Bush did say he disagreed with one decision from his brother’s administration.
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The former Florida governor said that in general, he believes torture is inappropriate, and that he was glad his brother, former President George W. Bush, largely ended the CIA’s use of the techniques before he left office. “It was a mission accomplished in a way that there was security there”, said Bush.
Bush also declared, “taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal”.
Jeb Bush said he won’t commit to continuing the Obama administration’s ban on the enhanced interrogation techniques commonly accepted as torture.
While Democrats are sure to mine Bush’s words for attack ad soundbites, the candidate showed no signs of tempering his praise for his brother’s war record.
“That is a fact and you can’t take that away from anybody and you can’t rewrite history in that regard”, said Bush, a leading contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
Bush also said he would keep open the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“I’m not ruling anything in or out”, he said, but stressed “we don’t do torture”.
However, the Florida Republican argued that his brother’s decision to surge the U.S. troop presence in Iraq in 2007 was courageous and helped turned the tide of the war. “He had the courage to do something that is completely against the political grain”, he said.
He suggested there may be occasions when brutal interrogations were called for to keep the country safe.
Some Bush donors privately question the strategy of Bush focusing attention on foreign policy and, specifically, the Iraq War with his speech Tuesday night in Los Angeles and the forum on national security here Thursday. He blamed them for the problems that have arisen in the aftermath of the Iraq war. “Once during her time”.
“This is all an exercise to get past January of 2017 and head off to Chicago”, he said of Obama. More than once, he referred to the “Wikipedia leaks”, a reference to WikiLeaks, an origination that has published sensitive national security and diplomatic information.
Those definitive comments capped a painful twist in his presidential ambitions, as he struggled in a Fox television interview and in other campaign appearances to articulate what he would have done.
“I’m not saying this because I’m a Bush, I’m saying this because I love this country, just like everybody in this room”.
Bush’s nuanced (or rather, factually shaky) argument may win over some Republicans, but convincing America that Obama and Clinton deserve more blame for the Iraq War fallout than the president who started it is a tall order.
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With 17 of his 21 foreign policy advisers being veterans of George W. Bush’s White House, Bush’s position is no great surprise.
