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Wow, they wouldn't even let the man build up some good karma after directly causing the death of over a million people.
Nah, they let him do some:
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/28/1159415936/george-w-bushs-anti-hiv-program-is-hailed-as-amazing-and-still-crucial-at-20
His program for helping manage HIV/AIDs in Africa is still viewed very positively.
Dubya was a mixed bag and I often felt like he got the rawest deal out of the war on terror. He was a true believer, he famously told Jacques Chirac that he thought the biblical demons Gog and Magog were at work in the middle east. He truly thought he needed to save the world. I think he was naive and was basically used by the neoconservatives around him. That doesn't excuse any of it, being a true believer led him to signing off on true atrocities. However, it makes me view him as more of a mixed bag of a person who may not have signed off on so many atrocities and might have done more genuinely good things if he had a less evil team managing him from behind the scenes. People didn't call Dick Cheney Darth Vader for nothing, the people around Bush were far more legitimately purposefully evil than him, in my eyes. Bush still signed off on war crimes though, so it's hard to have that much sympathy. I used to think that being a true believer was his worst quality and why things went so badly and it made me think being a true believer was the most dangerous quality you could have in a leader. Well, Trump taught me that believing in nothing at all is far, far worse.
Don't take away his agency by way of religion. He knew exactly what he was doing.
https://youtu.be/lrnaqpkBmOA
I don't think I'm taking away his agency. I'll even quote myself.
His agency is defined by his religion, his religion is why he was so sure he was doing the right thing without any self-reflection on the human consequences of the millions of lives lost in Iraq. He was justifying it as a means to an end to win a Holy War. That's pretty horrific.
I do think he actually wanted to do good in the world, but yes, true believers of religion are often blinded to the suffering they're making happen because they're so sure that the suffering needs to happen for God to love them. That's why I thought being a true believer was a dangerous quality in a leader, because they don't have the capacity to self reflect on how horrific their decisions are due to the fact that in their mind the ends justify the means in the name of God. That's still his own agency choosing to ignore the horrors he wrought because he believed it needed to happen in God's name. Religion didn't force that viewpoint upon him, there are plenty of pacifist religious people, it was a choice he made in the name of his religion.
I suppose that makes sense.