Simple: Bush thought some PowerPoint presentations were cool.
In the current issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows details a war game put on by the magazine. It involved a simulated conflict with Iran. The whole process was replicated: briefings, role-playing and prepared presentations. Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel, played the role of the National Security Advisor and presented an analysis using PowerPoint. Fallows describes the last set of slides:
Then there was option No. 3 (a land-invasion of Iran). Gardiner called this plan “moderate risk,” but said the best judgment of the military was that it would succeed. To explain it he spent thirty minutes presenting the very sorts of slides most likely to impress civilians: those with sweeping arrows indicating the rapid movement of men across terrain. (When the exercise was over, I told David Kay that an observer who had not often seen such charts remarked on how “cool” they looked. “Yes, and the longer you’ve been around, the more you learn to be skeptical of the ‘cool’ factor in PowerPoint,” Kay said. “I don’t think the President had seen many charts like that before,” he added, referring to President Bush as he reviewed war plans for Iraq.)
It is easy to imagine George Bush mesmerized by a bunch of flashing PowerPoint slides showing the “cakewalk” that was to be Iraq.