I will certainly agree that Bush made some bad miscalculations but I doubt that they were gullible enough to believe that they could intimidate the Arab world that way.

I think they wrongly believed that Iraq was a well educated secular nation that happened to be under the thumb of a despot. I think they believed they could "liberate" the country and quickly set it up as a democratic state, (puppet or otherwise), that would be seen as a positive example to the rest of the Arab world. Bush, (nor I), realized at the time that secularism only exists in the Arab region under a secular despot.

As for the war on Al-Qaeda not showing any dramatic victories, at the time I thought we were doing pretty good in Afghanistan. We had run the Taliban out of Dodge and appeared to be on the right track at the time. In fact one might suspect that our victories in Afghanistan drove the Al-Qaeda into the greener pastures of Iraq.

As for the rest, of course I don't buy all the Obama praise and the BDS, but I basically agree with your assessment of the current state of affairs over there, and who the GOP will blame. ;)