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Bush Detractors: Unpatriotic?

I would maintain that criticizing George Bush for his 'cowboy diplomacy' is absolutely fair. That doesn't, however, suggest that I think we should subordinate ourselves to world opinion or defer to European sophisticates on matters of our national security. Rather, I would have expected a leader with any kind of natural talent to have understood the basic tenets of leadership: specifically, that to lead, one must get people to follow. Bush's disdain for consensus building, his absolute lack of self-doubt and introspection, his conclusions drawn from information filtered through an inner circle of like-minded ideologues - it's these things that gave him the deserved reputation in the world community - and at home - of a gun-slinging cowboy. Without 'blindly imitating' the mistakes of early 20th century Europe (i.e. Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, among other idiocies), was it too much to ask for Bush to have spent half the effort his dad did in the first Gulf War, gathering a coalition of freedom-loving countries to follow America's moral imperative, thereby assuring the outcome we were looking for in the Middle East? Having failed to do so was a dereliction of his leadership role.

I'm so offended by Sowell's (perhaps intentional??) misinterpretation of this argument, and so tired of Bush detractors being dismissed as unpatriotic.