Jeb Bush should really stop trying to talk about foreign policy:

“What I would do is […] what I proposed at the Reagan Library two months ago — which is to defeat ISIS, and to defeat Assad, to bring stability [bold mine-DL] because it’s in our national security interests to do it,” Bush said Monday morning on Fox & Friends. “That requires a no-fly zone, safe zones [bold mine-DL]. It requires arming directly the Kurdish forces in Iraq. It means reengaging with the Sunni tribal leaders that were successful in fighting with us, side-by-side, with the surge.

“It means a strategy — we don’t have a strategy right now. This president is incrementally getting us into a quagmire [bold mine-DL], without having a strategy to defeat ISIS.”

Bush accuses Obama of getting the U.S. into quagmire in Syria in the same breath that he pledges to commit the U.S. to an open-ended mission “to bring stability” in Syria. Bush’s plan involves not only creating safe zones that will have to be defended by ground forces (most of which will inevitably be American), but also includes defeating ISIS and Assad and then remaining behind for some unknown period of time until the country has been stabilized. Bear in mind that toppling Assad will contribute greatly to even more instability for many years, so Bush is first proposing to destabilize Syria further before somehow figuring out how to “bring stability.” If Obama is very slowly taking the U.S. deeper into Syria’s civil war (and he has been), Bush wants to get us much deeper into the conflict now and keep us there for a very long time. Bush claims that he will have a strategy for achieving his extremely ambitious and costly goals, but so far all he is doing is telling us that he will commit the U.S. to war and occupation in Syria with no end in sight. If Obama risks getting the U.S. into a quagmire, Bush wants to guarantee that it will be stuck in one at great cost for many years.

Criticizing a president for leading the U.S. into a quagmire is a fairly safe criticism for most presidential candidates to make, but it isn’t credible coming from an advocate of an even more aggressive interventionist policy. It is even less credible coming from a hawk whose main complaint against Obama’s Syria policy is that it has been too passive. Coming from a member of the Bush family and an Iraq war dead-ender, it is laughable.