The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

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ity whose overwhelming interest was foreign and defense policy. He presided
over winning the Cold War and the first Gulf War and he had nothing
left when they were over because he wasn’t interested in anything
else. He’s a wonderful person, but you couldn’t get him to take a strong
position on something even when Republicans wanted him to do so.
George W. Bush inherited a lot from his mother, who is a much more
decisive person than his father. That said, the second Bush was probably
too indifferent to listening to various voices. He got us into a war without
knowing what the goals of the war were, or more precisely what the goals
were going to be after the war was over. So he has the ‘mission accomplished’
banner there on an aircraft carrier to celebrate victory, only to
lose thousands of troops over the next several years.
“He came out courageously with the right answer in the last year of his
presidency. He would have been a magnificent president if he had called
for ‘The Surge’ in 2003 or 2004 and had done the job then. I said it when
his father first told us a war seemed inevitable: If you go to war, you better
go to war to win. G.W. Bush thought he could win on the cheap, and he
couldn’t. It’s just as simple as that. Then when he was very unpopular he
went in to win—but way too late, with a large number of Americans killed
and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead as a result.
“G.W. Bush greatly underestimated the difficulty of creating a democracy.
You don’t create a Vermont town-meeting democracy in a place like
Iraq quickly or on the cheap. His whole presidency after 9/11 was national
security, with no longer any priority for domestic policies. He ran an idea
up the flag pole to partly privatize Social Security and it died. He never
came up with any other big ideas after that. His father’s presidency lasted
one term because he was indecisive. His own never reached its potential
because he didn’t learn enough lessons from his father’s presidency or
follow the instincts he inherited from his mother.”