Nearly 25 years after his father launched the first Gulf War and almost 12 years after his brother began a much more contentious sequel, it’s Jeb Bush’s turn to articulate his vision of America’s approach to the Middle Eastand Iraq in particular. How he responds will have big implications for his White House ambitions.
On Wednesday, he’ll deliver his first foreign policy speech since signaling his serious interest in running for president next year.
The remarks come as the United States is again being drawn back into the Middle East, including Iraq, to combat the brutality of the Islamic State. The speech will offer Bush a chance to show whether his national security views align more with the swaggering interventionism of his brother or the cautious internationalism of his father.
Democrats are vowing to tether him to the controversial decisions of his brother, President George W. Bush, who they blame for starting a war in Iraq on false pretenses and for presiding over a disastrous occupation that cost trillions of dollars, thousands of U.S. and Iraqi lives and destabilized the region.
The challenges of addressing his family’s foreign policy legacy are clear to Bush, who is already trying to defuse them.
“If I’m in the process of considering the possibility of running, it’s not about re-litigating anything in the past,” Bush said in Florida on Friday when asked about his Wednesday speech in Chicago. “It’s about trying to create a set of ideas and principles that will help us move forward. I won’t talk about the past. I’ll talk about the future.”
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At the Detroit Economic Club earlier this month, Bush warned that Obama’s failure to arm rebels in Syria and insufficient attention to Iraq left a void for jihadism.
“As we pulled back from the Middle East, look what happened,” he said. “Look what happened with ISIS in Syria. Look what happened with ISIS in Iraq.”
This is hardly the first time Iraq has emerged as a campaign issue.
The United States is fighting its third war in the country, if the current campaign against ISIS is included. Iraq was a key issue in presidential elections in 2004 and 2008.
It now looks certain that Obama will deposit the messy aftermath of the wars onto his successor, meaning they will return to the campaign trail in 2016.
