Peter Trumbore: Observations/Research/Diversions

For Jeb, W’s legacy is no liability

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george_and_jeb

Last month, just after the second Republican presidential debate, I wrote about Jeb Bush’s curious (to me) doubling down on his claim that his brother, President George W. Bush, had “kept us safe” from terrorism during his presidency.This was in response to goading from Donald Trump, who had the nerve in the debate to remind the viewers that it was Bush who was in the White House on 9/11.

Trump has been using this inconvenient fact to bludgeon Jeb ever since, forcing Bush to hold the line with the tenacity of a terrier. But it’s more than that now. As Peter Beinart writes at The Atlantic this morning, “It’s now clear: Jeb Bush wants to speak about his brother’s record on 9/11 as much as possible.”

And so Jeb continues to defend his brother:

In the latest episode of the reality show that is Donald Trump’s campaign, he has blamed my brother for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on our nation. That Trump echoes the attacks of Michael Moore and the fringe Left against my brother is yet another example of his dangerous views on national-security issues. … Let’s be clear: Donald Trump simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The historical record begs to differ. Bob Woodward, stenographer to official Washington, writes in Plan of Attack, the first volume in his Bush at War trilogy:

It was not an exaggeration when Bush dictated to his daily diary that night that, “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” In some respects the attacks were more devastating. Instead of 1941 Hawaii, which was not then a state, the targets were the power centers of the homeland. Instead of Japan, the attacks were conduced by a shadowy enemy that had no country or visible army. Worse for Bush, CIA Director Tenet had explicitly warned him about the immediacy and seriousness of the bin Laden threat. Focusing on domestic issues and a giant tax cut, Bush had largely ignored the terrorism problem. “I didn’t feel that sense of urgency,” the president acknowledged later in an interview. “My blood was not nearly as boiling.”

But for Jeb, the real responsibility for 9/11 lies elsewhere, with Bill Clinton, W’s predecessor in the White House. In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Monday, Jeb said:

I think there’s two ways to look at Islamic terrorism. One is a threat that has to be taken out as it relates to, you know, creating a strategy that calls it a war, or we view it as a law enforcement operation where people have rights. I think the Clinton administration made a mistake of thinking bin Laden had to be viewed from a law enforcement perspective.

Back to the historical record.

Richard Clarke was appointed by Bill Clinton as the first National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism, and he continued to serve in that position under George W. Bush until he resigned in March 2003. The country’s top counterterrorism official, Clarke ran the Situation Room on 9/11. In his book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, Clarke writes:

Clinton left office with bin Laden alive, but having authorized actions to eliminate him and to step up the attacks on al Qaeda. … He had seen earlier than anyone that terrorism would be the major new threat facing America, and therefore had greatly increased funding for counterterrorism and initiated homeland protection programs.

When Clinton left office many people, including the incoming Bush administration leadership, thought that he and his administration were overly obsessed with al Qaeda. After all, al Qaeda had killed only a few Americans, nothing like the hundreds of Marines who died at the hands of Beirut terrorists during the Reagan administration or the hundreds of Americans who were killed by Libya on Pan Am 103 during the first Bush’s administration. Those two acts had not provoked U.S. military retaliation. Why was Clinton so worked up about al Qaeda and why did he talk to President-elect Bush about it and have Sandy Berger raise it with his successor as National Security Advisor, Condi Rice? In January 2001, the new administration really thought Clinton’s recommendation that eliminating al Qaeda be one of their highest priorities, well, rather odd, like so many of the Clinton Administration’s actions, from their perspective.

So why does Jeb continue to toe the line? Well, it’s simple. The Bush name, and W’s legacy, isn’t the liability you’d think it is. Especially for Republican voters. A YouGov survey taken in September tells the tale.

In that poll, George W. Bush enjoys a 79% job approval rating among Republicans. When asked how good a job W did in “keeping the U.S. safe while president,” a whopping 81% of Republicans said his performance was good or excellent. Let that sink in for a minute.

Finally, when asked, “If Jeb Bush were elected president, do you think he would do a better or a worse job than George W. Bush?” 43% of Republicans said they thought Jeb would do just as well or better.

That’s the bottom line. Jeb has realized that his brother’s legacy is no liability, at least the voters who will decide the GOP’s nominating contest.

Saint Ronald vs. the GOP

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saint ronaldI’m not sure what it says about my mental state, but Ronald Reagan has been on my mind lately.

It’s probably because he keeps coming up as I teach my course on US foreign policy this semester. And he keeps coming up in a way that continually makes me scratch my head when I think about the contrast between his views, specifically on foreign policy, and those of today’s Republican Party standard bearers.

Now I’m at it again. In class this afternoon we’ll be discussing a case study on the history of the fraught negotiations between the US and Iran over the later’s nuclear ambitions and programs. Part of that discussion will revolve around the suspicion with which America typically views any negotiations with a hostile foreign power.

