiped out when my brother was president,” he continued. “There were mistakes made in Iraq for sure, but the surge created a fragile but stable Iraq that the president could have built on.”
Mr. Bush, who is laying the groundwork for a potential presidential bid in 2016, said Thursday in Arizona that in hindsight, he would not have gone into Iraq. A day earlier, he said at a town hall meeting in Nevada that the decision was too great to reduce to a hypothetical, after he had answered in the affirmative to an earlier question by Fox News’ Megyn Kelly of whether he would have authorized the invasion “knowing what we know now.”
Mr. Bush said Wednesday he made a “mistake” in listening to a question that was not asked, and “then it got bumpy.”
“But all is well now — the ship is stable,” he said.
He also said Wednesday there is no current strategy to take out the Islamic State terrorist group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and restore some stability to the region.
“We have to do this in partnership with other countries, but to suggest that somehow that decision…was a good decision to pull back, to mirror popular sentiment,” he said. “This is what leaders don’t do. Politicians do this.”
He said Common Core education standards, which he supports but are opposed by many conservatives, present an example of “where people had a view and now they don’t because popular sentiment in the here and now has a particular view and, my gosh, you don’t want to get in front of someone who’s angry, rather than try to persuade them of your view, you know, you just kind of mirror theirs.”
“Well that’s what the president did when he abandoned, when he left Iraq, and I think it was wrong and now you think about the family members … our blood and treasures in Ramadi, and they won,” he said. “They won that battle. It was hard-fought. And that stability now has been lost, so I totally get the past being an issue. I think the focus now is what strategy do we have to take out ISIS, and how do we deal with the destabilizing effect of Iran — a country we’re negotiating with, at all costs basically, to negotiate a nuclear deal. What are we going to do to stop their efforts to destabilize the region even more?”
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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