George Bush

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The environment is fine, and alternative fuel sources are not economically viable at this time. When the price of oil starts to rise (apart from short-term fluctuations like we've been seeing), then we'll see some real momentum in alternative energy research.

History will record George W. as one of the worst presdients ever.
He is already the worst president in recorded history.

"America's military budget is almost $400 billion dollars. Less than ten percent of that would be more than enough to perfect existing alternative fuel sources and leave oil, with the greed, torture, and murder it brings, in our past. The money spent on this unprovoked invasion alone would have been enough to make significant strides in the technologies."

The environment may be "fine" at the moment, but it's not going to sustain the current level of exploitation for long. The government should have and could have begun fixing the situation a long time ago.

No way. Bush defeated the Taliban in five weeks. He defeated Saddam in three weeks. The war in Iraq is probably the greatest American victory since World War 2.
What will people remember Clinton for? Clinton was a guy who wasted his time thinking he could talk peace with vile, terrorist thugs like Yasser Arafat.

The first Bush defense budget went into effect on Oct. 1, 2002. ...
During the 1990s, the Pentagon invested more than $1 trillion in developing and procuring new weapons and information technology that gave U.S. forces such an unprecedented advantage in the last two U.S. military campaigns. But more significant than the budget increases was the shift that occurred in the mid-1990s. That shift involved much greater emphasis on precision weapons, sensors, robotics, advanced communications, training, readiness, and orienting the intelligence community toward direct support of military operations. It was that shift that produced the superb military that not only swept through Iraq at a rate that defied historical precedent, but used its awesome force with unprecedented precision and effect, unprecedented low collateral damage, and unprecedented low casualty rates. It was the American Revolution in Military Affairs begun in the Clinton administration that was unveiled in Bush's Operation Iraqi Freedom... The Clinton administration also tried to maintain the quality of military personnel by increasing their pay, and it improved retirement and health benefits for military retirees.

During his presidential campaign Bush charged that the Clinton administration had overburdened the U.S. military with too many deployments overseas, and he promised to pare those military obligations. "Resources are overstretched," he said. "Frustration is up, as families are separated and strained. Morale is down. Recruitment is more difficult. And many of our best people in the military are headed for civilian life."

Yet in the name of fighting terrorism, Bush is expanding the U.S. military presence overseas faster than Clinton ever dreamed of doing. U.S. forces are not only deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Bush administration has sent advisers and support to the Philippines, Indonesia, Kuwait, Djibouti, Qatar, Yemen, Georgia, and Uzbekistan. The extra $70 billion a year that the administration has pumped into the Pentagon has bought more smart bombs and bigger paychecks, but it has not brought about a significantly larger force. Despite our expanded global war on terrorism, only about 27,000 troops have been added to our 1.4 million active-duty force.

Even with these troop additions, the military is more overstretched now than it was when Bush took office. During the first three months of 2003, the United States had more than twice as many troops on overseas missions at any given time as it did in 2000. This has made it harder to recruit and keep the soldiers, sailors, and airmen we already have. Bush did not create military overstretch, but he did campaign on fixing it. Instead, it has gotten worse.

The United States is still fighting insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

We didn't need to invade Iraq to provide security in the region or for American safety.
Fact is the region is far more insecure now that we are there, it's also costing a whole lot more.

From http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 67,00.html

Iraq's message to Mr Blair: we still need the troops that saved us from tyranny
Jalal Talabani, President of Iraq

EVENTS OF recent weeks have reaffirmed the need for the alliance between the new Iraq and Britain. The lesson of the ghastly drumbeat of terrorism, the rioting in Basra and the vile murder of the leadership of the Iraqi Anglican Church is that the battle of Iraq cannot be won by retreat or compromise, but by the vision and determination for which Britain is renowned. Above all, Britain owes no apology for delivering the enslaved people of Iraq from the hands of a callous tyranny.
The challenge is to show fortitude in the face of horror so that we can finish the job that began in 2003 of uprooting dictatorship and implanting a democratic government. Reforming Iraq, restoring a society distorted by fascism, was never going to be easy.

The alternative — to pretend that sanctions were working and that Saddam Hussein was contained — was an illusion. As has now been established, the United Nations Oil-for-Food programme was corrupt in root and branch. Saddam manipulated Oil-for-Food to become his personal chequebook for a campaign of international bribery and a trough from which his psychopathic progeny supped. Saddam’s regime openly declared in August 2001 that the sanctions had collapsed. Indeed, in 2003, as Saddam proclaimed his innocence to the world, his envoys were in Syria to negotiate the purchase of North Korean long-range missiles.

