Jeb Bush Blames Barack Obama For Failure In Iraq
Jeb Bush blamed President Barack Obama for the conditions in Iraq, stating the pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq has caused the rise of ISIS there, CNN Politics is reporting. Bush made the comments while campaigning as an unannounced candidate for president, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
“The focus ought to be on knowing what you know now, Mr. President, should you have kept 10,000 troops in Iraq,” CNN Politics quoted Jeb Bush for saying about Obama’s decision to pull most U.S. troops out of Iraq.
Barack Obama has withdrawn most U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, which ended the operations in Iraq that started almost a decade earlier during the presidency of Bush’s brother, George W. Bush.
CNN reported that Jeb Bush argued that Obama “could have kept the troops in and he could have had an agreement,” adding “the United States had enough influence to be able to deal with the immunity issue” and further quote Bush as saying in Portsmouth, “ISIS didn’t exist when my brother was President. Al-Qaida in Iraq was wiped out when my brother was President,” he said. “There were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure, but the surge created a fragile but stable Iraq that the President could’ve built on and it would’ve not allowed ISIS.”
Bush stated that Obama has no plan or strategy on how to “take out” ISIS and re-establish stability in Iraq. Jeb Bush was speaking in Portsmouth before a group of 60 business and political leaders from New Hampshire. While Bush was making comments blaming the president’s withdrawing of troops from Iraq, the president himself gave a commencement address to the graduates of the Coast Guard Academy, where he blamed “climate change” as part of the reason for the conditions in Iraq and the war in Syria.
“Jeb Bush sharply criticized President Barack Obama on Tuesday for withdrawing troops from Iraq, but he declined to say whether he would order additional ground forces into the country to repel Islamic State militants,” the Chicago Tribune reported about Bush’s comments yesterday in Portsmouth.
When asked what he would have done back during the days of the George W. Bush presidency, Jeb Bush struggled to give a clear answer, the Inquisitr reported a few days ago.
“This past week, former Florida governor and officially not yet announced presidential candidate Jeb Bush committed a serious gaffe in commenting on Iraq war policy. An article in the Christian Science Monitor asked just how serious his flub is. At one point, he suggested he would have invaded Iraq based on the intelligence available, as his brother George. W. Bush did, and further stated that Hillary Clinton would have done the same thing. But now Jeb Bush seems to have flip-flopped on the issue,” the Inquisitr reported.
[Photo of Jeb Bush by Alex Wong / Getty Images.]
