Did George Bush Ignite the Arab Spring?

If Al Gore became the president in 2000 the US would of undoubtedly not invaded Iraq.  I hope we would have gone into Afghanistan although that is uncertain.  The take of most people was that the invasion of Iraq was justified by blatantly incorrect information and that Bush pushed us into it.  Iraq has been a very costly war in terms of money and life on both sides.  No-one regrets the loss of Saddam Hussein but people often question whether we should have done it.  For years many people, including me, have argued that it was tremendous and costly mistake that only served to energize anti-American sentiment across the middle-east.

As a consequence the US take over of Iraq the first Arab democracy in the middle-east was created.  The new Iraqi government is tremendously dysfunctional and may not last very long.  That said, it did provide a model for other middle-eastern countries of a state where the dictator was overthrown and replaced by something resembling a democracy.  The Iraqis have had several elections and are, at least partially, attempting to move forward using the messy process of democratic rule.  One can't help but wonder if it wasn't at least one of the inspirations for the democracy movements that have sprouted during the Arab Spring.  During the run-up to the start of the Iraq invasion Bush argued that the Arabs were ready for democracy.  I am sure he feels some amount of vindication by the events of the last year.  His rederik at the time made it sound like he wanted to be the Simon Bolivar of the middle-east.  Thank god popular sentiment prevented him from going further.  If the US tried to "liberate" more countries we would have been demonized even more and there could have been a pronounced backlash.  The way things went and are continuing to unfold, with the US very reticent to get involved, is probably best in the long run.