“As far as history goes and all of these quotes about people trying to guess what the history of the Bush administration is going to be, you know, I take great comfort in knowing that they don’t know what they are talking about, because history takes a long time for us to reach.”— George W. Bush, Fox News Sunday, Feb. 10, 2008

In an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted over a three-week period through the History News Network, 98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success. 

“It would be difficult to identify a President who, facing major international and domestic crises, has failed in both as clearly as President Bush,” concluded one respondent. “His domestic policies,” another noted, “have had the cumulative effect of shoring up a semi-permanent aristocracy of capital that dwarfs the aristocracy of land against which the founding fathers rebelled; of encouraging a mindless retreat from science and rationalism; and of crippling the nation’s economic base.”

“George Bush has combined mediocrity with malevolent policies and has thus seriously damaged the welfare and standing of the United States,” wrote one of the historians, echoing the assessments of many of his professional colleagues. “Bush does only two things well,” said one of the most distinguished historians.  “He knows how to make the very rich very much richer, and he has an amazing talent for f**king up everything else he even approaches.  His administration has been the most reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, mendacious, arrogant, self-righteous, incompetent, and deeply corrupt one in all of American history.”  (From History News Network)

I was discussing George Bush on a  blog site (not OS) recently and  made the following comment:

Shrub's not particularly stupid but he's not particularly bright either. What was actually more notable about the man during his time in the White House than his IQ or lack of it was his disengagement from the day to day activities of his job, from the processes of governance. He didn't want to be bothered by details, or absorbing large amounts of information, or thinking on more than one level about things.  He didn't like being bothered by many of the activities his job entailed in fact, which is only natural in a man so lacking in intellectual curiosity, a man who was proud to mention that he rarely if ever even bothered reading the newspaper. When you combine all that with the fact that Dick Cheney definitely was interested in the processes of governance, the result was one of the more unusual presidencies in American history, and arguably one of the most disastrous.

Someone on the site took exception to my remark, and among other things asked me:  

What exactly was that disaster that happened under Bush?  

After I finished laughing, I thought about answering in a comment, but decided it would take too much space on someone else's page,  and that's without even mentioning the way W inherited a huge budget surplus but left us with crippling deficits, the steadily widening gap between the haves and the have nots in this country, the increase in levels of poverty, the erosion of civil rights, the rolling back of environmental legislation, the fact that we're more polarized a nation than we've been since the '60s, and oh by the way a near total economic meltdown. 

Anyway, I've put a little thought into it since then and below is my reply, at least part one of my reply. It would take a post longer than this one to enumerate all the ways in which George W. Bush was a monumental failure.

What exactly was that disaster that happened under Bush?  

Oh my, where to begin? The one that leaps to mind first is the wars. 

After 9/11 we went into Afghanistan, which was only natural. There are those who say we should never have gone there but they're wrong;  that's where the people who'd hit us were, and there was no way we were not going to go for them. Things went well initially and the Taliban were soon driven out, though Don Rumsfeld (and this is one  instance among many where W should have been making the decisions himself rather than letting underlings set the agenda) erred badly by not inserting a battalion or three of Rangers to close the back door when we had Bin Laden at bay at Tora Bora. If they had used US forces rather than local warlords to block the escape routes into Pakistan we might not be engaged in the drone war in Waziristan right now, might not be bogged down in Central Asia at all in fact.  Worse than letting Osama go though was the decision, taken sometime in spring of '02 and possibly even earlier, to invade Iraq. There was no strategic or logical reason to attack the Iraqis. None. They had nothing to do with 9/11, they had no real WMD capability, as our intelligence community well knew, and many in Bush's own government, people who knew what they were talking about, advised Georgie in no uncertain terms that invading was a really bad idea. He went ahead with it though, largely because that's what Cheney said he should do.

The rest as they say is history. The Neocons and other chicken hawks had visions of an Iraq transformed overnight by the might of American arms into a shining beacon of democracy, of an Iraq serving as an example of what other nations in the Middle East could and should become. They imagined a grand domino effect of freedom and Western (especially American) values cascading from Iran all the way to Libya and beyond. The reality has been somewhat different, to say the least. What have we gained as a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom? What have we lost?

The first casualty of the decision to invade Iraq was our mission in Central Asia.  Once we'd decided to get Saddam, resources and focus which were necessary to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan were no longer available, with the result that our policy there became one of just muddling along and hoping the Taliban wouldn't be so ungentlemanly as to make a comeback. Rather than working in a serious manner to help build a viable government,  we were reduced to relying on Hamid Karzai and assorted drug kingpins and warlords as allies. As anyone who has followed events in Afghanistan has seen, that hasn't worked out so well, and the result is that nearly nine years on from 9/11 things are worse than they've been at any time since winter '01-'02.  The bottom line is that if we hadn't decided to invade Iraq, it's very unlikely that we'd be bogged down in Afghanistan right now. George Bush took his eyes off the ball, and we're still paying for that today.