The Baathist regime, guilty of aggression and genocide, was overturned because Britain and the United States had courageously enforced the UN Security Council resolutions that others would barely support with words. Today the painstaking effort to enable Iraqis to express their views freely is also grounded in international legality. Foreign troops are in Iraq on the basis of a Security Council resolution, just as Iraq was liberated through the enforcement of 17 such resolutions that Saddam chose to flout.

Those who preferred the stability of the mass grave to liberation, and who raised their voices to save Saddam, but not his victims, have spuriously claimed that the war was fought to discover stocks of weapons of mass destruction. But Rolf Ekeus, the first head of the UN weapons inspectors, has argued that stocks were not the issue. Saddam could always re-create his stocks and until the end he could restart mustard gas production within months and nerve gas production within a couple of years. Moreover, Saddam used chemical weapons casually, gassing 5,000 Kurdish civilians at Halabja in 1988 and then using chemical bombs against Shia Arab civilians in 1991 — after the Gulf War ceasefire.

It is from this perspective, of the need to rebuild Iraq after decades of being run by a criminal state, that I have come to ask Tony Blair to keep British troops in Iraq. There are very few countries whose armed forces have the broad range of skills that Britain’s do, skills vital to the sometimes volatile situation in Iraq and skills that have been evident in your troops’ impressive performance.

While Iraq has often proved unpredictable, substantial progress has been made in rehabilitating a country that from the moment of its British colonial creation in 1921 was a failed state. Unfortunately, many in Britain are unaware of the advance of Iraqi democracy and of the desire of its first democratically elected government to have British and other foreign troops remain. Instead, some parts of the media have elevated the hooligans of Basra into tribunes of the people.

The stone throwers of Basra do not speak for the 8.5 million Iraqis who defied terrorist violence to vote on January 30, 2005. Nor do they speak for the vast majority of Iraqis whose democratically chosen representatives negotiated a final constitution in record time. That constitution reflects the realities of today’s Iraq and is, like the March 2004 interim charter, a remarkably progressive document. No constitution elsewhere in the Islamic Middle East is as democratic.

Similarly, those who attack mosques and churches, who murder schoolchildren and labourers, who behead foreigners and who kidnap humanitarian workers are not engaged in “resistance”. Those sabotaging Iraq’s first democracy bear no resemblance to the resistors of foreign occupation in wartime Europe. Rather, they are, in their ideology and record, contemporary representatives of the fascism that wreaked such havoc 60 years ago in Europe. They are supremacists and racists, as worthy of our contempt as those who practised apartheid in South Africa.

Nor do these terrorists have a popular base. They are drawn from a minority within Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority. They have no political wing and no manifesto beyond punishing their fellow Iraqis for welcoming British and American liberation and for daring to vote. Many of the suicide terrorists are not even Iraqis, but foreigners driven by religious fanaticism and al-Qaeda’s death cult — the poisonous gift of the Arab world that supported Saddam and now vilifies our nascent democracy.

There are occasional immoral voices that call for a new dictatorship to be installed in Iraq as, they claim, a less laborious means of imposing order. Order is certainly important, but so is freedom. A restored dictatorship in Iraq will be neither friendly nor benign. Animated by vengeance and fed by oil, a new dictatorship will again seek to make Iraq into the Arab Prussia and the overlord of the Gulf, goals that Iraqi regimes before Saddam aspired to.

To abandon us now would be murderously irresponsible and cynical. The resulting devastation would outstrip that of the spring of 1991, when the Kurdish and Shia Arab uprisings were encouraged and then betrayed. Even Saddam’s regime conceded that during those few weeks in 1991 that some 30,000 were killed. The true number was many times higher.

Building democracy in Iraq is not a fanciful quest, but a recognition that all other approaches have failed. True stability comes from consent, not from the illusory “stability” of dictatorships. It is therefore in our mutual interest that we pursue the cause of democracy. We may falter, we may tire, but if we persevere, we shall not be defeated.

It was the security of the Middle East that was allowing terrorism to flourish. There were terrorist training camps in Iraq before the invasion. The links between Saddam and Al Qaeda have been well-established, though rarely reported by the leftist media in the West. Saddam and Al Qaeda had an agreement whereby Al Qaeda would refrain from attacking Iraq in return for Iraq sponsoring Al Qaeda's worldwide terror campaign.

It would obviously be better for the world if every Arab country was democratic.

Anyway, now that Saddam has gone, American troops don't need to bother defending that craphole country, Saudi Arabia anymore.