Jeb Bush mistakenly follows his brother's path

One really has to wonder, why all the fuss about Jeb Bush? Yes, of course, he does have a careless tongue and a delivery that reminds you of your tax accountant. And after listening to him for a while, one has to stop oneself from asking how he got the moniker in Bush family lore as the "smart son."

But, hey, give him at least some credit. He's being criticized for clinging to his family in his thinking on the Iraq War; but if you take a closer look, that isn't the case at all.

In fact, his eminent father, George H.W. Bush - whom many, including myself, believe to be the finest president of our generation - was so against ANY idea of going into Iraq that, during the 1991 Gulf War, we invaded Kuwait to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwaiti oil fields and then stopped the allied forces precisely at the Iraqi border.

President/father Bush, supported by his brilliant Secretary of State James E. Baker III, deliberately halted the troops at the border for moral and ethical reasons. He had sold the Kuwaiti invasion to the leaders of Arab nations such as Egypt on the terms that their troops and ours would NOT go into Iraq itself. He further accomplished the remarkable feat of having all the other nations pay for the entire thing!

Gen. Brent Scowcroft, one of Father Bush's longtime closest advisers and friends, explained recently on television how Bush and political broker Baker intended to make the Gulf War an example. "It was the first conflict after the Cold War," Scowcroft said, "and we wanted to establish rules." It was to lay the groundwork for the United States and the Russians to agree on international norms, like the rules of warfare and the rules of combatant status.

(So far as one can ascertain, the pictures of Iraqi troops pitifully giving up to American journalists, which actually happened, has had no lasting effect.)

So, if Jeb had taken his father's example, he would have stood in the footsteps of men and women who led one of the most successful presidencies this nation has ever seen. But since he has stepped forward as a possible candidate, he has appeared - in his disastrous four attempts to clarify where he stood on the Iraq invasion - to unite himself with his brother George W. Bush.

He has taken into his infant campaign, not his father's superlative public servants, Baker and Scowcroft, but his brother's - Paul Wolfowitz, who dreamed of a democracy in Iraq in order to serve the purposes of Israel. He has said that no one could know that Saddam and Iraq would respond to the invasion the way they did, and in fact, he called for a greater U.S. presence in Iraq to rid the country of the "barbaric Islamist threat."

Lord help us, he then told reporters at a Chamber of Commerce speech in Tempe, Arizona, "I think we need to re-engage and do it in a more forceful way."

Re-engage? Yes, he said it, and he said it at the same time Ramadi was falling to the Islamic State or ISIS, the "new" Iraqi army was again "disengaging" by fleeing to Baghdad, and we were approving of sending the hated Shiite militias to fight the battle we don't want to fight.

Actually, what is most wrong with Jeb Bush is, at least from these first appearances on the campaign trail, he seems not to understand the very basics about the Iraq War. For instance, that of course Saddam would lie about his weapons - to fool and scare his neighbors!

The Pentagon and CIA accepted the weapons-of-mass-destruction-in-Iraq story from an Iraqi adventurer even the Germans had warned them against. The U.S. then dismissed most of Saddam's officer corps, leaving them free to form ISIS in the shadows of a disintegrating Syria. Finally, if you look at the entire somber picture, you can see that the U.S. itself helped form ISIS every time it landed troops on Arab or Afghan land.

As someone who has been in Iraq eight times, interviewed Saddam Hussein in 1973 and many of his military during the 1980s war with Iran, I can assure the good reader that Iraq simply in and of itself is enough to defeat outside invaders. It is a country of tribe-against-tribe, of cousin-against-cousin, of deserts impervious to human intrusion and of rivers that have changed course deceptively over the centuries, leaving great civilizations in ruins and shards. Primeval bitterness is its sweetest drink and destruction its hobby.

In the end, this aftermath of the Iraq War - in which the invasion continues in the fight against the Washington-created ISIS - does not stand by itself. We are fighting Vietnam, Cambodia, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan; we are repeating the mistakes of these disastrous wars we did not have to fight that now hang like a historic noose around our neck.

"The simple fact is, mistakes were made," Jeb said in one of his recent interviews. Oh, really?

Georgie Anne Geyer can be reached at gigi_geyer (at) juno.com.

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