"How much of the damage that Bush foreign policy has done is irreversible?"

A litany of failure and ineptitude. :cry:


THE WORLD FROM WASHINGTON / Michael Hirsh

The Final Chapter?

Bush's stamp (more like Bush's stain, imho) will linger long after tonight's speech.

"Whatever you think about the actual state our union is in, there is little doubt George W. Bush has profoundly transformed it. "Tonight is a red-letter night in American history," a campaigning Hillary Clinton told a crowd in Connecticut Monday, redirecting her ire momentarily from Barack Obama back to Bush. "It is the last time George Bush will give the State of the Union. Next year it will be a Democratic president giving it." Perhaps. But curb your enthusiasm, Sen. Clinton: it will still be Bush who dictates what you or any other president will talk about a year hence—and probably for many years after that.

Across the board, Bush has pursued policies that, for better or worse, will set the agenda for the next president and probably define his or her entire tenure. On the economy, Bush's successor will be left with a narrow, nail-biting set of choices, thanks to the lack of fiscal discipline over the last seven years (which turned a $236 billion surplus into a huge deficit), a dramatically changed tax structure and, now, what will likely be known as the Bush recession. Things were so dire this week that even the managing director of the fiscally strict International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, told the Financial Times that America and other countries had to loosen their already lax purse strings and do more deficit spending, despite the fact that the dollar is under attack due to America's overspending. Throw into that mix a new, Bush-appointed Federal Reserve chief, Ben Bernanke, who has nine years to go in his term, and you have to conclude that Bush will cast a shadow that will linger long after he leaves office next January.

On foreign policy Bush leaves an array of challenges that are, at best, in midstream. They will almost certainly keep the next president fully occupied for four more years, and probably eight: an investment of $1 trillion-plus and thousands of American lives, along with many more limbs, in Iraq, and a counterinsurgency, nation-building task that is still in its infancy; another country that by then will be only a year or so from bomb-capability (Iran); and an army that is so badly strapped it will take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars before it is back to where it was pre-9/11. On the more positive side, Bush has set precedents for the next president on HIV/AIDS and humanitarian intervention in Africa, especially Darfur, that will be hard to ignore.


On counter terrorism and intelligence, the next president will have to wrestle with Bush's Homeland Security Department, which has grown into a glandular monstrosity that no secretary seems able to tame (and which was at least partly responsible for the disaster that was the Hurricane Katrina response). The intelligence community, reorganized at Bush's command into a new structure in which the CIA director is just one player among many, has also now become a creature unto itself. Bush recently complained, after the embarrassment of December's national intelligence estimate on Iran, that he could not control what it writes. Nor will the next president.."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/105883

edit for typo.

is going to be hard to deal with.
The next administration has a disaster on it's hands.

because it got lost in the SOTFUU posts.