JEB BUSH TIES HILARY CLINTON TO RISE OF ISIS

I don't find the former Florida governor appealing, but his critique of Clinton in itself is interesting:

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush will step up his criticism of Hillary Rodham Clinton and her tenure as secretary of state on Tuesday, arguing in a speech on foreign policy the Democratic front-runner shares in the mistakes that he says led to the rise of the Islamic State.

The former Florida governor will also call for a renewed sense of U.S. leadership in the Middle East, which he says is needed to defeat the militant group and an ideology that "is, to borrow a phrase, the focus of evil in the modern world."

"The threat of global jihad, and of the Islamic State in particular, requires all the strength, unity and confidence that only American leadership can provide," Bush will say, according to excerpts of his remarks as prepared for delivery.

In a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, Bush plans to tie the rise of the militant Sunni group to the departure of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011. IS occupies a large swath of Iraq and Syria, and has a presence elsewhere in the Mideast.

"ISIS grew while the United States disengaged from the Middle East and ignored the threat," Bush will say. "And where was Secretary of State Clinton in all of this?

Clinton, he says, "stood by as that hard-won victory by American and allied forces was thrown away. In all her record-setting travels, she stopped by Iraq exactly once.

American troops left Iraq in December 2011 as required under a 2008 security agreement worked out by former President George W. Bush. Both countries tried to negotiate plans to keep at least several thousand U.S. forces in Iraq beyond the deadline to help keep a lid on simmering tensions among Islamic sects.

The Iraqi government refused to let U.S. forces remain in their country with the legal immunity President Barack Obama's administration insisted was necessary to protect them. Obama, who campaigned for president on ending the war in Iraq, took the opportunity to remove U.S. forces from the country.

"It was a case of blind haste to get out and to call the tragic consequences somebody else's problem," Bush will say. "Rushing away from danger can be every bit as unwise as rushing into danger, and the costs have been grievous."

The irony is that the Iraqi government themselves aren't much better than IS, and if they adhere to Islam, that could partly explain why IS managed to gain footholds there.

Beyond this, however, I don't see much value in Bush, whose own brother led an otherwise irresponsible, dhimmified policy on Islam, and I wouldn't count on Jeb Bush being any better.