JEB BUSH: ‘There were mistakes’ in Iraq.
Yep, but the biggest mistake was Obama’s unforced error of a complete pullout in 2011, after his own administration was bragging about how well things were going in 2010.
The war was won, Iraq was on a peaceful path, and Obama threw it away for a campaign line in 2012. If you’re going to talk about Bush’s mistakes pre-2008, you’ve got to talk about Obama’s mistakes, post-2008. And they were huge, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan, where he sent extra troops, but not as many as the military said they needed, then set a pullout timetable that signaled to the Taliban that he wasn’t serious — again, for political reasons.
Related: National Journal: The World Will Blame Obama If Iraq Falls. And someone needs to ask the 2016 Democratic candidates how they’d avoid Obama-like screwups in the future. Because between now and November of 2016, avoiding Obama-like screwups is going to become more salient than avoiding Bush-like screwups.
Related: What Kind Of Iraq Did Obama Inherit?
Plus, I’m just going to keep running this video of what the Democrats, including Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, were saying on Iraq before the invasion:
Because I expect a lot of revisionist history.
Plus: 2008 Flashback: Obama Says Preventing Genocide Not A Reason To Stay In Iraq. He was warned. He didn’t care.
And who can forget this?
FACT: President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 22, 2012
Another Romney foreign policy prediction, derided by all right-thinking people at the time, that turned out to be spot-on.