May 28, 2015 | Quote

Jeb Bush: ‘ISIS Didn’t Exist When My Brother Was President’ and Al-Qaida Was ‘Wiped Out’

After former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush faced a tough couple of weeks related to his comments about whether he would have invaded Iraq even if he had known about faulty intelligence, he used a new tactic in New Hampshire: Blame President Barack Obama.

“The world is radically different, and so the focus ought to be on ‘knowing what you know now, Mr. President, would you, should you have kept 10,000 troops in Iraq?’ ” Bush said at a roundtable event in Portsmouth May 20.

Bush noted that the Iraqi city of Ramadi had been taken over by ISIS the day before his roundtable. He then continued:

“ISIS didn’t exist when my brother was president. Al-Qaida in Iraq was wiped out when my brother was president. There were mistakes made in Iraq for sure, but the surge created a fragile but stable Iraq that the president could have built on…..” He then criticized how Obama has handled Iraq.

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Technically, yes, a group with the name “ISIS” did not exist under President Bush.

The group’s roots, however, trace back to 2004.

“There were evolutions that took place with some of the name changes,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Al-Qaida’s power waxed and waned over the years, but was it “wiped out,” as Jeb Bush said?

The Congressional Research Service wrote in August 2008 that U.S. officials concluded that al-Qaida in Iraq was “weakened almost to the point of outright defeat  in Iraq, although they say it remains lethal and has the potential to revive in Iraq.”

The surge under Bush was successful — the attacks al-Qaida was carrying out had significantly declined by January 2009 when Bush left office.

“Literally everybody viewed this as a defeat for ISIS,” Gartenstein-Ross said. “When I say everybody I mean al-Qaida included. They viewed this as a major defeat to its brand.”

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Read the full article here.