Many bad policies came out of the Bush Administration. I have neither the energy or the time to catalog them here. What I would like to focus on is the terrible refugee situation playing out from the Middle East to Central Europe. This particular bee has been flying around my bonnet for a while now, since I first saw footage of refugees fleeing for their lives from ISIS. On the network news last night and today it was called the worst refugee problem since World War II.
This morning I saw DarkScholar82's diary, Two Versus Fifty: The Relative Weight of Tragedies, and thought, "Yes, those fifty lives should matter as much as those two journalists, but there's a reason those fifty lives had to be put in such jeopardy." It boils down to this.
When President George W. Bush's administration made their case for war against Iraq, there were plenty of articles in the media detailing the history or the region and how easy it would be to destabilize the political climate there. But on Bush's side we had aluminum tubes, yellowcake, and Curveball. Anyone with an ounce of critical thinking skills recognized that Bush's "reasons" were flimsy excuses.
Nevertheless, with help from the New York Times, etc. the "for-us-or-against-us" Bush Administration pushed the US into making war on a country so poorly equipped to defend itself, that videos from Iraq "training" to defend itself from us were sadly laughable.
The invasion itself went so well, that the Bush Administration declared victory several times with appearances by the usual suspects, Cheney and Rumsfeld as well as President Bush telling the American public just how "well" things were going. I lost track of how many "corners" we "turned" in subduing the remaining fighters after the army was disbanded.
Certainly our "shock and awe" tactics worked at first, due to our overwhelming military might. But the hearts and minds that we were supposed to win somehow never turned in our favor. Instead, Al Qaeda entered a country that had formerly been hostile to their presence. Eventually an even more dangerous force arose--ISIS.
So in unseating a puppet dictator that the Bush Administration decided was no longer useful, the region was so politically destabilized that people now feel they must flee for their lives. Europe is now reaping the what the Bush Administration had sown. And Angela Merkel got more than an unwanted massage from George Bush. This year Germany expects to receive 800,000 refugees from the Middle East.
Every day, from Asia to Central Europe, dramas large and small are played out in the lives of these refugees. They suffer hardship and danger and many die before that can reach any sort of safety whether by drowning at sea or suffocating to death in the back of a van in Austria. And this tragedy, the largest refugee situation since WWII, is a result of the Bush Administration's policy to go to war in Iraq.
We, as Democrats need to lay the blame for this crisis at the foot of the Administration that wrought it. We can't be timid or do it in half measures. We need to be sure that Americans realize that Europe's refugee crisis is due to Republicans George Bush's policies. He built that, but others pay for it. What harm could another Republican administration do not just to the US, but to the world? All voters need to consider that. We need to help them do that.