Jeb Bush’s claim that there was no existence of Islamic State when his brother was president’

Robert Costa recently wrote an interesting article about how Republican presidential hopefuls plan to frame questions about the situation in Iraq. “After more than a decade bearing the political burden of Iraq, Republicans are making a dogged effort to shed it by arguing that the Islamic State’s gruesome ascent is a symptom of Obama’s foreign policy, rather than a byproduct of the 2003 invasion they once championed,” he wrote.


Given the recent setbacks in Iraq for U.S.-backed forces, this might be an effective strategy. Former governor Bush, who was perceived to have stumbled by failing to quickly say the initial invasion was a mistake, tried this tactic in a recent appearance in New Hampshire. But does his history add up?

The Facts

Islamic State, also known as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), certainly has become an important player in the Middle East, taking advantage of the civil war in Syria and the disarray in the Iraqi government to claim vast areas of both countries. In the past couple of years, the group’s activities have gathered attention in the United States; it was only a year and half ago that President Obama dismissed Islamic State as a “JV team.”

But that doesn’t mean it “didn’t exist,” as Bush put it, during President George W. Bush’s presidency. A quick check of Thomas A. Ricks’ 2009 book “The Gamble” finds a reference to a statement by Islamic State during a 2007 battle. Ricks described it as “a group affiliated with al-Qaeda.”
Indeed, to a large extent, the Islamic State of today is simply an outgrowth of al-Qaeda of Iraq. In 2007, the Times of London, quoting U.S. intelligence officials, described “a radical plan by Al-Qaeda to take over the Sunni heartland of Iraq and turn it into a militant Islamic state once American troops have withdrawn.”

The National Counterterrorism Center puts it this way: “Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) and more recently the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), was established in April 2004 by long-time Sunni extremist Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi.” The NCTC notes that Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. airstrike in 2006 and afterwards his successor announced the formation of the Islamic State.

As analyst Brian Fishman noted in a 2008 report for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the announcement was made on Oct. 15, 2006 — more than two years before Bush left office. (This paper, interestingly, was one of the reports that Osama bin Laden had on his bookshelf when he was killed by U.S. forces in 2011.)

“Unfortunately, almost everyone in Washington, including those of us that understood and emphasized the political shifts it had made, continued to use ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ as shorthand for the group because it was widely understood nomenclature among policymakers,” said Fishman, who is now with the New America Foundation. “This was a mistake; I certainly regret conceding to convenience at the time.”