It appears that Jeb! is taking the position that the Iraq War was a success as of 2008 due to his brother’s brave decision to escalate a few years earlier, and that the Obama Administration consequently frittered away the fruits of victory, thereby creating favorable conditions for the rise of IS. Naturally, this argument completely disregards the big picture: given the lack of democratic experience and the brutal sectarian divides within Iraq, the only possible political outcomes were a weak, corrupt, highly sectarian government dominated by Shiites and friendly to Iran; or a coup and a dictatorship run by a light beer version of Saddam. Neither of these types of regimes would have been worth the costs of the invasion, and the former would result in an increase in Iranian influence in the region, which was to be avoided at all cost. That is what has happened, of course.
But let’s leave all that aside, and confine our analysis to the argument as it stands. When you deconstruct it, it consists of the following:
1. Obama is responsible for the selection of the inept and corrupt Maliki as Prime Minister.
2. Obama is responsible for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.
3. If American troops had stayed in reasonable numbers in Iraq, there would be no IS.
This line of reasoning disregards the following:
1. Maliki came to power under the Bush Administration, which supported him without any public reservations.
2. Maliki remained in power following the subsequent election after a lengthy standoff to which there was no other obvious resolution. The Obama Administration did not embrace him so much as it acquiesced to him, given the outcome of the election and Iran’s overriding influence with the Shiite parties.
3. Obama did not intend to withdraw from Iraq. The withdrawal was driven by the Iraqi government, largely due to the insistence of its Iranian patron. The triumphant manner in which the withdrawal was advertised was an exercise in making lemonade out of lemons for political purposes.
4. Assuming, for purposes of argument, that we had kept 10-20,000 troops in Iraq, that would have done nothing to solve the problem of IS in Syria, and there is no logical connection between the presence or absence of American troops and Maliki’s misguided treatment of the Sunnis, which created the necessary public support for IS. In other words, we advised him repeatedly to handle the Sunnis with care, and he ignored us; why would he have behaved any differently just because there were American troops in Iraq?
The bottom line is that if Jeb! wants to associate himself even more fully with his brother and refight Iraq in the 2016 election, he can have at it.