Evaluating George W. Bush

Whatever one thinks about George W. Bush, there are six points about him no one has the right to deny:

1. He kept his country completely safe from terrorists atacks for eight years.

2. He put down a genocidal regime, guilty of the murder of 300 thousand Iraqis.

3. Contrary to what the big media spreads with hysterical mendacity, he did it through a war that caused the smallest number of civil victims in all History.

4. He practically dismantled terrorist resistance in Iraq, killing 20 thousand Al-Qaeda militants and forcing most of the remaining ones to seek refuge in Iran.

5. He promoted in Iraq the fastest and most spectactular post-belic reconstruction ever seen, making Iraqi economy more prosperous than it was before the war.

6. He implemented democracy in Iraq – and it works.

From these six facts, I take two conclusions:

a) He was the best chief of security the USA has ever had.

b) He was the best president Iraq has ever had.

It is an entirely different thing to judge him as president of the US. When he was elected in 2000, Republicans had all the conditions to win presidential elections for the next four decades, dismantle the conspiracy of the Democrats with the radical left, and heal the country according to the formulas consacrated by Ronald Reagan. After two presidential terms, not only he failed to do this, but has allowed his country to loose breath to the point of the permanence of Republicans in power being almost unfeasible .

To blame this shame on the failure of the war in Iraq does not explain anything, it is pure deceitful leftist propaganda.

George W. Bush has never failed in Iraq. His real failure was in the internal front. It started right after September, 11th. Taking the opportunity to denounce the Democrat collaboration with the left would make all trust in the left vanish and would have hygienized the American political atmosphere. Instead, he preferred to pretend his enemies were his friends, creating a fictional national unity against foreign attackers. The Democrats, bearing the patriot label Bush himself sticked on their foreheads, and armed with the prestige thus acquired, could stab in the back their own country, Army and president while people would not question for one second their deep-hearted good intentions.

Running away from the confrontation his enemies – who were the enemies of the US – sought so much, Bush gave them strength. All the bravery he showed in leading the war, turned into cowardice in the internal fight. The result: his success is condemned as failure and his real failure cannot be confessed in public without triggering a thousandfold worse internal division. And although Bush wants to avoid this division, his adversaries assume it more and more, taking from it, against the US, the same advantages Bush should have taken for the US.

George W. Bush took the wrong job. He is a great military commander, but he is not at all a politician.

Translated from the Portuguese by Fabio Lins Leite