Make no mistake: this was GWB's "harebrained scheme"

Some more from Digby on the claims that Bush was held back by the lack of will on the part of the American public.

Bush really believes he's some sort of Jesus-like figure and he's made his disasterous decisions without any regard to the desires of the public.He has made a fetish of it. He believes he is morally superior to the hoi polloi. To now say that he has been restrained by the people is ridiculous. When he got into office with a dubious one vote majority on the Supreme Court he governed as if he had a mandate. He never cared what the congress thought --- just ran roughshod over them. The man has always done exactly what he wanted to do.

The only public support he has ever cultivated (at Rove's careful direction) was the 35% or so of his red-meat base or the business interests that paid for his presidency. On foreign policy he operates from his "gut" which means that he picks and chooses, without analysis or informed knowledge, from a variety of advisors with no thought to coherence or how such decisions might be implemented. Even Cheney cannot adequately control him. It could just as easily be decisionmaking by Ouija board. The problem is not that the public failed to approve of Bush's harebrained schemes. The problem is Bush's scemes themselves.

The Iraq invasion was the result of an absurd amalgam of greed, rage, naivete and hubris that was Shakespearean in its complexity.

[...]

George W. Bush was very, very frightened after 9/11 and for a variety of motivations his administration persuaded him that killing the Iraq bear would make him feel better. The public's support or lack of support was irrelevant.