The Origin

It all started here.

The journey actually began with a PowerPoint presentation at the Pentagon in 2002.
It was at a routine meeting of a Pentagon advisory board that Rand analyst Laurent Murawiec (whose public resume bizarrely includes a fling with LaRouche and just about nothing else) laid out a philosophy based on the old addage "When it rains on the Tigris, Egyptians open their umbrellas."

There are probably infinite variations of that phrase. Creating democracies in Iraq and Egypt was the crux of the presentation.

One person, however, borrowed the Baghdad/Cairo concept and made it the centerpiece of his Middle East strategy. He did so against the very strong urgings of every human being who has studied the history of the Middle East or been involved in Middle East diplomacy. "This is a different place with different rules...", we told him. "You're being naive. They're going to chew us up and spit us out...". We begged him to listen. He didn't. And now we're very close to the point where historians will be naming George Bush as the founding father of democracy in the Middle East.

This is what impresses me the most about Bush. I disagree with him on many levels. He's not charismatic in the traditional sense. But vision is the thing that drives leadership. No president has had the long term vision that Bush has on any issue for decades.
Except Reagan.

Hat tip to Instapundit.