I commend to you all J. Peter Mulhern’s essay today in The American Thinker, Finding Wisdom in the Wreckage here. Mulhern, who first came to my attention during the Clinton impeachment as caller Peter from Annapolis on Rush’s show, argues that George W. Bush’s genuine “compassionate conservatism” doomed him as a war leader.

“…Blinding compassion is disabl(ed) Bush the war leader.

“In the aftermath of 9/11 any minimally responsible American government would have had to topple Saddam Hussein. We were at war with Hussein (yes, a real shooting war) and we were losing. When the twin towers fell we all knew, at some level, that the Arab world had challenged us. We couldn’t respond to that challenge by losing a war to our most vocal and visible Arab enemy. We had to assert our dominance, and Iraq, a major, oil-producing enemy just above the Arabian Peninsula, was the logical place to do it.

“George W. Bush was not the man for this job. Instead of pivoting out of Afghanistan and descending on Iraq like a biblical plague, he took a long detour through the United Nations to argue about flouted resolutions and weapons of mass destruction.

“When we finally got around to an invasion we had to put a humanitarian gloss on an essential demonstration of our power. Instead of Operation Arab Smackdown we got Operation Iraqi Freedom. This was the true blunder that turned Iraq from a political asset into a liability. This blunder belongs to George W. Bush and George W. Bush alone, even though Don Rumsfeld has now paid for it with his job.”