dendroica:

“Leading a nation whose citizens felt a mix of unbridled patriotism and raw fear after 9/11, Bush, Cheney, and their crowd abused those sentiments to gin up fervor for a war against a country that had zero connection to the 2001 attacks. Not unlike World War I, Americans have never been given an understandable rationale for a war that had something to do with Machiavellian machinations in a region rich with oil — an abstract exercise of American power that killed more then 4,000 very real Americans on top of those hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them innocent women and children. We do know this: To make their splendid little war happen, Bush and his minions lied again and again — about “ticking time bombs” that had been unplugged years earlier, about weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, and about ties between Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda that never were. The Iraq war has destabilized the Middle East to this day and paved the way for the rise of a new anti-American group called ISIS that remains a murderous scourge. And it made the world safe for oil, right at the moment when the planet’s survival depends on moving away from fossil fuels. The Iraq war alone should be disqualifying, but there’s so much more to this sordid story. Team Bush also manipulated the post-9/11 mood to bring back waterboarding and other forms of torture that are clearly illegal, thanks to a 1988 treaty enacted and praised by conservative icon Ronald Reagan. Detainees who were mostly innocent — rounded up by bounty hunters seeking easy cash — were both abused and held for years without charges at the Guantanamo prison camp, in a stunning betrayal of American values, while others were whisked to CIA black sites around the world or tortured at notorious prisons like Afghanistan’s Bagram or Iraq’s Abu Ghraib. The Bush administration also shredded the Fourth Amendment with its large-scale illegal wiretapping and surveillance of everyday Americans — which makes Sunday’s celebration of all things Bush by a center that honors the U.S. Constitution all the more bizarre. Of course, some of Bush’s unpopularity when he left the White House in January 2009 was the result of things — the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 economic collapse — that merely made W. a very bad president. But what happened in Iraq, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib made him a very bad person.”

— George W. Bush started an immoral war. Now he’s getting the Liberty Medal because nothing matters | Will Bunch