This just really annoys me. A reporter for the Telegraph in England wrote a story on how nobody hears much from George W. Bush.
Here’s how he begins:
When Chad Draper finished eating at a fish-fry in his grandmother’s garden in suburban Dallas earlier this year, he took a walk with some of the friends and relatives he would soon be leaving for Afghanistan.
As they reached number 10141 in the neatly kept cul-de-sac in Preston Hollow, Private Draper paused to glance at the home of the man who, a decade earlier, started the war he was about to join. And George W. Bush looked back.
Bush started the war?
There was that whole business with the World Trade Center getting knocked down, you might recall. It made all the papers.
May 31, 2012 at 12:39 pm
Dude, it's the Telegraph. Do they actually have to print "from the Ministry of Truth" in the letterhead?
May 31, 2012 at 1:37 pm
Well, W was president when the wars started. For good or bad, he owns them. The buck stops at the president. If you want to hold Obama accountable for the price of Gas, you have to let Bush own stuff on his watch.
Rover.
May 31, 2012 at 2:09 pm
Afghanistan, Iraq, and the war on terrorism are separate wars, though they are obviously related.
May 31, 2012 at 2:31 pm
You'll just have to be annoyed then. Afghanistan did not take down the towers. This will likely make no sense to you until someone comes and invades your property. It is most likely to be a SWAT raid with the wrong address. I hope you don't have dogs. They will hurt you and then tell you you are a victim of the drug war, much like all the poor Afghanis are victims of the war on terrorism.
May 31, 2012 at 2:44 pm
I claim no omniscience. G.W. seems to have done the right thing, and Congress has clearly sat on its collective hands (Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution).
Without a declaration of war, our democratically-elected government puts our fine young people in the military in a legally ambiguous situation.
– Mack
May 31, 2012 at 2:52 pm
Al Qaeda started the war when they attacked Americans at the WTC and Pentagon. Al Qaeda was headquartered in Afghanistan.
You might not hear much from Bush, but guess who was the first one here after the Fort Hood shooting to visit the wounded? You got it, George W. Bush. Without any fanfare.
May 31, 2012 at 3:01 pm
GW's silence drives the left crazy. They need to hate him, to make him the boogeyman of every problem… someone else to blame.
*Anything* he could possibly say, anything at all, would be twisted for their purposes and widely reported by the MSM. Perhaps, GW is not as dumb as they think.
May 31, 2012 at 3:38 pm
There are also those on the right who're disgusted and outraged at the Bush Administration. When the narrative changed to the effect that getting OBL was no longer a priority, that would have been the time to get out of Afghanistan.
The Iraq war was always a murderous fraud. By visiting a few wounded soldiers in hospitals, Bush does not atone for the thousands of precious American lives he threw away for this lie.
It was the Bush administration's appetite for extra-Constitutional adventures including torture, assassination, and the wholesale ramp-up of the police state that made possible the continuing grotesque abuses of the Obama Administration.
Anyone claiming to care about the war on terror needs to think about how America uses terror to pursue political goals.
Romulus
May 31, 2012 at 7:30 pm
The Bush administration had to make decisions based upon what we now know was faulty intelligence. Why did we have faulty intelligence? Could that possibly have something to do with G.W. Bush's predecessor in the White House, someone who put in place policies that practically destroyed the U.S. intelligence apparatus abroad?
Yes, I agree that we likely should not have invaded Iraq to take out Saddam Hussein – but we didn't know what we didn't know then. And that was not G.W. Bush's fault.
As to the remark about how America uses terror to pursue political goals: I contend there is no moral similarity between American attempts to minimize innocent casualties and the attempts by Islamic radicals to MAXIMIZE innocent casualties.
June 1, 2012 at 1:16 pm
uivalency to the U.S. adicals.
For the longest time I was confused about the war in Iraq, until I watched the beatification of JPII and the commentator mentioned his response to the war in Iraq. He sent cardinals to D.C. and Baghdad in an attempt to convince them that war was not the answer. But when war won, during his first Angelus afterwards, he said emphatically, no more war! I have seen war, war is never the answer.
I wish that people would consider the mind of the Church as higher than the mind of a mortal country when deciding where they cast their alliances.
June 1, 2012 at 1:18 pm
Sorry, meant to say at the beginning:
Come on, nobody is assigning moral equivalency to the U.S. and Islamic radicals.
Silly phone 🙂
June 1, 2012 at 4:08 pm
Why did we have faulty intelligence?
Because it was special-ordered by the Bush Administration so that the American people could be terrorized into backing the Iraq war.
Thank you for asking.
Romulus
June 1, 2012 at 6:23 pm
It's interesting that of our more recent presidents, the Republicans
have chosen to behave like Cincinnatus, while the Democrats have
clung to the political, public stage.
God willing, we shall soon see how our current president behaves
in retirement.
June 1, 2012 at 11:45 pm
August, may I remind you that Afghanistan was governed by a regime that provided aid and comfort — at the expense of its own people, btw — to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda?
Abby, the fact that JPII opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq doesn't necessarily make his opinion correct. He also opposed the 1990-91 Gulf War that forced Iraq out of Kuwait, which Iraq invaded and tried to annex. That war had the full support of the UN — including Russia, which Gorbachev ruled at the time.
Had the world listed to JPII in 1990-91, Kuwait would have lost its independence and Saddam Hussein would have set his sights on Saudi Arabia. Had Saddam invaded that country, the U.S. would have lost far more soldiers over a far greater period of time.
Abby, the Vatican is an independent state with its own diplomatic corps and foreign policy. Consequently, it has geopolitical interests, the same as other independent states. JPII's opinion was a prudential opinion. As such, people have the right to question and examine it.
June 4, 2012 at 8:27 pm
Romulus, that the G. W. Bush administration "special ordered" faulty intelligence is one narrative. However, I don't believe the Bush administration really wanted to go to war and thus wanted to create a justification for war out of thin air. I happen to find more believable a different narrative: due to the lack of any credible "assets" in Iraq after the Clinton administration, the Bush administration turned to Iraqi ex-patriots in the U.S. for information and was misled by them (and by the faulty intelligence of U.S. allies).
As for listening to JP II regarding Iraq – his concern in that matter was not a matter of teaching faith and morals, but as Joseph D'Hippolito stated, one of a prudential opinion. JP II did not have the God-given responsibility to look out for U.S. interests that G. W. Bush did. If WMDs had really been there as the intelligence indicated and G. W. Bush had not invaded Iraq to eliminate them, G. W. Bush would rightly be condemned for not having protected the U.S. as he swore to do when he took office, since Saddam had made very public and credible threats against both the U.S. and Israel. He also had a verified history of using WMDs against his own people.