President Bush The Smarter Has Passed Away

[Amarok]

Really? Unilateralism and unwinnable preventive wars against the wrong countries?

Boru

Implementation of policy is never perfect, but that cannot impugn the policy itself.
After the end of the Bush era, we see a resurgence of unsavory dictators that are emboldened to thumb their nose at human rights.
In the Bush era, these dictators and antagonistic powers like Russia and China, were scared shitless that they would be next.

Lol absurdity . Bush Jr foreign policy was belligerent and short sighted and proved disastrous and yes how you carry something out matters in the policy itself . Results are what matter .

[Anomalocaris]

George Bush senior did all the right things to establish the US at the head of an international regime in which most nations believed United States was a largely benign and largely impartial hegemon.    Therefore most nations, even the collapsing USSR facing the loss of her world geopolitical empire, and China in the Aftermath of tiannanmen and facing harsh sanctions from the US, believe they have much more to gain working with the US and conceding the senior position in setting international rules and regulations to the US.

Bush senior made the US Supreme in the entire post cold war world by making American hegemony synonymous with everyone being more secure, and having more potential for economic growth.  It also made the US Supreme as guarantor of collabrative multilateral rule making in which everyone has a say, and everyone has a stake.   This is the acme of enlightened statecraft never before achieved in the history of human civilization.    Bush didn’t set of process in motion.  He wasn’t the main driver for it.  But he was smart enough to see it, and grasp it, and accrue its benefits to the United States, and in the process almost the whole world.  That may not seem like active bombastic alpha male leadership, but it is real leadership achievement unprecedented in all human civilization.  He was vastly underrated.

Clinton took advantage of the vast good will the US built under Bush senior in but 4 years.  He was astute enough to realize once a nation has accumulate such good Will, it could do a lot of questionable and self-serving things without losing the good will from the majority.   So the essence of Clintonian foreign policy was to show enough bonhomme and consideration to keep up the good will and acceptance of American supremacy amongst most major players, while selectively targeting the geopolitical interests of Russia, to undermine with an eye of breaking Russia up, so Russia can never again parley its central location in euroasia into the geopolitical strength to rival the US again.    This was explicitly against the deal made by Bush Senior with collapsing USSR to cause the USSR and later Russia to embrace US hegemony in the early 1990, when bush promised NATO would respect Soviet Union’s sphere of influence even if the Cold War rivalry ends with soviet pull out from Eastern Europe.  But the single unifying theme of clintonian foreign policy was to screw Russia in evey way in every part of traditional Russia sphere of influence, at time Russia’s historic weakness, while smiling indulgently at Boris Yelsin.

It is not at all surprising Russia and Putin really, really, hates the clintons.

So Russia welcomed the election of bush junior, since Bush senior in their opinion dealt with the USSR fairly in the dying days of the USSR.   But unlike Clinton, bush junior, or rather his neoconservative cabal, was too stupid to realize the hegemony of even a hegemon as strong as the United States still was in early 2000s, still dependeded mostly on the consent of the everyone else, and therefore relied on perpetuating the belief the American hegemony provides more security and room for common growth than any alternative.    Bush junior knocked the first main prop out from under the american hegemony bush senior built and Clinton maintained by invading Iraq in defiance of international opposition and making it clear the United States, rather than being the guarantor of security of most countries,  can be the main threat to security of major players in the world, and would not be talked out of it even by a coalition of just about everyone.   Fate the knocked out the second prop from under american hegemony with the economy tsunami of 2008.   That made it clear that rather than a source of economic potential and economic growth for much of the world, american hegemony was also the source of economic instability, imbalance and mismanagement.    So two out the three props for american global hegemony, arguably what made America great, was knocked out during bush junior’s watch.   But there remain the third prop, that American is the guarantor of collabrative, multilateral rule making in which everyone has a voice and a stake.   That prop will survive until trump.

As part of bush junior’s America does what it wants, he continued Clinton’s policy of screwing Russia wherever he can, much to putin’s Vast anger, annoyance and disappointment.

You can see how this is leading to the world we live in.

[Minimalist]

I appreciate Bush Jr.'s foreign policy above all else

He attacked the wrong country, dumbass.  How many military leaders can actually say that?

[Anomalocaris]

I appreciate Bush Jr.'s foreign policy above all else

He attacked the wrong country, dumbass.  How many military leaders can actually say that?

He didn’t attack the wrong country.  He intended to attack the country that he attacked.  His administration just made such stupid bullshit idiotic excuses for the illegal attack that people couldn’t believe such a moron could hit the country he was aiming for.

