Now that the dust has settled, was he really as bad as made out to be?

Arbitrary nonsense

I don't reaaaaally see in him the monster that a lot of people make him out to be. Sure, oil was a factor, but people tend to completely disregard the actions of Saddam that led to the mess. It is almost like Iraq is treated as being merely reactive to Western actions, without it's own agency. Truth is Saddam was likely bound to kickstart this shit we're going through given enough time. He pissed off both USA allies AND Iran. He invaded a sovereign nation, to take their oil, but that isn't something people hold against him as much as they do against Bush. He tried repeatedly to genocide minorities.

I don't see him as a particularly immoral man, just a very inept one - and given great power it is hard sometimes to say which is worse.

>literally anyone could have done what he did in response to 9/11
wrong.
youtube.com/watch?v=NjGcCI9ByWw

>Truth is Saddam was likely bound to kickstart this shit we're going through given enough time.
maybe, maybe not. either way, the US going in with zero hard proof whatsoever was a huge blow to their credibility, and that only got worse when they found nothing to point to saddam making WMDs and massively destabilized the region.

their were more conventional invasions and genocides in casualties prior to the invasion

the invasions issue was dealt with over a decade prior, and nobody gives a flying fuck about genocides until it suits them too.

Anyone who really thought he was as bad as he was made out to be at his election was 'opinionated, to be nitpicky'. But anyone who thinks that after the unspeakably disastrous eight years that came after him? That's a moron.

The one thing I will say is although Iraq wasn’t building WMDs, his premature attack safely ensured they will never be able to make them in the future either.

If you look at NK, you wonder if it would have been a good idea to attack them before they started building them.

Bush overall wasn’t a good president, but I do feel safer knowing Iraq won’t have access to nuclear weapons any time soon.

>Now that the dust has settled, was he really as bad as made out to be?
Yes, George W was a fucking disaster.

>ran as a "compassionate conservative", promising an end to divisive politics and the nation building ways of Clinton
>We now know that as early as 1999 he had intended on invading Iraq
>Lost the popular vote, won only because of some extremely shady shit in Florida courtesy of his brother Jeb!
>After 9/11 let hardcore Neocons take over his cabinet, driving out the voices of sanity
>Flat out lied in order to get us to go to war with Iraq.
>Put two wars, a Medicaid expansion, and tax cuts on the nation's credit card, passed the bill to Obama. Basically told congress to fuck off and went to war without their permission, forcing them to pass a budget or risk being labeled a terrorist-lover.
>Economy collapsed under his watch, which every legitimate economist (up to and including Alan Greenspan, himself) admitted was the result of under-regulation and making assumptions about the free market's ability to correct itself.

When you take an aggregate of the opinion of historians, he generally ranks with the lower 10 worst presidents of all time.

I still believe he was the reason for everything bad happening in this generation.

America's Commodus

Sure most probably wasn't his fault (don't blame him for 2008 but he didn't help taking the surplus into tax-breaks) but him using 9/11 to bomb Iraq is the reason why we'll never have a WWII type glory and patriotism. That and the anti-intellectualism is what lead to Trump at the end.

Better Ambassador than a President.
The only pro I think we can all agree on is his work in Africa battling AIDS.

pretty much, I mean he was okay up until the Great Recession domestically speaking but having one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression happen under your watch is pretty bruising. While his Foreign Policy bungling was so bad it still haunts the second president after him.
Though with the way things are going he'll be seen as a bretty good guy if the economy finally hits its cyclical decline or some FP bullshit breaks out under Trump

We all need to dig a little deeper.

The US has suffered from a dangerously consistent bad string of presidents from Bill to Trump. It’s very reminiscent of the pre-Abe presidents.

We literally did attack NK before they got WMDs and now they’re just determined to send them at us anyway, did you forget the entire Korean War?

Are you the guy who posted a thread with pic earlier? There is a 25 year rule on Veeky Forums.

He was a good goy

Tbh Bush Obama and Trumps foreign policies have all been laughable. It’s a wonder we still call it foreign policy as if it’s an actual policy and hasn’t been whimsical for close to 20 years

Not really.

He mostly only killed subhumans. Everything would be better if Iraq was put under colonial rule and settlers were sent in so that Muslims don't control as much as the world's oil.

I say it was bad from LBJ to Trump
but then again Carter and H.W was alright

The original Kim who was leader of North Korea during the Korean War was actually competent and well-liked. His son and grandson are not nearly held in such high regard, so much so that when Kim II died, it was debated whether he should even be buried next to his father.

North Korea is a state that is destined to collapse and has nukes. The US didn’t intervene when it had the chance, so now we’re just gonna have to see what happens when Kim’s increasingly aware and rebellious population is able to revolt.

He's pretty fucking bad, and I think he only became president because his dad killed JFK

That has little to do with the point that we already tried and failed to attack them and they got WMDs anyway.

Not history. 25 year rule.

>we already tried and failed to attack them
You mean Kim Il Sung got Soviet support and decided to attack first in light of the Commies winning in China?
Seriously at least get you correct facts on the OG war my man
fun fact, he had a massive calcium deposit on the back of his head from the late 70s on, which meant he was only photographed or taped (usually) at specific angles to hide it a la FDR

t. reddit
They found components of WMDs in Iraq no too long ago.
>start a war as soon as possible leading to a stil ongoing conflict in afghanistan
FDR joined in on WWII after Pearl Harbor, are you saying we shouldn't do anything in the face of attacks?
spectator.org/39856_taking-sledgehammer-ataturk/
>Then the economy ceashed and he did pretty much nothing about it
What was TARP?

>components of WMD

Lol. Did the mocking birds of CIA tell you that?

kim il-sungs shit economic policies led directly to the disaster of the '90s. hardly competent.

They didn’t start to develop WMDs until the past 20 years. Why we went to North Korea the 1st time and why there was an argument to be made that we should have gone to war with them a second time are completely different.

The first time the US was overly ambitious about stopping the spread of communism which there is no reason to care about anymore. Acquiring nuclear weapons though is something different altogether. Going to war with Vietnam was also stupid, but nobody is arguing the US should declare war on them now. They’re a quickly developing country who’s now an ally of the US, not trying to build nukes, and not run by a tyrannical regime. North Korea is such a dangerous unstable state that even China has admitted regret in enabling them to get to the point they are now.

usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/10/16/new-york-times-reports-wmd-found-in-iraq
referenced NY Times article
nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html

This too
nypost.com/2010/10/25/us-did-find-iraq-wmd/

>The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West.
did you even read your own bloody link? undercuts your argument.

>Jew York Times
Kek

Do you know what propaganda is?

I'd say he's in the bottom ten. Nixon is way better than Bush or Trump, it's just his paranoia got in his own way, otherwise he was a great leader. Bush meant well and followed his heart, but he stumbled here and there.