WI George Bush doesn't get gun shy

Minty_Fresh

Banned
George W. Bush in his second term sort of changed up how he approached the use of force, as is well documented. He refuted calls to bomb Syria's nuclear facilities in 2007, and made sure that Israel went in on that alone. He also did not bomb Iran in 2008 and stopped Israel's Labour leadership from doing so as well. He did not interfere in Sudan, nor did he lift a finger to the Russian invasion of Georgia.

A lot of this has been attributed to his change up in advisors, with Condi Rice and the realists having more influence than in his first term, where the focus was more with Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and the influence of the neoconservative school of thought.

Its unclear what this meant long term. Some thought that Bush did this as a way to try to make more progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, which he did spend a lot more time on. That however was a case of too little too late. Others figured that Bush reverted back to the ideas he campaigned on in 2000, which were skeptical of interventionism and the use of force, or that he felt betrayed by those who had given him counsel in his first term.

Regardless of the reason, however, how do you change this? Is there any way that there isn't a turnover in counsel and advice that leads to this change?
 

Minty_Fresh

Banned
I think maybe a good place to start for this kind of set up is the inevitable replacement of Colin Powell not with Condi Rice but rather with a figure like Eliott Abrams or Douglas Feith.
 
Bush stated becoming gun shy by 2004. I wouldn't have just read Assad the riot act in 2004 when it became clear he had accepted his territory to be Zarqawi's supply lines to attack Iraq and it would have saved countless Iraqi and American lives.

Bush started getting gun shy way before his second term, the decision to call off the first Battle of Fallujah in the middle of it was an epic catastrophe.
 
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