But the fact that he actually aimed for Iraq made his failure as a geopolitical strategist more complete.

There were 3 pillars that held up American supremacy and hegemony in the world:

1. American hegemony makes most countries more secure, particularly the more influential and powerful ones.  So security makes hard powers of the world buttress american hard power.

2. American hegemony enables the economic system American champions to become a venue for all major economies to grow wealthier and more propsperous, this makes America central to world prosperity and enable greed to motivate everyone to support American Hegemony

3. American hegemony create a system of international rules and conduct in which everyone has a voice and everyone collaborates on achieving goals that benefits everyone but too large to be undertaken by any one power and impossible to undertake if everyone can cheat.

Bush senior seized the historic opportunity to put in place pillars 1 and 2.   United States still has all three pillars firmly in place on 2000, at the end of clinton’s Administration.    Between 2000 and 2018 United States lost all three pillars and is no longer a hegemon or even a real superpower.

For all of trump’s antics, he can lay claim only to knocking out pillar 3.

Pillars 1 went in 2002 with invasion of Iraq, pillar 2 went on 2008 with economic tsunami resulting from subprime crisis instigated by the American financial system.   Both Under bush junior’s watch.

Year, bush junior was better than his father.

[Cherub786]

The Iraqis will eternally be grateful to Bush Jr. for liberating them from Saddam. Can't argue with that.

[Anomalocaris]

The Iraqis will eternally be grateful to Bush Jr. for liberating them from Saddam. Can't argue with that.

Hardly, Iraq hardly would have undergone the travails of the last 17 years under Saddam. Most of Syria and the rest of the middle east will eternally despise him for lunching the invasion that is the ultimate cause of ISIS. Europeans will eternally loath him for the ISIS triggering the refugee crisis that put the European Union experiment in jeopardy.

[Amarok]

The Iraqis will eternally be grateful to Bush Jr. for liberating them from Saddam. Can't argue with that.

Hardly as all he gave them in return is a decades of war and chaos .

[Cherub786]

The Iraqis will eternally be grateful to Bush Jr. for liberating them from Saddam. Can't argue with that.

Hardly as all he gave them in return is a decades of war and chaos .

I disagree. The Iraqis gave themselves this war and chaos. They could have taken advantage of the golden opportunity that was presented to them, the first Arab country to have the gift of democracy. Instead they chose to launch an insurgency, start a sectarian civil war, ethnically cleanse each other, bomb each other's shrines and mosques, and elect corrupt politicians (Nouri al-Maliki) to loot their coffers.

Of course a lot of the blame lies on external actors. The Saudis, Syrians and Iranians did not want Iraq to succeed from day 1. They infiltrated the country with their proxies to destabilize it. Why? They knew if Iraq becomes a successful democracy, their own people will want the same thing and their autocratic and corrupt rule will be in jeopardy.

[Anomalocaris]

The Iraqis will eternally be grateful to Bush Jr. for liberating them from Saddam. Can't argue with that.

Hardly as all he gave them in return is a decades of war and chaos .

The joke is an Iraqi family wakes up years after the invasion. To their astonishment when they flip the light switch, the light comes on. When they turn the faucet, water comes out. An when they look out the window there are no riots and suicide bombers on the street. The family looks at each other and staggered under the realization that saddam has come back to life.

[Cherub786]

The Iraqis will eternally be grateful to Bush Jr. for liberating them from Saddam. Can't argue with that.

Hardly, Iraq hardly would have undergone the travails of the last 17 years under Saddam.  Most of Syria and the rest of the middle east will eternally despise him for lunching the invasion that is the ultimate cause of ISIS.  Europeans will eternally loath him for the ISIS triggering the refugee crisis that put the European Union experiment in jeopardy.

The US is not responsible for ISIS. I know the history of ISIS going back to Zarqawi. They were encouraged by the Syrian Baathist regime of Assad to destabilize Iraq for the reasons I mentioned already. This extreme faction of Qaeda then declared themselves ISIS, terrorized the Sunnis of Anbar and Mosul, committing acts of terrorism on the Shiites too. Why would the US create ISIS to destabilize its own project of nation building in Iraq?

If Bush or a neocon was president, they would have bombed Syria to smithereens allowing the FSA to take control and oust the Baathists and you would have no refugee problem.

Obama and now Trump are weak and incompetent on Syria. And that maniac Assad turned his own country into rubble, pushing it centuries back and now it is an economic catastrophe, all for the purpose of remaining in power as president. I tell you, these people deserve what happens to them for their unlimited stupidity