His approval ratings seem to indicate so.
I don't get it. Should he have done this? Was there ever any reason to believe he would have?
And plunged them into a civil war that has caused millions of deaths and displaced persons.
And they're still there.

I have no interest in a really long and protracted political argument (I have other outlets for that) but I think it's important to look at the other side of things. Bush may have had good intentions at first; I don't doubt that. But he failed to achieve tangible results.

I think that Obama will get a second term. People might be angry but if I understand America's politcal system, if Obama doesn't win then a Republican will. I think enough people are tired of them by now.

The trend for the past 200 years is to vote in a Republican who is tight with the money, keeps the budget, keeps taxes low and wins wars. After a republican, they ALWAYS vote in a democrat, because democrats have more of a heart, but they end up bankrupting the nation, and we get our buts kicked in war (or spend so much money fighting it, that it would have been better to lose). After WWII, and the Civil War we had democrats to rebuild the country and have more social awareness, then we vote in a republican after we've spent all our money Americans inherently WANT a Democrat, but we NEED a Republican. That's the way it's been since George Washington. There's a fragile dichotomy within every American. We all know we need universal health care, and we need to help the Haitians, but after we do those things, we like to tighten our belts. I think we Americans do that in our real life too. We want to help the battered, divorced mother, but THEN we want the flat screen.

It was a Democratic president who won WWII and a Republican who lost Vietnam.
Isn't this exactly what Republicans just did?

Actually, the parties switched sides since the mid 1880's. Democrats became the new Republicans.
But Am. History was not my calling, so I am not emphatic about the statements made.

Democrats could never claim that they wanted to win in Viet Nam and were very critical of LBJ's efforts in that country, so when President Ford allowed the South to be defeated there were no Democratic objections. We had simply become exhausted with all those years of fighting and bombing.

point of order:

no president or political party has ever 'won a war' that claim goes to the military members who were actually involved

remember presidents take a monstrous amount of advice from chief military advisers

political parties, per se, aren't involved at all in military decisions

please...continue

I don't think there is such a wall of separation between the political and military spheres. If there were such a wall, we would have won that war, since we had an overwhelming technological advantage. I once met a veteran who commanded a PT boat on a river in Viet Nam and he told me that there were some zones along the river where he was under orders not to fire back when fired upon. All he could do was position the boat to minimize exposure to the incoming bullets. Remember that back in the Korean war MacArthur tried to do his own thing and was sacked by Truman.

i think you might be confusing national politics, international politics and internal military politics

while these tend to be influenced by each of the others, they do have independent axises

also, Truman dismissed MacArthur for direct insubordination and for publicly denouncing the American strategy in Korea

this does not mean that Truman won the war

My general point in all this is that when we become involved in wars that are not formally declared according to the Constitution we become bogged down in these conflicts and that "mission creep" sets in. It really doesn't matter which political party the President belongs to. Generally speaking, the Democratic party has a dovish tilt and the Republican party has a hawkish tilt. But this doesn't allow one to predict what decisions a President from either party will make in the conduct of one these "police actions". For instance, I've heard that Obama is killing more Al-Qaida or Taliban members per month by ordering the use of lethal drone rockets than the "hawkish" Bush did. Somehow the doves in the Democratic party are not affecting him as they would like. This kind of war can't be fought with only military tactics in mind. Various political agendas come into play and act to frustrate a sound military strategy. I am thinking of the failure of Bush to capture Bin Ladin at Tora-Bora as an example. It seems that simply being willing to engage in a conflict without any prospect of clear victory is what matters to today's politician. We don't want to be seen abandoning these projects.