“I love my father and my brother. I admire their service to the nation and the difficult decisions they had to make,” Bush said Wednesday in Chicago during the first major foreign policy speech of his prospective Republican presidential campaign. “But I am my own man.”
The appearance offered Bush a chance to show how he will balance a desire not to dismiss George W. Bush’s presidency while insulating himself from Democratic attempts to paint him as a clone of the man who led the nation into a bloody, prolonged era of foreign wars.
Bush did concede that the previous Bush administration made “a mistake” by not providing security for Iraqis in the wake of the U.S. invasion in 2003. But he also argued that his brother’s surge strategy forged political stability in Iraq that Obama squandered in his eagerness to get American troops home.
It’s too early to tell whether Bush’s appearance answered the key question facing his campaign: Can a third man with the name “Bush” win the presidency in a nation exhausted by war and suspicious of dynasties?
But Democrats quickly tried to stamp out any progress Bush had made.
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He said he had “forced” himself to visit Asia four times a year to experience the region’s explosive growth — and complained that people he met said Obama’s Asia “pivot” policy was all talk and no action.
He ended his speech with a message to Republican isolationists and Obama’s foreign policy backers.
“America does not have the luxury of withdrawing from the world,” Bush said. “Our security, and our prosperity, and our values demand that we remain engaged and involved in — often distant places,” he said.
“We have no reason to apologize for our leadership, or our interest in serving the cause of global security, global peace, and human freedom. Nothing and no one can replace strong American leadership.”
CNN’s Ashley Killough contributed to this report
