SIMI VALLEY, Calif. -- Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said Tuesday that the U.S. may need to send more ground troops into Iraq to defeat Islamic State militants, but he stopped short of saying how many as he outlined his strategy for combating the threat.
Bush criticized Hillary Rodham Clinton's tenure as secretary of state and accused her and President Barack Obama of allowing the militant group to take hold in the Middle East.
"Who can seriously argue that America and our friends are safer today than in 2009, when the president and Secretary Clinton -- the storied 'team of rivals' -- took office?" Bush said. "So eager to be the history-makers, they failed to be the peacemakers."
About 3,500 American military trainers and advisers are already helping Iraqi forces fight the Islamic State. Bush offered a look at how he would take on the group in Syria.
Combating the group there will require the removal of that country's president, Bashar Assad, Bush said. He said he would aim to unite the moderate forces fighting the Islamic State in that country and for U.S. troops to "back them up as one force."
In his speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Bush tied the rise of the Islamic State, a militant Sunni group that occupies a large swath of Iraq and Syria, to the departure of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011.
"ISIS grew while the United States disengaged from the Middle East and ignored the threat," he said, referring to the Islamic State by a commonly used acronym. "And where was Secretary of State Clinton in all of this?"
Clinton, he said, "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."
Clinton has said she supported keeping a residual force behind in Iraq, but a proposal to do so fell through after Baghdad refused to give the troops immunity from legal charges.
Jake Sullivan, a senior Clinton campaign policy adviser, said Bush is trying to divert attention from the action of his brother, former President George W. Bush.
"This is a pretty bold attempt to rewrite history and reassign responsibility," Sullivan said. "President Bush signed an agreement that required us to be out by 2011."
Clinton on Tuesday kept her comments focused on another Republican, criticizing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker for cutting spending on his state's colleges and universities.
Walker "seems to be delighted in slashing the investment in higher education in his state," Clinton said at River Valley Community College in Claremont, N.H.
She said Walker has made it "more difficult for students to get scholarships or to pay off their debt, eliminating opportunities for young people who are doctors or dentists to actually work in underserved areas in return for having their debt relieved and ending scholarships for poor kids."
Walker shot back in a statement: "Hillary Clinton is offering the same bait and switch as President Obama, making promises to students while delivering higher tuition costs and tax increases. As governor, I froze college tuition at Wisconsin colleges four years in a row. Americans need a leader who delivers results not empty promises."
Earlier this year, Walker proposed $300 million in cuts to the University of Wisconsin System over two years, which Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature reduced to a $250 million cut that Walker signed into law last month.
Also Tuesday, Donald Trump returned to Fox News for the first time since his dust-up with the network's Megyn Kelly after her tough questioning during the party's first debate.
Trump drew criticism last week for saying Kelly had "blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever" during the debate.
He made no mention of Kelly or her questions during his brief phone interview with Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy, making only passing reference to his brouhaha with the network by saying that they'd "always been friends."
An interview later Tuesday on CNN's New Day was much more heated, as host Chris Cuomo pressed Trump on his lack of specific policy proposals.
Asked about how he would achieve his goal of simplifying the tax code, Trump responded: "Here's what you can do: You can have a fair tax, you can have a flat tax, or you can leave the system alone, which is probably the simplest at this point, leave the system alone and take out deductions and lower taxes and do lots of really good things, leaving the system the way it is."
"And I know exactly what I want to do, I just don't want to announce it yet," he added. "I'm just not prepared to tell you right now."
Information for this article was contributed by Thomas Beaumont and Jill Colvin of The Associated Press and by Jennifer Epstein and John McCormick of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 08/12/2015