Word: bushing
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...Omnipotence Obama's effort to downsize the war on terrorism is partly a function of personality and mostly a function of circumstance. George W. Bush loathed what he called "small ball." He saw both his father's presidency and Bill Clinton's as inconsequential and yearned to invest his own with world-historical significance. After 9/11, he immediately began comparing the war on terrorism to World War II and the Cold War - a global, generation-defining struggle against an enemy of vast military and ideological power that would transform whole chunks of the world...
...Obama, by contrast, doesn't need to go hunting for grand challenges. From preventing a depression to providing universal health care to stopping global warming, he has them in spades. Bush could afford to define the war on terrorism broadly because he didn't think anything going on at home was nearly as important. Obama, on the other hand, must find space (and money) for what he sees as equally grave domestic threats. Bush loved the ominous, elastic noun terrorism. Obama, according to an analysis by Politico, has publicly uttered the words health and economy twice as often as terrorism...
...Obama is also shrinking the war on terrorism because, although he won't say so out loud, he's scaled back Bush's assessment of American power. When Bush invaded Iraq, the U.S. was coming off a decade of low-cost military triumphs - from Panama in 1989 to the Gulf War in 1991 to Bosnia in 1995 to Kosovo in 1999. And back then, Afghanistan looked like a triumph too. It was easy to believe that the U.S. military - through a combination of force and threats of force - could prevail over a slew of hostile regimes and movements...
...blank check. And ideologically, violent, illiberal movements like Hamas, Hizballah and the Taliban have proved that they have deeper roots in native soil than the Bushies assumed. At West Point, Obama said he would not "set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means or our interests." Bush never spoke in that language of limits...
...Narrowing the Struggle Practically, this exercise in subtraction starts with Iran. By defining the U.S.'s enemy as "terror," Bush implied that Iran was as big a problem as al-Qaeda. After all, Tehran's mullahs began sponsoring terrorism before al-Qaeda was even born. In so doing, Bush made normal relations with the Islamic Republic virtually impossible. While he didn't actually declare war on Tehran, he initiated the coldest of cold wars: threats of force, no diplomacy and an ideological campaign aimed at making the regime crack...