Eight years that changed America. Part II

8. Iraq. The Iraq war was a screw-up of such colossal magnitude that it's easy to forget how many discrete screw-ups went into the making of it. There were the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and the nonexistent links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. There's the humiliating spectacle of Secretary of State Colin Powell presenting hours of bogus testimony to the U.N. Security Council. There was Paul Wolfowitz's bizarre claim that the war would pay for itself, when the real price tag is now in excess of $1 trillion. And let us not forget the 4,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, more than 30,000 American soldiers wounded, and several million Iraqi refugees forced to flee their homes. A strategy that was supposed to bring U.S.-friendly democracy to the Middle East instead produced an empowered Iran and a more fragile balance of power in the region. The only thing more astonishing than the scope of these blunders is the fact that the former president does not regret his decision, even now.

9. Snubbing Iran, Again. In the midst of the "Mission Accomplished" euphoria that followed the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, a worried Iran sent a Swiss intermediary to Washington with a far-reaching offer for a "grand bargain," including an end to Iranian support for groups such as Hezbollah and a deal on Iran's nuclear energy program. The offer was reportedly approved by Iran's top leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Bush administration turned the Iranians down flat — why negotiate with the next candidate for regime change? — and Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reportedly reprimanded the Swiss ambassador for even delivering the message in the first place.

Instead of a possible rapprochement, America ended up with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran's president and a steadily worsening relationship with Tehran. Would a different response have left it in a better position today? We'll never know.

10. Sabotaging Peace in the Middle East. When Bush took office, he decided to put Israeli-Palestinian peace on the back burner, even though plenty of people warned him that the situation would only get worse if neglected. After 9/11, he did briefly try to persuade Israel to exercise some restraint in the occupied territories; the situation there, he realized, was fueling anti-Americanism in the Arab and Islamic world and making it harder to weaken al Qaeda. Bush soon came under pressure from the Israel lobby, however, which helped convince him that the United States and Israel were "partners against terror" and that he should just follow the Israeli lead on this issue.

For the rest of his presidency, Bush's Middle East diplomacy consisted of a series of essentially meaningless gestures, most notably the 2003 "road map" and the 2007 Annapolis summit. Meanwhile, Israel continued to expand settlements in the West Bank with hardly a murmur of protest from Washington. Bush refused to have anything to do with Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat and did hardly anything to bolster Arafat's moderate successor, Mahmoud Abbas, even after the new leader repeatedly renounced the use of terrorism, endorsed Israel's right to exist, and reaffirmed his desire to negotiate a final status agreement. Bush also did virtually nothing to build on the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which the Arab League endorsed at its Beirut summit that year and again at the 2007 Riyadh summit. By the time Bush left office, a two-state solution was more distant than ever, and America's image in the Middle East had hit a new low.

It gets worse: Bush also gave a green light to Israel's misguided attempt to use air power disarm Hezbollah in the 2006 Lebanon war. Israel's strategy was doomed to fail, and though U.S. officials had been briefed about its plans well before the war broke out, Bush did not tell the Israelis to come up with a better strategy. Instead, he gave Tel Aviv consistent diplomatic backing, even when it became clear that its strategy was not working and was causing massive damage throughout Lebanon. The United States even delayed a U.N. cease-fire resolution in order to give Israel time to "finish the job," a measure that prolonged the war for no good purpose and led to even greater Israeli casualties.

11. Hurricane Katrina. It takes a truly spectacular domestic-policy blunder to register as a foreign-policy screw-up, too. Yet Bush's bungled response to Hurricane Katrina was exactly that. Observers around the world saw this debacle as both a demonstration of waning U.S. competence and a revealing indicator of continued racial inequality, if not outright injustice. (You know you've screwed up when you get offers of relief aid from Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.) Because America's "soft power" depends on other states believing that the U.S. government knows what it is doing and that America itself stands for laudable ideals, the disaster in New Orleans was yet another self-inflicted blow to America's global image. If the United States cannot take good care of its own citizens, why should anyone think that they can "nation-build" in some distant overseas country.

12. Democracy, but Only When Our Guys Win. When it turned out that Iraq did not have any weapons of mass destruction, Bush tried to justify the invasion as part of a broader campaign to spread democracy in the Middle East. Unfortunately he was no better at that than he was at finding mobile bioweapons labs or chemical weapons caches. Bush pressed the Palestinian Authority to hold legislative elections in 2006, but when Hamas won, he simply refused to accept the results. For Bush, it seemed, democracy only made sense when the candidates that he liked won. The White House subsequently tried to foment a Fatah-led coup, a ploy that backfired and left Hamas in charge of Gaza and the Palestinians badly divided.

13. How Not to Stop Nuclear Proliferation.Bush was clearly worried about the dangers of nuclear proliferation, especially after 9/11. But the decisions he made unwittingly encouraged it. He threatened would-be proliferators with sanctions and regime change, and refused to hold serious talks with them until they fully complied with American demands. If anything, this approach gave North Korea and Iran a powerful incentive to obtain a nuclear deterrent to protect themselves from the United States. Not surprisingly, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in January 2003 and conducted its first nuclear test in 2006. It is not clear whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons, but it is certainly in the process of developing a sophisticated nuclear enrichment capability that will bring it close to the point where it could build a nuclear weapon if it ever decided that a deterrent was needed. During Bush's eight years in the White House, Iran went from having a few hundred nuclear centrifuges to having more than 5,000. And while Iran faced economic sanctions and the threat of military force, India refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or open all of its nuclear facilities to outside inspections — and still obtained a generous new nuclear cooperation agreement.

14. The Crash Heard 'Round the World. By lowering taxes while waging costly wars, Bush produced near-record fiscal deficits and a mountain of foreign debt. At the same time, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's easy money policy encouraged a vast real estate bubble that eventually collapsed in 2008. Bush's economic team also paid little attention to regulating Wall Street, thereby facilitating the reckless behavior that produced a major financial collapse in 2008. The resulting meltdown cost Americans trillions of dollars and millions of jobs, and the aftermath will affect U.S. economic prospects for many years to come.

Although Bush does not deserve all the blame for causing the greatest recession since the 1930s, he was in charge when it happened and his actions contributed significantly to the debacle. And because international influence ultimately rests upon a state's economic strength, the damage wrought by this economic crisis may be Bush's most enduring foreign-policy legacy.

Now we’d better cite the article of Professor Stephen Walt, in order to prevent the accusations of anti-Americanism and author’s biased attitude towards the 43^rd President of the United States.

“One could go on. There's the abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the opportunistic decision to impose tariffs on imported steel in 2002, the failure to hold military commanders accountable for letting bin Laden escape at the battle of Tora Bora, the failure to fire the serially incompetent Rumsfeld after the Iraq war went south, and the mixed messages from Washington that encouraged Georgia to miscalculate its way into war with Russia in the summer of 2008. But there's no need to pile on further, and you may be running short on anti-depressants by now.

The United States would have been far better off had George W. Bush never decided to enter politics and instead had spent the last two decades running a baseball team. The former president wasn't particularly good at that job either, but failure there would have had far fewer consequences for America and for the world. Obama's efforts to clean up Bush's legacy may have been disappointing so far, but that's no reason to feel nostalgic for the man who created all these messes in the first place”.

 (To be continued)