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“In 2003, the Damascus regime was panicked that then-US President George W. Bush, after his victory over Saddam Hussein, would have his troops continue into Syria to topple Assad as well. “

The truth is that the Syrian Ba’athist regime was an evil Anti-American gang long before George Bush was president. All our enemies are always looking for ways to make us fail. Any operation in the region will have to contest the efforts of many bad actors - it is an unavoidable cost of effecting change in that region.

Yup, and some of these bozos will believe that it’s merely situational that or episodic that the Assads and the mad mullahs of Iran have come to hate us based on some recent events. Actually, these apologists are little different than Obama who explain and mitigates the crimes of Islamists by making sure we remember the Crusades. They cut from the same cloth even if they claim they’re conservatives. They blame American regardless.

That line is in there pandering to European/liberal conventional wisdom - that the pigheaded reactionary policies of the bumbling Americans are the cause of the unrest of otherwise happy noble savages - assuring themselves that they are so much more sophisticated. The truth is that the Syrian Ba’athist regime was an evil Anti-American gang long before George Bush was president. All our enemies are always looking for ways to make us fail. Any operation in the region will have to contest the efforts of many bad actors - it is an unavoidable cost of effecting change in that region.

This wasn't a question of sophisticate vs rustic - it was a question of Bush officials so convinced of a WWII-era European-style reception to GI's in Iraq that they blinded themselves to sectarian realities. We are Christian and they are Muslim. We are European whereas they are Mesapotamian, and that made all the difference in the world. Inside every Iraqi isn't an American struggling to get out. Bush adopted the political correctness of the liberals, and the GOP took the hit while he rode off into the sunset. Instead of slaughtering the Iraqi army in the course of conquering Iraq, he let most of it go while striking at the head. Instead of making peace with a Syria he had no political capital to conquer, he kept threatening to attack it, despite the fact that a Sunni Arab regime would have been even more supportive of Iraq's Sunni Arab rebels.

They also blinded themselves to the what-ifs in the event things should turn out less amicably. Bottom line isn't that they weren't sophisticated - it's that they had tunnel vision and never bothered to think it through. And the European critics were even more retarded. If you want to bring someone around to your point of view, calling him stupid is not the way to do it. But that's Europeans for you - always short-sighted and reflexively attracted to self-defeating point-scoring at the expense of long-time allies.

Note also that the reality of Islam is that all non-Muslims are essentially less than human before the law. How would we feel if monkeys came to rule over us? Muslims see us as monkeys who just now happen to have the upper hand. Social prejudices can be eradicated over time. This is a religious prejudice that has been in place for over 1300 years, to the point that even today, in some countries, Muslims can kill non-Muslims with impunity (including in Iraq and Afghanistan), much as someone would step on a cockroach. How is a Muslim ever going to be reconciled to rule by cockroaches, without an occupation that is accompanied by swift and draconian collective punishments of the kind levied by Saddam against rebellious Shiites and Assad against rebellious Sunnis - punishments that would horrify the American public and world opinion?

Americans who supported Bush's invasion thought he knew what he was doing. And, as someone whose entire job was to figure these things out, the buck stopped with him. When your plumber tells you he needs to do something, you ask him about the price tag but don't question his expertise. When he floods your basement, however, you hold him to account. And that's what's happening to Bush.