Fighting the Last War

[applegrove]

Fighting the Last War

By John Dickerson at Slate

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/05/jeb_bush_must_speak_clearly_about_america_s_lessons_in_iraq_the_former_florida.html

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What does Jeb Bush think about Iraq? It’s not clear. When he’s asked about it, he is quick to note that it’s an issue where people won’t find much daylight between him and his brother George W. Bush. “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 told Megyn Kelly, the Fox News host.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. Read his series on the presidency and on risk.

There’s no evidence that was what Kelly was going after, but there is an endless obsession with measuring him relative to his brother and father, so he’s naturally wary. But he’s also trying to twist any questions about his brother’s foreign policy legacy in Iraq into gotcha journalism (see Mark Leibovich), making inquiries into the topic seem like a low-rent effort to sow filial discord. The implication is that if it weren’t for that media fixation, there wouldn’t be so much poking around on where he stands on Iraq.

That’s obviously not the case. Or it shouldn’t be anyway. Iraq and what went right and wrong are a part of any intelligent conversation about America’s foreign policy posture, particularly the posture as Republicans see it. Republicans in the main believe that President Obama has been weak. GOP presidential candidates promise they will be strong. If Obama is at the weak end of the continuum, then George W. Bush’s actions in Iraq and Afghanistan represent the opposite—resolute strength and risk-taking. So where do the various 2016 candidates fit on that continuum? That requires a thorough discussion of Obama’s foreign policy—and also the policy he inherited.

These are the events that give shape and details to abstract discussions. We could allow ourselves to use vague words like weak and strong about the largest military intervention America has launched since the Vietnam War, but then we’d just blunder forward. So it’s in everyone’s interest to get specific, especially since we’re going to spend so much time together in this presidential campaign.



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[applegrove]

1. Cheney and Rumsfield were fighting their & George H. W. Bush's previous war when they invaded Iraq

in 2003. That has not ended well.