Writing in World Affairs back in 2010, Frank Logevall and Kenneth Osgood connect this to “The Ghost of Munich,” the reflexive charges of naive appeasement that are levied against any president who dares to engage diplomatically with a potentially dangerous rival:

‘Munich’ and ‘appeasement’ have been among the dirtiest words in American politics, synonymous with naivete and weakness, and signifying a craven willingness to barter away the nation’s vital interests for empty promises.

These words retain their power, they argue, because of electoral considerations:

An abiding faith in the Munich analogy became one of the few things that was truly bipartisan in postwar American politics. In the years that followed Chamberlain’s fateful trip to Bavaria, Democrats and Republicans alike displayed a common understanding of the dangers of appeasement, and a common belief in the political value of using the Munich analogy to undermine the other party.

The problem with this, they argue, is that success in foreign policy has typically come to presidents who had the courage to push back against the analogy and engage diplomatically with rivals and hostile powers, while those who bowed to its demand for unyielding strength and toughness often failed, and in spectacular, tragic ways. Like Vietnam. And Iraq.

Enter today’s GOP, and Sen. Ted Cruz’s assessment of the agreement then being negotiated with Iran:

I believe we are hearing echoes of history. I believe we are at a moment like Munich in 1938.

Or this from Jeb Bush:

This isn’t diplomacy – it is appeasement.

And from Marco Rubio:

President Obama has consistently negotiated from a position of weakness, giving concession after concession …

But what about Saint Ronald? Well, he came to see the value in negotiations, even with an adversary like the Soviet Union, whose strategic doctrine, like our own, assumed the utter annihilation of of its chief rival as the end goal:

I don’t take too seriously the statement of positions in advance of negotiations. Everyone wants to preserve their position at their highest price before negotiations, and for them to do otherwise is to give away something they might not have to give away once the negotiations start.

And:

You’re unlikely to get all you want; you’ll probably get more of what you want if you don’t issue ultimatums and leave your adversary room to maneuver; you shouldn’t back your adversary into a corner, embarrass him, or humiliate him; and sometimes, the easiest way to get things done is for the top people to do them alone and in private.

If you’d have asked me 20 years ago if I could ever see myself lauding Reagan in either the classroom or in writing, I would have called you crazy. But then I hadn’t yet encountered today’s Republicans.

Chip off the ol’ blocks

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bush bush bush
Pick a Bush, any Bush.

 

Speaking to Michigan’s party faithful at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference over the weekend, Jeb Bush made his critics’ case for them.

Riffing on his foreign policy credentials, and arguing that the next president will need to foster international peace, he said:

I know how to do this because, yes, I am a Bush.

Jeb has spent a lot of time arguing that despite the family name he’s his own man. Which I guess is plausible if you ignore the family’s big donors and all those holdovers from his brother’s and father’s administrations in top policy positions in his campaign. (For example, 19 of 21 of Jeb’s foreign policy advisers worked for one George or the other or both, including Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley, chief architects of W’s war in Iraq.)

Having declared in last week’s debate that his brother “kept us safe” while 9/11 happened on his watch, Jeb has apparently decided to embrace rather than run from his family’s legacy, especially on foreign policy, Iraq War I, Iraq War II, 9/11, Afghanistan, and all. This could finally signal that the candidate has figured out how to respond to questions about the family business he’s hoping to inherit.

As campaign communications go, his Mackinac declaration has the virtue of being short, succinct, to-the-point, even kind of high-energy. “Yes, I am a Bush,” will sound great in a campaign ad.

A Hillary Clinton ad.

Jeb doubles down

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bush 9-11
George W. Bush, keeping America safe.

 

It was one of those moments during last night’s GOP debate when I had to stop and ask: Did he really say that? OK, fine, there were a lot of those kinds of moments, but this one was … special.

In response to Donald Trump’s goading criticism of his brother’s administration, Jeb Bush responded with this:

You know what? As it relates to my brother, there is one thing I know for sure, he kept us safe. I don’t know if you remember, Donald. You remember the rubble? You remember the firefighter with his arms around him?

Yeah, I remember. That would be the rubble of the World Trade Centers.  That would be the rubble of the World Trade Centers that were destroyed by terrorists in hijacked airliners on 9/11. That would be Sept. 11, 2001. When George W. Bush was president.

screen_shot_20150917_at_2.39.53_pm.png.CROP.original-original.39.53_pmSo, according to Jeb, George kept us safe from terrorism by presiding over the country on the day it suffered the single worst terrorist attack in its history.

Now we have to acknowledge that Jeb was going off-script in this moment of the debate, and while he’s had some nine months now to prepare any number of effective responses to criticisms of his brother’s (or his dad’s) presidencies, every time he gets one of these he stumbles and fumbles his way into some awkward statement or other.

You’d think that in the clear light of the next day, Jeb would find a way to walk that bit of gross misstatement of the historical record back. Maybe emphasize that W kept us safe after 9/11, or something. But nope. Today he doubled down, sending out the tweet above.

Maybe there’s some signal of steely resolve that Jeb is trying to send here, I don’t know.

What I do know is that the families of some 3,000 Americans who lost their lives that day, and the families and friends of the thousands more service men and women who gave their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan in the Bush years that followed, might beg to differ.

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