George W Bush, who served two terms as POTUS, is, as has been the case with many men (and women), somewhat complicated. He got the USA into the early 2000s Iraq War on the basis of suspected WMD (weapons of mass destruction) held by Iraq’s erstwhile leader Saddam Hussein. Those WMD were never found. Saddam Hussein claimed they never existed.
The truth may never be known but there may be reason to side with Hussein’s story.
Bush & Co. did not take kindly to there supposedly being no WMD. That was their main justification for going to war.
Joseph Wilson, US diplomat sent in 2002 to Niger to find out if Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake uranium, claimed the negative in a NY TIMES Op-Ed, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”
For his pains, in retaliation, his then wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA agent. She would never be able to work for the agency again, and lost a subsequent bid to become Senator from NM. Whether the latter is related to the former remains a matter of conjecture.
The cost of that Iraq war? An estimated 1.9T dollars. 2500 US troops remain in Iraq to this day, despite Iraq’s public statement they abhor a foreign presence.
Bush badly mangled ‘nuclear’ when he mentioned the word.
But he had the decency to say, with correct pronunciation, when he exited the office of POTUS and Barack Obama came aboard in 2009: ‘He (Obama) deserves my silence.’
