Jeb Bush has always been marketed as the “smarter brother.” Although I’ll admit that is a rather low bar I could never see it. My first real impressions of Jeb Bush came when he was still the governor of Florida. I’m thinking of course of the Terri Shiavo debacle. The efforts to keep her mindless body alive was opposed by a vast majority of Americans including many in the Right To Life community. When the courts finally allowed Terri’s life support to be removed it was determined that the cognitive areas of her brain were gone. Senator/Physician Bill Frist who after watching some video tapes said she was alive chose not to run for reelection. Jeb Bush was term limited and couldn’t run for reelection anyway.
Fast forward to 2015 and Jeb Bush is running for president. It’s been a long time and most have forgotten Terri Shiavo but they have not forgotten the Iraq war debacle, the impact of which we are still seeing today. A vast majority of Americans think the invasion and occupation was a mistake and that the occupation was botched. His brother’s policies are baggage for Jeb so what does he do? He embraces them.
In an interview with Fox News, Mr. Bush said that he would have authorized the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq, although he acknowledged that it was a mistake that more was not done to guarantee security in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was removed from power. He reminded the interviewer that Mrs. Clinton, then a U.S. senator also supported the Iraq invasion. And he said his brother agreed that mistakes were made after Saddam’s fall.
“So just for the news flash to the world, if they’re trying to find places where there’s big space between me and my brother, this might not be one of those,” he said.
This it not a sign that he is the “smarter brother.” Daniel Larison says it much better than I could:
Bush’s answer is useful in confirming that he doesn’t have the first clue that the Iraq war was a colossal blunder and a horrifying, destructive waste. He clings to the notion that the invasion was justified by pre-war intelligence. That tells us that he thinks the WMD-based case for war was actually compelling instead of being the nonsense that opponents of the war knew it to be at the time. More important, Bush predictably misses the point that the Iraq war was illegal and unnecessary. Even if administration claims had been right, there was no threat to the U.S. or anyone other country that warranted an invasion. The main problem with the war was not that the U.S. and its allies failed to prepare for the aftermath of regime change (though they did), but that they launched a “preventive” war on shoddy evidence for the explicit purpose of toppling another government by force.
The decision to invade was indefensible, and the war was entirely unjustified. It could not have been salvaged or made better by a more competent occupation, but then there is no reason to think that the previous administration or any American administration would be competent at establishing a new system of government in another country that it barely understands. The fact that Bush can’t begin to grasp that the original, irredeemable error was the invasion itself tells us all that we need to know about his appallingly bad foreign policy judgment. It gives everyone fair warning that he would make the same sort of disastrous blunder if presented with the opportunity. That alone proves him to be unfit for the presidency.
The Jeb Bush foreign policy advisers are the very same neocons who advised his brother.