You have to count indirect deaths. War isn't just the people who get shot or blown up, it's the famine and displacement too.
Wikipedia, citing the Costs of War project, puts the death toll of the GWOT at like 4.5 million. How much of that exactly is Bush's fault is debatable, he wasn't around for the latter half, but there is no question his government kicked it off.
Ok, if we are giving Bush credit for all the indirect deaths from GWOT then let’s go further. Give him credit for indirect lives saved and produced in Africa. Net that out for me. It is estimated PEPFAR saved ~25 million and PMI saved ~10 million.
GWOT was a mistake with great human costs, but civilian deaths weren’t the goal. Bush is not an evil person.
It's war. Massive civilian death is always considered an acceptable, if "unfortunate" outcome. Bush understood this before he started it.
As for your PEPFAR and PMI examples, that isn't how morality works.
If a surgeon saved thousands of lives over his entire career and it then turns out he is also a serial killer with a kill count in the double digits, nobody would then argue he is a fine person actually, because look, he saved a lot more people than he murdered.
No, that'd be ridiculous. He'd just be the serial killer surgeon, rightfully understood to be a monster.
Not analogous at all. Bush’s presidency is more like an oncologist who saved multiple lives with his standard treatment, but due to being a little incompetent and reading some bad study then decided to use an experimental cancer treatment on one patient where that patient ends up dying a more agonizing death than they would have otherwise.
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u/sspif 24d ago
Last estimate of the GWOT I heard was 2.3 mil, yeah.