The Taliban had pleny of sins that needed punishing, but that was none of our business. Harboring the guys who flew airliners into our office buildings WAS very much our business, and we needed to punish them. Decapitating Al-Quaeda and emasculating the Taliban was an American foreign policy and military triumph that can be shared by both Bush and Obama.

I'll never fault Bush for going after the Taliban. I fault him for easing up on the Taliban and concentrating on Iraq, instead.

There were a lot of reasons for him doing this: geopolitics, strategic placement of US arms, logistic support of expeditionary forces, local feuds and conflicts, exploitation of Saddam's own enemies, attempts to impose our philosophy on that culture, and of course, oil.

But Bush's primary motivation was that Jihadism was an anti-American movement sweeping the Muslim world that required a strike at the Muslim
world itself, to demoralize, divide and discredit that world. He was mistaken. His actions only made things worse.

Still, you can't blame the man alone for making that mistake. That's a cheap shot; Monday morning quarterbacking. We can't guarantee we wouldn't have made that same mistake if we had been in his shoes at the time.

The real mistake came when it started to become clear that it WAS a mistake, and to refuse to realize that, to make excuses for it instead to cover his political ass, and not take steps to correct the problem. It was a lot like Vietnam.