In Iraq, the invasion itself was a masterpiece of planning and of superior American technology and military science. Within weeks we were storming Saddam's palace in Baghdad, and Hussein himself had slunk off into the shadows. The thing is though, as Colin Powell told W before the invasion, "Once you've broke it, you've bought it." We'd been told by the Neocons (who had it on good authority from fellows like Ahmad Chalabi and others on the Pentagon payroll) that the Iraqis would welcome us with flowers and dancing in the streets, but that didn't happen. Even as our commander in chief made his victory speech, dressed in his heroic flight suit and standing in front of a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished",  an insurgency was growing in Iraq, one which continued to worsen for several years and which tested the US military to near breaking point. Though a change in tactics on our part, coupled with what's now called the Awakening movement among Iraq's Sunnis, allowed us to narrowly avert defeat, the net result of all the blood, treasure, and effort (not to mention all the dead Iraqis) we've poured into Iraq  has been a long way from what anyone with any sense would call victory.

Why isn't it a victory? Saddam is gone, AQI has largely been defeated,  and there's a fairly democratic regime in Baghdad, so we won right?

Well, not really.

George Bush famously referred to Iraq once as a member of a supposed "Axis of Evil." The other two members of the triad were Iran and North Korea. So what has transpired with this Axis since W made us aware of it in 2002?

Iraq: Of the three members of the Axis, Iraq was far and away the weakest, and most of the world's intelligence agencies knew that they posed no strategic threat to the United States. Or to anyone else really.  Yet we invaded, and seven years on, after trillions of dollars spent, after thousands of American and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives lost, the net benefit to us is the installation of a government in Baghdad that is somewhat democratic. There are some who argue that having Iraq as a platform for US bases has enhanced our strategic posture relative to the Persian Gulf and its vital oil reserves, but that's nonsense. We already had such a platform in Kuwait and some of the other Gulf states.

Iran: Since our invasion of Iraq seven years ago, Iran's position has actually grown stronger. Though they were at first somewhat shaken by the ease with which we overthrew Saddam, they regained their cockiness after they saw us becoming mired in a vicious insurgency/civil war. As we've bled ourselves in the sandbox of Iraq, Tehran has grown ever more confident that it's safe from the US military, has grown ever more assertive in the region, and it is now generally understood that we're a year or so from Iran being able to produce its own nuclear weaponry. Operation Iranian Freedom anyone?

North Korea: Since W's Axis of Evil speech, the North Koreans have demonstrated that they have a nuclear capability, albeit a limited one. They've also proven that for the right price they'll help others to build their own nuclear programs. Yet Kim Jong Il was given pretty much of a free pass by the tough-talking Bushies. Why? Because messing with North Korea didn't sound as fun as toppling Saddam I guess, and because most of our attention has been on Iraq, and now on an increasingly dangerous Islamist movement in Central Asia.

So much for the Axis of Evil.  Operation Iraqi Freedom succeeded in eliminating the least threatening of the three, while allowing the other two to become more dangerous.  Nice work Georgie.

There have been other consequences as well.  The Russians and the Chinese and, well, everyone, watched closely as we leaped into Iraq, and they watched even closer as we faltered and floundered and bled there. The net result has been a growing consensus among world powers that the US and its vaunted military aren't quite as scary as everyone thought. There's also the troublesome fact that the readiness and general ability of the Pentagon to respond to an unforeseen crisis elsewhere in the world has been severely compromised by years of grinding attrition in two wars.

Another result of going into Iraq has been that we've surrendered the high ground in the view of much of the world community. America talks a great game about the rule of law and so forth, but actions speak louder than words, and we've demonstrated to the world that as far as we're concerned, using naked power to accomplish your goals is OK as long as you have enough naked power. In other words, we've proven ourselves to be hypocrites and thugs. Some people relish the notion of others fearing us, and I guess it's a good thing when the bad guys are afraid, but we've combined our thuggery this time around with a fairly large amount of incompetence, so the message has become "The Americans will attack like a rabid hyena when it suits them to, but don't worry, they aren't that good at it."

Does all this constitute victory or disaster? For some, that will depend on which side of the political spectrum they come from. Most objective observers though agree that invading Iraq was at best a mistake made with good intentions and at worst one of the greatest strategic blunders of the last half century or so. I tend towards the latter view myself, but I'm guessing you've already noticed that.

(first image from About.com, second image from http://bringontherevolution.blogspot.com/)