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Family legacy looms over Jeb

WASHINGTON – The sure-footed start of Jeb Bush’s bid for the Oval Office began with a money blitzkrieg that helped drive Mitt Romney out of the running for 2016. It may well claim other casualties among the large crowd of other Republican presidential hopefuls before the first party caucuses and primaries.

But the matter of Bush’s family connection -whether it’s a plus or a minus, particularly in discussing foreign policy -will be tested first in relation to his brother George’s responsibility for the calamitous invasion of Iraq in 2003. Jeb’s own efforts to defend or ignore it, and his ability to chart his own course in the critical national security arena, certainly will be campaign fodder.

In his first speech on the subject as a prospective presidential candidate the other day before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Jeb Bush avowed his love of father, brother and mother but pointedly declared, “I am my own man, and my views are shaped by my own thinking and experiences.” But neither his public observations to date nor his experiences in the realm of world affairs have offered much guidance to voters.

The best he was willing to say regarding his brother’s Iraq invasion was that “there were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure.” He acknowledged that his brother’s prime rationale for going to war – the existence of weapons of mass destruction never found in Iraq – proved “not to be accurate.”

But rather than focusing on the decision itself to invade a sovereign country in violation of the UN Charter, he cited “not creating an environment of security after the successful taking out of (Saddam) Hussein was a mistake, because Iraqis wanted security more than anything else.”

The would-be 2016 Republican nominee thus dismissed his brother’s war of choice, which was unrelated to the ongoing, imperative war in Afghanistan against the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and all the Middle East chaos that grew out of both wars. In spite of all that, Jeb was able to say in Chicago that brother George’s surge of more American troops into Iraq in 2007 was “one of the most heroic acts of courage politically that any president’s done.”

Jeb Bush supporters have floated the names of likely principal advisers for his yet-to-be declared presidential candidacy, including his brother’s secretary of state, James A. Baker III, who is still highly regarded as a major figure in both previous Bush administrations. Also being mentioned is Paul Wolfowitz, one of the principal architects and cheerleaders for the Iraqi invasion, an easy target for the Democrats.

The younger Bush also praised his brother’s National Security Agency’s expanded and widely controversial surveillance of communications at home. In all this, he probably will have extensive political shelter within his own party, inasmuch as most of his likely contenders for the 2016 GOP nomination will be in the same defensive boat with him. In the general election, it also would be awkward for Hillary Clinton if she is the Democratic nominee to be excessively critical of him on the Iraq war, since she as a senator voted to authorize use of force against Iraq.

All this nevertheless signals some foreign policy bumps in Jeb Bush’s road to the nomination. For the time being he can focus his fire on President Obama, as he did in the Chicago speech, faulting “shortfalls in our defense spending,” castigating him for making empty threats against Syria and Iran, and questioning whether “you’re going to see freedom break out in Cuba” upon Obama’s resumption of U.S. diplomatic relations. However, lame-duck Obama won’t be running two years hence.

Jeb’s Chicago speech drew criticisms of a few minor verbal gaffes as well as his vague indications of how he intends to be “my own man” relative to the foreign-policy records of his illustrious kinfolk. But nothing said or written so far seems likely to shake the early sense that he is the man to beat in a field of conservatives lacking his Republican star power.

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