If Bush is that smart, what does that tell us about his questionable decisions on other things? Why start a war in Iraq based on WMD's that weren't there, and a government that was not in league with Osama bin Laden? Why start dragnet surveillance? Why let the CIA torture people? Why do the ridiculous tax cuts at the same time we're spending big dollar on a war?
If Bush is that smart, he must have good motives for those things, or if not good motive, hidden motives.
There's a lot of people whose intellectual credentials are unassailable that supported all of those programs. The differences in opinion come down to values and ideology, not intelligence.
I've always been a believer that smart people can come to very different conclusions on how to do things.
Just look at the number of people who fall within the Alan Kay camp of mutable state vs those who like Haskell.
Look at those who think Lisp should have ruled the world versus those who believe Prolog just never had a fair shake.
There's a bunch of issues that reasonable people can reasonably disagree on.
Granted when it comes to politics I believe all motivation is hidden because ture radicals can't win the vote by coming out and telling people they plan a revolution. They have to claim to be only slightly off center, then continually reframe the issue till people begin to see things their way.
Guantanamo Bay was a great example. If you'd asked Congress "do you want to authorize a secret camp to torture dissidents just offshore from the continental USA?" then they would have said no. Yet now that the camp exists, the question has been shifted to "Do you want to close our black-ops torture camp, and move all those people with grievances (legitimate or not) against us to your home state's prison system?"
Now even Congressmen who hate torture feel unwilling to go down in history as the one who let 'terrorists' into gen-pop, even if in fact our prison system is perfectly capable of handling dangerous individuals (like all the homegrown terrorists we have).
I can't see any scenario where deciding against extending surveillance in that manner is the wrong decision for the executive: the potential downside of not doing it is very high (in the event of an actual attack you will be hit by your opponents for endangering the public); the potential downside of doing it is only criticism from the very small number of voters who take communication privacy very seriously.
This isn't a counterpoint to Bush actually being intelligent, but the most convincing theory I've heard about the war in Iraq is that Sadam Hussein was going to sell oil for Euros instead of Dollars (and he had formally announced those plans). The idea is that speculation about future oil not being bought and sold in dollars would devalue the dollar as countries would hold less in their reserves, and this would start a more rapid cycle of devaluation.
EDIT: Looks like people don't even want to deal with this as a theory.
you should really parse the WMD stuff over again. The history on this is as follows: Post Iran-Iraq war Hussein had a WMD development program, and then the UN inspections regime came and put several of them "under seal". In the runup to the Iraq war, the US repeatedly asked where these sealed WMDs were and Hussein refused to disclose where they were or allow inspectors to see them, and the US spun that as implying that he COULD use them to supply terrorists with WMD (technically true, unlikely to actually happen). Ultimately, after invading the US found them, and they were still "under the UN seal", unable to be used in any military context.
The US also never argued that there was a direct connection with Bin Laden, just that Iraq was covertly supporting terrorism. Which is similarly flimsy, limitedly true, and definitely manipulative of the US public.
So, the Bush administration was incredibly deft at taking minor truths and spinning them in the public's mind as molehills that justified bigger action. Not to justify their actions, but in the strictest sense, Iraq did have WMDs, and Iraq did support terrorists.
And why did Hussein refuse to disclose where the WMDs where or allow inspectors to see them? Because he wanted to bluff neighboring countries (primarily Iran, I believe) into thinking that he had them and would use them in a pinch. But that bluff ran into the US's desire to control who had WMDs, with disastrous results.
If Bush is that smart, he must have good motives for those things, or if not good motive, hidden motives.