My “metamorphosis” is almost a carbon copy of yours. I lost a lot of sleep waiting with baited breath in both of W's elections that he would prevail (actually it was pretty much of a no-brainier when you looked at the RAT opponents both times). But as time wore on, and we ground on in Iraq and Afghanistan with ROE’s that kept us from winning and resulted in needless deaths of our young people coupled with the huge costs, I came to the conclusion that W was either really as stupid as the RATs portrayed him to be or that he was in the pockets of the Saudis. In the end I hate him too. He was a $hit president, and on inspection of his record, so was his father. And if it's possible, Yebbie is the dumbest of the lot. The Booshes need to be relegated to the ash heap of history.
Here's a prediction I wrote on September 13, 2001 about what was going to happen. I didn't know then that Vietnam II would be fought in Iraq, but I was pretty sure that we would blow sh*t up, demonstrate we could take casualties (so we looked serious) without conquering the enemy (so we didn't look mean) and wind up worse off, which is exactly what happened.
A punitive expedition (which is how Afghanistan started) was the minimum acceptable response. IF we had killed Bin Ladin and his team at Tora Bora in December 2001, success could have been declared and it would have been over.
The necessary for victory was the conquest of Arabia and Pakistan. Sounds big, I know, but certainly smaller than the conquest of Japan and Germany. Yes, the Soviets did a lot to Germany, but we could have had India's legions for the Pakistan part.
But a 80-division expeditionary force, mostly white and all Western, grinding little brown men to dust and re-educating their children was always beyond the imagination of the Bush family and their crew.
That left him with the need to do "something" bigger than Special Forces on horseback chasing out the Taliban and smaller than a war to extirpate the cancer that is politicized Sunni Islam.
Saddam WAS wearing a sign that said "kick me", and had been for years, but he was an entrepreneur of brutality with a keen sense of survival, so it's certain he and his army could have been bought for the march on Riyadh.
Bush thought small at a time when big thinking was a necessity, and the subsequent disasters are entirely the result of this failure. His pathetic embrace of "enforcing UN resolutions" as casus belli only made failure more certain.
It disgusts me that there are Republican candidates who are not made physically ill by the magnitude of our sacrifices for nothing in Iraq.
For after all, even if the fantasy of a multicultural, peaceful, feminist Iraq and Afghanistan had come true (impossible though that was), our real enemies in Riyadh and Islamabad would still sleep soundly in their beds, as they do to this day.