What Would Jeb Do On Iraq? He Won't Say

The son and brother of the last two Republican presidents vowed to be his "own man" in a foreign policy speech Wednesday. But he failed to outline a plan to deal with a major focus of those previous two Bush foreign policies: Iraq.

Likely presidential candidate Jeb Bush spoke and took questions for more than an hour at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He addressed trade deals with Asia and Latin America, support for Ukraine, pushing democracy in Cuba, stopping nuclear proliferation, fighting the so-called Islamic State — even the revolution in Tunisia.

But on Iraq, the closest he came to a plan was conceding that George W. Bush's administration erred in its conduct of the war and accusing President Obama of encouraging the rise of ISIS by withdrawing U.S. troops from the country too soon.

"There were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure. Using the intelligence capability that everybody embraced about weapons of mass destruction turns out to not be accurate. Not creating an environment of security after the successful taking out of Hussein was a mistake," Bush said, then he praised his brother's "surge" of troops to stabilize Iraq in 2007 as an act of political courage.

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