The head of government/state dichotomy is irrelevant to my post. Even Bush Jr had the nerve to fly in the backseat of a navy fighter to give his (bull$h!t) mission accomplished speech (his mission was to get bin laden not his daddys ghosts)
Interesting you note the “Mission Accomplished” speech by Bush the Younger. I’ve watched a couple of FrontLine documentaries on the Second Iraq War in the past few days - interesting that the Bushies had no plan for running Iraq after the war except to fire anyone who had been connected in any way to the Baath party. As a consequence, there were no civil servants, police or other authority of any kind left in large swaths of the country and the Bushies had no one to replace them. So when Bremer arrives as the chief US person there, he is amazed to see buildings in Baghdad burning out of control for days at a time - the firefighting crews had all been fired. How on earth did Mr. Mission Accomplished expect that a relatively modern country such as Iraq would operate with no government, no civil authority and a lot of angry people who have lost their jobs? The more I see of Bush Jr. the more I think he was a total disaster of a president.
Bush was a trained combat pilot. Bit of a difference there.
CC