The
former Florida governor gets too much credit for being smarter than his
brother.
By Donald Kaul
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“Knowing what we know now,” he was asked — that Saddam Hussein
didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction, for example — “would you have
authorized the invasion” of Iraq?
“I would’ve,” he said.
Almost immediately, the oatmeal hit the fan. Supporters and
critics alike jumped up out of the weeds protesting his embrace of what many
consider the greatest foreign policy blunder since Hitler invaded the Soviet
Union.
Before nightfall that day, he was backing crab-like away from that position. He had
“misinterpreted” the question, he said. In any case, it was futile to take up
“hypotheticals” like that.
But back he tracked until it seemed as though the former Florida
governor would’ve been marching in front of the White House, occupied at the
time by his own brother, with a “Hell No! I won’t go” placard.
The kindest interpretation friendly critics offered was that Jeb
Bush was reluctant to take issue with George W., who, after all, ordered the
Iraq invasion. It was filial affection, not foreign policy naiveté, that
informed his first response.
Are you kidding me?
Of course Jeb Bush would have done the same thing as George W. Bush. There’s hardly the thickness of a sheet of paper between them on Middle East policy.
Don’t believe me? The man who would like to lead the third Bush
administration in three decades named Paul Wolfowitz, the Iraq invasion’s architect, to his team of
advisers. That’s like taking navigation lessons from the captain of the
Titanic.
Wolfowitz, you’ll remember, is the guy who promised a speedy end
to the Iraq War and predicted it would pay for itself with rising oil revenue.
That was a trillion dollars — and many thousands of lives — ago. And we’re
still waiting for our first payment.
I’ve always thought Jeb got too much credit for being smarter
than his brother. That was largely a function of the fact that even
though he smoked a lot of pot in high school, he didn’t spend
his youthful years drunk, unlike George W.
In reality, neither of them has shown much in the way of smarts.
They’ve gone a long way on family money and friends in high places.
The best of the Bush bunch, to my thinking, is the old man,
George H. W. Bush. Not a brilliant intellectual, perhaps, but he was smart
enough to know that Iraq’s not a place where you want to hang out very long. As
bad a guy as Saddam Hussein was, the elder Bush had the sense not to
dabble in regime change when he went to war with Iraq.
Perhaps the most astonishing piece of information to come out of
this latest Bush flap was a Quinnipiac University poll that showed George W. Bush’s
favorability rating with likely voters in the Iowa caucus stands at 81 percent.
Eighty-one percent! Chocolate ice cream doesn’t have an 81
percent favorability rating among Iowa Republicans.
What can they be thinking of? Certainly they can’t be thinking
very seriously about the Iraq invasion. Did I mention that it’s cost us a
trillion dollars and counting?
Perhaps I failed to inform you that our conduct of that war and
the other conflicts that seem to have unstoppably flowed from it, with our
waterboarding and our drone attacks, have squandered any moral advantage that
we claimed over our enemies.
Jeb Bush was the great hope of rational Republicans in the
upcoming race. He was the sensible one.
Now we find he hopes to ride his brother’s tattered coat tails
to victory.
Who’s his model for economic policy, Herbert Hoover?
OtherWords
columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org.