George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is the 43rd and current President of the United States, inaugurated on January 20, 2001 and re-elected in the 2004 U.S. presidential election.
The Bush family has a significant history in the Republican Party and U.S. politics. Bush is the eldest son of the 41st U.S. President, George H. W. Bush, grandson to Prescott Bush, the former U.S. Senator from Connecticut, and older brother to Jeb Bush, former Governor of Florida. He became the 46th Governor of Texas in January 1995, resigning in December 2000, after being elected president.
Nine months into George W. Bush's presidency, nineteen hijackers sponsored by al Qaeda carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks. President Bush responded by declaring a global War on Terrorism, which would become one of the central issues of his presidency. In early October 2001 he ordered the invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda.[1] In March 2003, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, asserting that Iraq was in violation of UN Resolution 1441 regarding weapons of mass destruction and had to be disarmed by force in order to (1) adequately protect the United States from what he asserted was "a continuing threat from Iraq", and (2) take the "necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."[2] Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Iraq regime, Bush committed the U.S. to establishing democracy in the Middle East, starting with Afghanistan and Iraq.[3] President Bush's execution of the War on Terror, especially surrounding the Iraq War and the implementation of various related domestic policies designed to enhance the power of the presidency, would become the most enduringly controversial aspect of his presidency.
Bush was first elected in 2000, becoming the fourth president in U.S. history to be elected without a plurality of the popular vote after the 1824, 1876 and 1888 elections. As a self-described war president,[4] he won re-election in 2004[5] after an intense and heated election campaign in which his prosecution of the War on Terror and the Iraq war were made the central issues, becoming the first candidate to win a more than 50% of the total votes cast in the election since his father did so 16 years earlier.[6] In the previous three elections, strong showings by third-party candidates had prevented the popular plurality winners, Gore and Clinton, from winning a popular majority. [7]
After his re-election, Bush received increasingly heated criticism, even from former allies, on the Iraq War, Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandals, as well as domestic issues such as federal funding of stem cell research, Hurricane Katrina, and controversies such as NSA warrantless surveillance activities and the Plame affair. According to polls of job approval rating, his popularity reached record heights after the September 11, 2001 attacks, but later significantly declined, due to his perceived poor handling of the Iraq War.[8] It was one of the major reasons for what Bush called the "thumpin'" of the Republican Party in November 2006 mid-term elections.[9][10]
Courtesy of Wikipedia.
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