Jeb Bush Is Staking His Own Foreign Policy Path

On August 11 at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, Governor Jeb Bush delivered a major address on Middle East policy and the war with Islamic terrorism. It was an important moment, not just for Republican primary season, but for the general election, as Bush presented a sustained critique of the foreign policy record of Democratic front-runner and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (Disclosure: I support Bush’s candidacy and have contributed financially to his campaign).

A few thoughts on Bush’s speech:

He declared an end to the nomenclature fight. For years, counterterrorism experts have debated what to call Islamic terrorists. Some have argued for calling the terrorists something comparable to what they call themselves — namely, “violent jihadists” or “militant Islamists.” Others have argued that any label even derived from Islam risks offending millions of peaceful Muslims. Instead, they advocate for the term the Obama White House prefers: “violent extremists.” By deliberately and repeatedly naming “radical Islam,” Jeb made clear where he stood on the question. He took some risk in using this term, but it may also produce great benefits, especially among Americans yearning for moral clarity in the current conflict, and among young Muslims who wonder if the United States takes their faith seriously and understands how it is being distorted by terrorists who claim to speak for “true Islam.”

He deliberately echoed Reagan. When Bush said “[w]hat we are facing in ISIS and its ideology is, to borrow a phrase, the focus of evil in the modern world,” he intentionally quoted one of Reagan’s most famous lines from his 1983 “evil empire” speech. This was no accident. While Reagan remains widely revered today, as president he suffered frequent derision for his allegedly simplistic and moralistic approach to policy issues, especially the Cold War. Bush also staked out firm rhetorical ground on behalf of moral clarity.

He gave policy specifics. This was not just a speech about terrorism, but one about the ongoing conflagration in the Middle East, and what Bush regards as the Obama administration’s record of policy failure. Here, he was willing to offer more policy specifics than in the past, and much more so than one normally encounters so early in the campaign cycle. This included his call for deploying forward air controllers to improve the targeting of Islamic State (IS) assets, implementing a “safe zone” and multiple “no fly zones” to increase pressure on Syrian President Bashar al Assad to step down, and for arming the Kurds and the non-Shia Iraqi rebels. While Jeb didn’t mention “Vietnam” or “LBJ,” he clearly implied that the Obama administration is following a similar policy towards IS today as Johnson did a half-century ago in Vietnam: a reactive one of half-measures, fighting not to lose rather than fighting to win, that fails to adequately resource the mission or galvanize the political process behind a strategy for victory.

He criticized Secretary Clinton. Sure, political candidates ding each other all the time. But this time was notable by an order of magnitude. Some pundits and GOP activists had privately been asking themselves whether Gov. Bush had the fortitude and tenacity to take on Secretary Clinton. His speech answered this in the affirmative, as it connected the woeful setbacks that have beset Obama’s foreign policy with Clinton’s ongoing refusal to accept any responsibility for the countless policy failures that happened on her watch: the abandoning of Iraq, the rise of IS, the failed “re-set” and return of revanchist Russia, and renewed Chinese aggression, to name a few. It is no wonder that in their rapid response, Clinton’s campaign surrogates resorted to re-litigating the 13-year old origins of the Iraq War, rather than taking responsibility for any events that happened on her watch.

Bush’s major speech also raises the question of whether the media can reliably cover this complex issue. The early returns are mixed.

On the one hand, a recent article by New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney generally reflects thoughtful and balanced reporting. On the other hand, large parts of a Politico article by Eli Stokols read like a press release from the Clinton campaign. Stokols parrots, uncritically, the Clinton camp’s attempts to tie Jeb Bush to the authors of the original Iraq War — never mind that he was governor of Florida at the time, and had absolutely nothing to do with the decision process to go to war — while conveniently neglecting to mention that, as a senator from New York, Hillary Clinton enthusiastically voted to authorize the war. Nor does the article mention Clinton’s own admission that she opposed the Iraq surge in 2007 for political reasons.

Even worse, the article credulously repeats the Clinton campaign’s line that her multiple policy failures as secretary of State had absolutely nothing to do with the rise of IS — never mind the Obama administration’s premature declaration of victory in Iraq after it inherited a stable and peaceful country with Al Qaeda in Iraq almost totally defeated, its failed effort to negotiate a residual troop force (even though it later deployed U.S. troops under the same legal immunity protections it had earlier deemed a deal-breaker), its diplomatic malpractice in the wake of the Iraqi elections that enabled the Shia sectarian leader Nouri al Maliki to take power, or blithe ignorance of the intelligence warnings about the rise of IS. In short, the Politico article — unconsciously and unintentionally, I trust — furthers Clinton’s strategy of refusing to accept responsibility for the considerable foreign policy mistakes made on her watch. Hopefully as the campaign unfolds, reporters will hearken back to their prior tradition of asking tough questions of both parties.

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