On George W. Bush’s first trip to Washington after the notorious Supreme Court Bush v. Gore decision, he told the press “If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier just so long as I’m the dictator.”
This reminds me of an observation of former Israeli Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky in his book “By Way of Deception.”

The Mossad considers Syria a “whim” country. Simply put, this means that since it is run by one man, Assad, he can wake up one morning and say, “I want to go to war.”
- Victor Ostrovsky, By Way of Deception, p. 236

While we certainly aren’t the model democracy we’re told about in school, Bush’s fantasies about absolute power don’t resemble Assad in Syria or Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Decisions of the importance to invade Iraq require agreement among the elites: political, media, Wall Street and the rest of what President Eisenhower called the military industrial complex.