liveonearth

In particular, he objects to how Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reacted to 9/11. He feels they were too hawkish, taking a harsh, inflexible stance that tarnished America's reputation around the world.

"I don't know, he just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with," Bush told Meacham. "The reaction [to 9/11], what to do about the Middle East. Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East ..."

The elder Bush believes Cheney -- who had been his own defense secretary back when he held the White House -- acted too independently of his son. "The big mistake that was made was letting Cheney bring in kind of his own State Department," Bush said, apparently referring to the national security team that the vice president assembled in his office.

liveonearth

President Obama certainly inherited a mess in the Middle East. But his foreign policy has never broken decisively with the fatal conceit of the Bush administration: that America has the final and decisive say on the nature of the regimes in the Middle East. Obama has kept the imperial premise of American politics, without the will to commit the strength needed to actually make them effective.

-Michael Brandon Dougherty 11/3/15

http://theweek.com/articles/586515/obamas-catastrophic-syria-folly