I love your post! Not to get off subject, but I voted for W twice and I can make you a list of the good things he did on the back of my business card, because listing the dumb-ass things he did would take far too long. The ROP crap was just one of them.
Part of the problem here is that if intelligent people really looked at the last 20 years from a historically objective perspective, they'd ask themselves why the hell the U.S. government has been waging these mindless wars for "democracy" in these sh!t-holes in the Middle East . . . while the radical Wahabbist Muslims who have governed in Saudi Arabia for decades are still there, and still have U.S. presidents kiss their @sses.
What you call the "ROP crap" was actually a war aim. The idea behind it was to minimize the number of enemy combatants. I'm surprised that the Sun-Tzu junkies here haven't picked up on it.
Granted that, like all strategies, it made for a bad fit in some circumstances. The Rules of Engagement are unprecedentedly restrictive, and have gotten soldiers killed. [Not just American ones, either: some of my fellow Canadians have been brought back from Afghanistan in coffins.] The overall idea, though, was to convince as many Muslims as possible to not fight - to look the other way when the Coalition troops came in. "I'm not an extremist Islamist, so they are not here to avenge America by killing me. Hence, they are not my enemy. It's not my fight."
If you're interested, one of the reasons why that strategy was decided upon was because Muslims have a track record of fighting each other - something that the Israeli govenment has wisely taken advantage of.
I should also add that, although the deaths of soldiers prosecuting in the War of Terror have been tragic and in some cases arguably unnecessary, the total number of deaths has been far, far lower than in World War 2.
I know there's a lot of criticism of W here over his supposed effeteness. But, as a matter of brute fact, making Islam the enemy makes for over a billion enemy combatants. One billion, over all of the world. The country with the largest Muslim population is Indonesia.
One of my "9/11 mysteries" is why President Bush has been criticized so heavily on both sides when he and his Administration did a solidly good job in the War on Terror. Remember: Pearl Harbor was an attack launched by the military of a country. Everyone knew who was responsible for it. Any soldier of Imperial Japan was ipso facto an enemy combatant, because the attack was undertook by the Japanese government through the Japanese military. The terrorists flew no flags and were not acting as official representatives of an enemy nation. Had they done so, I can assure you that President Bush would have acted a lot more like President Roosevelt.
Granted that nation-building further muddied things, but nation-building is the unquestioned nostrum of the foreign-policy branch of the permanent political class. W can be faulted for not putting his foot down in this area, but he might have decided to go along with it because they were the only experts he had to rely upon. Some things we have to learn the hard way.
Thankfully, the criticism of W here has been more substantive than those inane liberal snarks about him not stopping his reading of "My Pet Goat." (In the real world, we sometimes need time to gather our thoughts when we're hit with something devastating.) I still think he did the best with what he had. Inarguably, his speech on 9/11 was what America needed.
There you go: I'm now a "Bush apologist." I've never met the man, and likely won't, but I still think his strategy has been underrated and he himself is underappreciated.