The title of the editorial said it all:
The Guardian view on George W Bush: a welcome return.
In a tongue-in-cheek, almost jovial, piece the Guardian unsubtly rehabilitated a man responsible for crimes that are among the most egregious in all history.
Bush was responsible for the destruction of an entire country, the killing of one million Iraqis, the wounding and displacement of countless millions more. The car bombs, the suicide bombs, the mass executions, the dead-of-night disappearances, the blow torch and electric drill tortures, the bombs in London and Madrid, the rise of Islamic State, and much, much more – they all began with George W. Bush.
But the Guardian japed:
During his time in the White House, George W Bush was regarded as a warmonger and hardline conservative. As president he did an awful lot to polarise the country and was viewed as such a threat to world peace that when he left office the Nobel committee handed his successor the peace prize – for not being him.
The piece continued:
It says a lot about the United States that Mr Bush can be seen now as a paragon of virtue. He sounds a lot better out of office than in it.
And so ‘the 43rd US president should be applauded’.
Not a single syllable was uttered about his literally millions of victims.
It is unthinkable, of course, that the Guardian would ‘welcome’ the return of an Assad, or a Putin, or any Official Enemy, in this way. But it is ‘normal’ for a newspaper that tirelessly…