Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Victor Davis Hanson: If you look at George W. Bush, people—his reputation has gone up a little bit because he broke with [Donald] Trump, the next Republican. I’m not sure he voted for Trump, and he made his peace with [Barack] Obama.   There were three things that people fault Bush for. I’m not sure he was responsible. No. 1 was the Iraq War. No. 2 was the Afghan War. No. 3 was the 2008 financial meltdown. I think he was the most conservative Republican president that we have had since forever.  He was much more conservative than his father, George H.W. Bush. He tried to do a lot of things. I think part of the problem was they thought they could deal with the Democrats. So, they did things like prescription-drug entitlement and things in education that didn’t work out. But they thought that the Left would appreciate that magnanimity, and they interpreted that as weakness.  So, when you look at Iraq, on the plus side of the ledger, after 9/11, we were told that they were going to blow up airliners, 10 or 11 of them, in the Philippines. We uncovered a lot of al-Qaeda plots, and there were a lot of foiled efforts. And for all the false WMD narratives about Saddam [Hussein], we really never knew what happened to the WMDs.  We knew he had them, and they might have gone to Syria because we know they were used later by the Assad government in Syria. But that hurt him when Colin Powell went before the United Nations and said, “This is WMD, and they’re going to do this and this and this.”   But that being said, Iraq never quite degenerated like Afghanistan.  So, today they actually are working with the United States to expel Iranian influencers. And they do have elections. And we have Americans still there advising the Iraqi government.   Was it worth all those deaths and mayhem and casualties? I don’t know. We’ll see, but I don’t think it was. I supported the war, and I’m someone who supported it to the end.  The only thing that was very bad for Bush is the people who really had called for that war was the Committee for the New American Century. That was Bill Kristol, Fareed Zakaria, Robert Kagan bipartisan effort. And almost all of those people turned on the war, not so much as Richard Perle did or David Frum— all of those neocons did.  And then, you know, as Matthew Ridgway said, “The only worse thing than a bad war is losing it.” So Bush was orphaned, is what I’m saying. There were a lot of conservative scholars, neocons, that said, “You’ve got to go and deal with this, and then if you knock him out and you put a consensual government, it will spread like wildfire.”  That didn’t happen. It did corral Iran for a few years. And then the Afghanistan thing—it was a brilliant campaign. We removed the Taliban in eight weeks. We had a government there, the Karzai government. Everything was going well, and then we diverted a lot of resources to Iraq.  But the problem was everybody said the Afghan war was the good war because it was stable and the Taliban were in hiding and regrouping, and Iraq was the bad war. Why didn’t we just get a Karzai? Why didn’t we just do it like Afghanistan?  Well, the problem was Afghanistan was always the problem. It was landlocked. It had no ports. It was in a terrible neighborhood. The terrain was terrible. The weather was terrible. The Taliban were completely fanatic. They were being supported all around their borders.  We had to deal with the Chinese, with the Russians, with the Pakistanis. Iraq was flat. It was arid. The weather was clear. We had access to a port, and the Iraqi people were somewhat industrialized and educated compared to Afghanistan.  So, once people kept saying that Afghanistan was a good war, but when Obama just pulled all the troops out of Iraq, Iraq had a bumpy period. It was stable.   When Obama took office, there were fewer Americans dying in Iraq each week than the accident rate. It was stable.  And then he pulled out and he said, don’t worry, ISIS are JVs. And the ISIS people took over. Then we came back in under Trump and bombed the blank out of them.  And so, Iraq is a work in progress, but it’s better than under Saddam Hussein. But I don’t know if it was worth the cost in American lives.   I think Americans feel that not one American is worth what—when you see the stuff that’s going on in the Middle East and the idea that we’re going to go over there and try to change their minds, I don’t think so.  It’s more worrisome that they’re coming over here and trying to change our minds.  And then very quickly, the financial—that was a Democratic project in Congress, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.   Sami Winc: You mean the 2008 financial crash?   Hanson: Yes. That was the idea that we needed to get homeownership up over 60%.  And we had these subprime loans to people who were not qualified. And then even the interest sometimes was adjusted because they were bad risks, so they couldn’t make the interest payments anyway. It was all speculating on people on Wall Street.  Barney Frank was right at the middle of that. He was in the House Banking Committee, and he was basically calling people racist who were opposing these reckless loans and the speculation.  So, all these banks were making these loans, and then they were saying they were guaranteed by the federal government. But the guarantees of the federal government covered what—5%, 2% of the loan portfolio?  So, when one started to go, everybody wanted to—they all started to default. And then the people who were covering the default didn’t have the capital, and the government had to step in.  And that said, people sometimes forget that happened in September. So, there was the end of September, one; October, two; November, three; December, four; and January, five.  When Obama came into office, things were stabilized. If he had just let the actual market forces continue, we wouldn’t have had that 9% unemployment and 0% or 1% growth for his first five years.  He made it a lot worse with all those crazy programs—Cash for Clunkers, Obama phones, those huge deficits. It didn’t do any good at all, among other things.  Bush did some good things on the conservative side. The only thing that I really disagreed with him—he had tax cuts, and he came in with a surplus that the Gingrich-Clinton compromises for the last four years under [Bill] Clinton had given us.  He came in—we were in a mild recession. The dot-com boom had busted. So, he thought tax cuts would spur growth, but he didn’t insist on budget cuts.  So, we started this cycle where we were working to pay off the debt, and he cut taxes, and he actually got some more revenue for a while, and then all the spending—like prescription drugs, No Child Left Behind, all these massive programs.  It wasn’t representative. I hope Trump looks at that. I hope when these midterms are over, he really recalibrates and reboots DOGE, and then if he’s going to have these big tax cuts—and they’ve already hit—we’re going to have deficits unless we start cutting, cutting, cutting.  Winc: Yeah. Well, Victor, we need to go to a break and then come back.  Hanson: Oh, I should say one last thing—that George Bush was treated, I think, very unfairly by a lot of American people. They call him—all this idea that Trump is unusual and we’ve never called a president a fascist or a Nazi—  Al Gore said Bush and [Dick] Cheney were digital brown shirts. [Angela] Merkel said it was the old Nazi thing. John Glenn said that.  That was mainstream. He was the first president that they really called a Nazi. The Left hated George Bush, and they hated Cheney.  And then, as always happens, when the next Republican came, they transferred their hate and said, “Trump is now the new Nazi, and those other guys, they weren’t that bad. We like them.”  And they said that exactly about George H.W. Bush. They said, “He’s a wimp. He’s a fascist. But compared to W, we like him.”  And they said the same thing about [Ronald] Reagan. “He’s a fascist. He’s horrible. He’s terrible. But compared to George H.W. Bush, who’s a meanie and went to war, we kind of like Reagan.”  And that’s what they always do.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.