Tuesday, June 3, 2008

George W. Bush's Views on Nation Building, circa October 2000

I started to write a post two weeks ago about these comments from then Gov. Bush from one of the 2000 Presidential debates, but I couldn't get my thoughts organized. But I just came across the clip on You Tube while trying to find instances of Bush speaking idiotically during the 2000 campaign for my post on Obama earlier tonight.

One thing that has irked me about this quote and what has happened in Iraq is that the media has not asked Bush about this. Particularly after his Administration's rhetoric about the purpose of the Iraq War shifted from finding and destroying Iraq's WMDs to creating a beacon of democracy in the Mid-East, the press should have hounded him about his comments from that debate.

The other thing about those comments is that I think they show how little Bush in 2000 understood the world. It boggles my mind that he couldn't envision a scenario in 2000 under which he would think it'd be in the best interest of our country for the United States to engage in "nation building". And, unfortunately, the events of the last seven plus years have proven that Bush's understanding of the world has not improved sufficiently since 2000.

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