This is anything but thinking about the dead:
In his memoir of his year in Baghdad as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer recalled that President Bush once told him that the leader of a new Iraqi government had to be “someone who’s willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq.”
Bremer noted that Bush made this point three times in the course of a single conversation and further insisted that the president of Iraq’s first interim government should be Ghazi al-Yawar, an obscure Sunni Arab businessman, because Bush “had been favorably impressed with his open thanks to the Coalition.”