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In retrospect, though, it seems clear that he arrived in the White House surrounded by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other twisted neocons who were determined to topple Saddam Hussein given any excuse, or none at all.
It seems clear, in retrospect?
I actually completely disagree with Joan Walsh on her assertion that people who voted for Bush didn't think he'd bring the nation to war. Most of the people who voted for Bush knew exactly what they were getting — a swaggering, hyperaggressive stick-swinger who was going to show those limp-wristed nicey-nice Democrats a thing or two about how to run the world. Of course he would also pay lip service to humility, just like Reagan did, but everyone knew that was just for effect.
What's more, after 8 years of amnesia a lot of them believed explicitly that what had doomed Bush, Sr, was his failure to "finish the job in Iraq" (as if the Gulf War, as undertaken, had in some way gone unfinished).
That wasn't just some kind of secret neocon passphrase — it was a commonly-held, if somewhat squishy, opinion.
If Bush voters were fooled it was by their man's illusion of competence, not some belief that he was going to be a quiet president or that Iraq would never be revisited.
The people who were fooled on that score were centrist liberals, who failed to see in Bush's career, his campaign, his choice of advisers, the 2000 coup, and the disastrous early months of his first term, the five-alarm fire bells going off.
When the history of this age is written, it will not treat George W Bush kindly. But it will treat contemporary liberal thinkers far less so — Bush was merely a symptom of their disease.
Nothing illustrates that more clearly than "in retrospect, though, it seems clear..."
