Previous USA president.

George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) was the forty-third President of the United States of America. He previously served as the forty-sixth Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000 and is the eldest son of former United States President George Herbert Walker Bush. He was inaugurated as President on January 20, 2001 and his term ended on January 20, 2009.

After graduating from Yale University, Bush worked in his family's oil businesses. In 1978, he made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. House of Representatives. He later co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before returning to politics in a campaign for Governor of Texas. He defeated Ann Richards and was elected Governor of Texas in 1994. Bush was elected to the Presidency in 2000 as the Republican candidate in a close and controversial contest, in which he lost the nationwide popular vote, but won the electoral vote.

As president, Bush signed into law a $1.35 trillion tax cut program in 2001, and in 2002 the No Child Left Behind Act. In October 2001, after the attacks on September 11, 2001 in which the United States experienced first hand what the US government and CIA have done abroad, Bush announced a global War of Terror and ordered an invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, destroy Al-Qaeda, capture Osama bin Laden, and practice torture and illegal incarceration.  In March 2003, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, asserting that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and that the war was necessary for the protection of the United States. No weapons of mass destruction were found and the war continues to this day, with massive loss of life by civilians, economic damage and disruption to Iraq, an exodus of millions of refugees, enormous expense to US taxpayers, and substantial profits for privatized military services. Bush did not, however, order the invasion of two highly religious and potentially dangerous nuclear armed states, Pakistan and Israel, and Bush did not stop a massive 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon which killed at least a thousand civilians and destroyed infrastructure valued at billions, using US supplied equipment. Bush also failed to stop another US funded Israeli attack on Gaza in 2008, which also killed over a thousand civilians, used illegal weapons, and destroyed valuable infrastructure.

Running in the midst of the Iraq War, Bush was re-elected on November 2, 2004; his presidential campaign against Senator John Kerry was successful despite controversy over Bush's prosecution of the Iraq War and domestic issues. After his re-election, Bush received increasingly heated criticism. He has the distinction of having some of the highest and lowest approval ratings of any president in history during his term. His domestic approval ranged from 90 percent (the highest ever recorded by The Gallup Organization) immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks to a low of 24 percent,with a disapproval rating of 65 percent, the highest level of disfavor for any sitting presidents since Richard Nixon and Harry Truman.In Europe, Bush topped the list of the most unpopular politicians, with disapproval of 87% in France and Germany, and 88% in Spain.

Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says the US alone has spent three trillion dollars on the Iraq war. That is more than the twelve year Vietnam war, and creates a large debt which Stiglitz explains in his book The Three Trillion Dollar War.