I'm going to ignore the Clinton Gambit. It's bankrupt, and just a sign that you're stretching for an argument. Get over it--Bush took the White House in 2000, Clinton's now irrelevant, and certainly not the all-purpose excuse for whatever Bush does.

Bush gets a lot of mileage from supporters with short memories. The war in Afghanistan was substantially over in a couple of months. Bush declared that we'd destroy the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and specifically Osama bin Laden. We destroyed the Taliban, heavily damaged Al Qaeda, and didn't get Osama. Around the time of his State of the Union address in January there was beginning to be criticism of the latter failure, and so Bush unveiled his Axis of Evil to distract attention.

As for the effect of the various wars on the prospects for Bush's domestic agenda, the political strategy is to have a string of successes in war so that things like the tax cut can ride their coattails. Success in war doesn't logically make a tax cut a good idea (the cost of conducting Bush's wars, in fact, makes tax cuts a stupid idea), but politics isn't about rationality.

There's no disputing that Saddam was/is an evil man, but the degree to which Bush's war was personal was truly remarkable. "He tried to kill my Daddy" is one giveaway. Even in World War II, while there was a heavy focus on Hitler, that war was still about "Hitler and the Nazis", and there was little rhetoric about how we actually love the German people and our goal was to liberate them. Think of all of America's wars. The other half of WWII wasn't about Tojo; Vietnam wasn't about Ho Chi Minh; Korea wasn't about Kim's father; the Spanish-American War wasn't about the King of Spain...

Why not use the term spin instead of propaganda.

Because to call it "spin" would itself be spin. A heavy bombardment of disinformation and unsupported allegation goes way beyond spin. It's propaganda.

And you want less politics involved in war??

That's right. Can you say "wag the dog"?

--Robert