I get it. Right there in the third paragraph. It’s Bush’s fault.
It is Bushs' fault, he destabilized the region by invading Iraq and removing Saddam without suffient forces to occupy and hold Iraq. Now if you want to blame Jimmy for allowing radical Islam to take and hold Iran, I'm inclined to agree. Jimmy, W, and O all share blame. W and O get most of the blame IMHO.
I think what he means by the “rough centurions” were men like Hussein and Qaddafi who kept the peace... Brutally, but they did.
Bush was also being driven by the false humanitarian hopes of European intellectuals. I’m surprised Arturo doesn’t see this, but since Bush 1’s time, and through the Clinton years, disposing Hussein was American strategy. They just couldn’t do it because European intellectuals would have screamed foul.
In fact, think about how many times we had to go to the United Nations, hat in hand, to get them to agree to let us do something?
Remember Hans Blix and his sternly worded letters?
Colin Powell before the Security Council and the aerial photos of Iraqi tractor-trailers pulled up to weapon factory’s loading docks, and then driving off... somewhere?
Yet still the West dithered, and the Europeans objected.
Bush had to promise to be nice, to be humane, to make a democracy out of Iraq. Colin Powell said “You break it, you own it.”
If Bush was an imbecile, it was because he agreed to this—making a democracy—a flourishing Western republic, out of a cobbled-together nation of bitter religious enemies; Shia and Sunni.
Much wiser would have been to install another strongman. A centurion owned by US.
That Arturo doesn’t see Bush being bound by the same idiocy that came from the European intellectuals is just missing the forest for the trees.