Thanks for the reply.
GWB fought to end “racial profiling” of Arab Americans as a pre 9-11 candidate, whitewashed Saudi involvement in 9-11, kept spouting that Religion of Peace hogwash while he was President, gave us the Patriot Act and the Iraq invasion as answers to 9-11 when confronting Islam was the correct and uncomfortable answer, and bungled the post victory handling of Iraq.
So how do you reconcile those faults with the enthusiastic support he got at the time, especially from the Troops? America had been attacked, and we always rally around the leader, I think he genuinely loved the troops and that feeling was returned, and at the time it was still a matter of “GWB or the Leftists”.
The whole “Us or the Left” argument has kept American conservatives in thrall for many, many years. Much of the conservative leadership puts globalist and international business interests ahead of American interests, and they use the bogey man of the American Left to frighten and silence conservatives who dare to question that agenda.
Witness the shrill efforts on this thread to tie Trump to Code Pink. Any questioning of the motives of Bush, the idea of nation building as a military objective, or the willingness to avoid offending Arabs and Islam at the cost of national security means that you are an ally of Code Pink? It’s an unthinking smear.
Also, any policy that self destructs at the end of a term due to unpopularity is by definition a failed policy. We can point fingers at Obama all we want, and be right in doing so, but if we fail to recognize the policies of GW Bush as the fathers of the election of Obama, we are fooling ourselves.
I’m sure GWB manipulated and controlled information in order to justify the invasion of Iraq, rather than confront Islam as a whole, and the source of the support of the 9-11 hijackers (his buds, the Saudis). In Washington DC they call it nuance, in the schoolyard we called it lying.
Trump is many things, but he’s not a DC insider, and he doesn’t like DC nuance. We are flummoxed by Trump because we can’t get beyond the old labels of left and right, and he doesn’t fit either one.
It wasn't known until recently that King Fahd, our ally in the Gulf War, was in fact the prime mover, at a couple of removes, behind the terrorist-"refugee"/"immigrant" initiative that brought the beauteous Tashfeen (I've never seen harder and more hateful eyes on any other woman) and her mail-order U.S. "husband" to San Bernardino.
It's this discovery that merits a reappraisal of the friendship that was built up by earlier generations of Saudis and such exponents as Prince Bandar, the F-15-driving, urbane exemplar of the "new" Saudi monarchy. After Fahd's death, Bandar fell into shadow, and his name is heard no more, as he is now somewhere inside the palace and the royal dynasty.
Fahd's successor is supposed to have been the strict Wahhabist who made this and other transformations back to the past happen. Fortunately, they haven't reverted to taking dumps on the carpet in five-star hotel lobbies the way old King Faisal used to do on visits to the West in the 1950's (something my old man told me about back then: the bedou, and the stool, was strong with the old king).
But the real reason, beyond all the royal lobbying and influence-agent happy bullsqueeze applied by the Kingdom to U.S. policymakers, that Dubya wanted to minimize Saudi involvement in 9/11 (which let's not forget was still an OBL/KSM operation) and to separate Salafism from "real" Islam, was IMHO to discountenance the Salafists among other Moslems and, by discrediting them and demolishing their prestige, to avoid a Punic War with 1,200,000,000 potential screaming fanatics like the Fuzzy Wuzzies of 140 years ago.
Not slipping the punch, not going dark, not settling differences in the shadows with as few opponents as possible means going nuclear, turning Mecca into a 1500-foot-deep crater, and turning a GWOT into a GWOM, a Global War on Mohammedans.
Still want to sand down George W. Bush as a wuss and a traitorous NWO girlyman? Still want a GWOM with the Chinese watching?
I hope not. It might come to that, but can you really blame Bush for not wanting to go there? We will, if it turns out the Saudis have played us and ours false, in an effort to make our people and the whole West bend toward Mecca, but let's try to do it without a genocidal world war.