I get your point. So when you deflect the story’s points about Assad to bring up Bush, that’s okay. It makes sense to always bash Bush. It’s all his fault. It explains everything including the deaths of Americans after he left office. And in your eyes Assad is just a victim of not getting enough largess. And it’s insulting for me to be critical of your cowardice and moral weakness that offers submitting to extortion by a terrorist regime like Assad because we assist our allies, and because it’s not fair to shift the argument like you do on Assad to Bush. Got it.
Assad is nobody's idea of a good guy. But bad guys have their uses. Assad's was keeping Sunni Arabs down, just as Stalin's was killing Germans after Hitler tore up the Molotov-Ribbentrop plan. Pol Pot wasn't a good guy, either, but we made common cause with his Khmer Rouge movement after Vietnam invaded Cambodia, thereby leading to Vietnam's withdrawal a decade later. Similarly, we paid $3b a year to Egypt and Jordan so they wouldn't attack Israel, or harbor Palestinians to conduct attacks against Israel. Why the vociferous objection to paying Syria off not to allow jihadists to attack GI's in Iraq?
Like it or not, the buck stops at the White House. Any president who achieved the kinds of results Bush did in Afghanistan and Iraq would be up for relentless bashing. Obama took a bad situation and made it worse, but it was Bush who made it a bad situation in the first place. I can accept that a dove like Obama has a fantasy land view of the world. The problem with Bush is that he had an equally deluded view of the world, one that denied the possibility of large scale resistance, and instead of slaughtering the Iraqi army in place, left it around to kill 5K GI's and burn $1T of American taxpayer dollars. Shinseki was right. We needed 500K men to keep the insurgency at bay while keeping casualties low. Bush tried to do Iraq on the cheap and ended up being penny-wise and pound-foolish. Neither Bush nor Assad are the victims of Bush's folly. The conservative movement, the American people and, most of all, the 5K dead GI's are.
The difference between you and me is that I view Bush (or any other president) the way I view a plumber or a tax preparer, and you view him as a saint. If a plumber floods my home or a tax preparer causes me to be audited, I give them a piece of my mind. I pay their salaries and I expect results. You view criticisms as borderline blasphemy. I view them as a normal response to bad service.