Another Brit here, mildly disagreeing with you. Nobody dealing with the ME will ever come up smelling of roses, but Bush’s two worst foreign policy disasters, Iraq is possibly the biggest US foreign policy error of modern times; and total support for Israel’s excesses (instead of leaning on Israel to facilitate a two-state system by dismantling West Bank settlements and building the Wall to '67 borders) count as right big fat fuck-ups in my book. Outside the ME, branding Iran as part of the “axis” helped Ahmadinejad get into power by uniting a population that had been flirting with western values against a common enemy.
On a positive note, I think, since the ridiculous State of the Union address in 2002, Bush’s handling of North Korea has been less than bellicose. Which is, if not positive, not negative either.
ETA: Oh balls, I missed that this thread had extended to page 2, and am therefore probably re-hashing 30 posts of similar rebuttals. Apologies.
Yes, but your hypothetical president did the same stupid shit that Bush did, which would naturally preclude him from being a “Great President”. My hypothetical president wasn’t so stupid, and therefore said “Why in the world would I invade Iraq, who had nothing to do with 9/11? I’m busy rebuilding Afghanistan after removing the Taliban from power.”, thus wouldn’t have had the same ME situation.
And there is no evidence that any other president would have done the same, as there was no valid reason to attack Iraq without provocation.
I don’t really have to do either, but your original post would fit much better if the question had been “Could any other president have done the same stupid shit as the current one, and come out smelling like roses?”. The answer is no, as doing the same stupid shit would have made them just as bad as the person who did the stupid shit in the first place.
Many of us (and I’m aware that Quartz and others aren’t in that list), including potential presidents, think the decision to GO to Iraq was a clusterfuck of monumental proportions.
Yes, but other potential presidents wouldn’t have made the same bed. Hence, a hypothetical president could have taken 9/11 and run with it, coming out looking very good.
If Al Gore had been elected in 2000 and spent the last seven years doing the same things George Bush has done, I’d be calling him an terrible president. But Bush got elected and did those things, so the title is his.
You’ve moved the goalposts so many times now that they’re in a different stadium.
There are definitely a few potential presidents that would have made at least some of the same mistakes, you would have (you’re thankfully not eligible anyway), Quartz would have, Cheney would have, most of PNAC would have, etc. Let me repeat once again what you took issue with.
See, none of you would have been a moderately decent president, as you would have screwed up the ME just as Bush has done. A large number of us saw absolutely no reason to invade Iraq, no reason to label Iran part of the “Axis of Evil”, and some of that group would have made a moderately decent president.
Yes, at the time. Feel free to go back and read what various people and posters were saying then, when Bush initially wanted to hit Iraq. Unlike many of our countrymen, we haven’t had a change of heart about Iraq, as we never once thought that invasion was warranted, and quite a few of us, including myself, meet all requirements for being president.
In order to make the same mistakes, another person would have had to have had the same mindset. GWB announced a desire to go after Saddam Hussein on multiple occasions during the 2000 election. The attack on Iraq was a keystone of the Wolfowitz term paper that defined much of neo-con thinking regarding the Middle East. In order to rationalize the Iraq invasion to the American (and world) public, the administration set up an entirely new “intelligence” department, the OSP, outside the channels of the existing 19 intelligence groups, placed it under the Secretary of Defense, and staffed it with people who had far more experience in public relations that in intelligence. In organizing the Iraq invasion, Secretary Rumsfeld explicitly overrode the recommendfations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisting that they use far fewer troops than they sought to secure the country following the war–a policy based on the concept of light attack forces that Rumsfeld was developing under the aegis of a military planner favored by GWB for which they decided to use Iraq as a “proof of concept” event. In order to provide intelligence analysis for on-the-ground operations in Iraq, the administration was forced to strip several intelligence units out of Afghanistan, seriously damaging our efforts to deal with the Taliban in that country. Having gotten the support of Congress to invade Iraq if Hussein refused to comply with the UN inspections, Bush arbitrarily declared that Hussein was not complying even though Hussein had let the UN inspectors back into the country and the inspectors were sending lots of information back that indicated the WoMD were no longer present. Lacking the support of the UN, GWB went to a number of smaller nations and threatened them with a cut-off of funding or support if they did not give lip service and send a couple dozen troops to his “coalition of the willing” to make it appear as though it was not an extra-legal unilateral invasion, but a united effort by some large portion of the world.
In order to claim that some different president would have made the same mistakes, one would have to find a person who was willing to put ideology ahead of facts to create a bogus reason to invade Iraq, who was willing to put theory ahead of knowledge to insist that the military go in short-staffed, who was willing to manufacture false evidence to support the unnecessary invasion, and who was willing to lie on multiple levels in ways that were so transparently false that it wrecked U.S. standing in the world.
I could see some president making any number of mistakes, but to get to repeat the mistakes made by Bush would have required that the president be an inherently dishonest person selected from among the same small group of neo-cons that supported him–and not one of them was considering a run for the presidency between 1997 and 2000.
As a reminder, here is what Bush’s opponent had to say regarding the issue, and since he was not only an actual candidate in the primaries, but actually won the democratic nomination, you don’t have to go very far when looking for a hypothetical candidate that would have done better regarding the ME. No one knows for certain whether he would have made a great president or not, but he most certainly wouldn’t have made the exact same mistakes leading to all of the problems in the Middle East, as he clearly outlines what he considered the correct path to deal with terrorism. An excerpt:
I am reminded of something a person who supported the war once said:
While this person wouldn’t have made a great president, as they fully supported the war, they later acknowledged and despaired over the problems that were caused, and asked for help in deciding what to do to resolve them. Even that is an improvement over Bush.
Veiled insult? If you mean the “thankfully”, that was something I would attribute to anyone who wanted us to go to war, and had nothing to do with you personally, other than your stance regarding Iraq. While I have no idea, without Iraq in the picture, you might make a fine president. If you took that as a personal insult, I assure you it was not intended in that way.
While I explained the only thing I found that might be misconstrued as an insult, which part of my posts have been obtuse? If anything, I’ve been very straightforward, and responded to each and every one of your posts. You haven’t returned the favor.
Well, you’re not responding to or rebutting his points either, so I don’t think our approaches make a difference.
Well first of all it was you who introduced the hypothetical prez into the picture, as I said earlier I responded in kind.
Second: I moved no goal posts, I reiterated my earlier postings and feelings on the matter.
Third: You state that I would have screwed up the ME situation the same as GWB. Believe me I am not as thick as he is…not by a long shot.
Fourth. In posts 86 I asked that you refer to “Maybe and Perhaps” . You didn’t, you evaded this by stating that I’ve moved the goalposts, which I have not.
Fifth: As Tagos states, the post by ** tomndeb** was excellent, I have no reason to argue with anything contained in it.
Sixth: I was expressing a relief that the Americans I had met were not all possessed of the same dogmatic and irrational dislike of your president as you have.
Finally: He is your president, you elected him to serve the USA to the best of his ability.
The fact that the man is a total plank is the electors fault, the people who placed him in office