An Interesting Take on Bush Presidency

Just wondering why everyone has to be so absolutist. Yeah, Bush crippled Al Queda and attacked Afghanistan to drive the Taliban out. Why does it hurt anyone to acknowledge the truths about things he's done? Al Queda's infrastructure has undoubtedly been weakened because of things we have done since 9/11, such as freezing bank accounts, cutting off communication, etc.

Those are also things that HAD to be done and it doesn't really make a great statement about Bush's leadership that he did the things that just about ANY president would have done. That stuff was sort of a no-brainer stuff. What president WOULDN'T have send the U.S. military into Afghanistan after 9/11 or reevaluated how the FBI and CIA were communicating? Our intelligence and readiness for a terrorist attack prior to 9/11 were obviously weak. I don't blame Bush for that. No president before him was prepared for anything like that. As a country, we weren't expecting something like that.

If you want to laud Bush, though, it would make a much stronger case if you could say he had anticipated the threat that Al Queda was and did something proactively to prevent it from getting so strong. That would have made him a leader with vision, not the fact that we fought back AFTER we were attacked. That was the response ANYONE would have had.

And in fact, you can look at specific things we have done during the "War on Terror," and Iraq, from things that you probably shouldn't be pointing fingers about, for example, our inability to catch Osama Bin Laden, to things where we are clearly in the wrong, for example, how we are handling Guantanamo Bay, how we handled Abu Ghraib, etc., and conclude that we have gotten a ton wrong; probably more than we have gotten right.

As for liberating Iraq, that would be wonderful if we had liberated the place and created a stable, safe country where Iraqis were now better off. But the place is now a mess and we are mired in a military conflict that has overextended our capabilities and put lives at risk. To stop at "we liberated Iraq" kind of misses the point of the mess it is now and how our mismanagement and not planning for what might happen has caused that mess.