Bush: Not So Terrible As You Think

Or so say Fareed Zakaria, David Frum, and Robert Kagan, according to a blurb in today's Outlook section.

It's a shame there isn't some treacker of the Villager attitude towards Bush over the years. Because there's never been a point where they've said: yes, Bush really is a fuckup. Instead, they've managed to go from "he's not so bad" to "well, he was really bad, but he's not anymore" without ever having to say, "yeah, he's really a terrible President." Which he was, and is - and having done a few things right at the end doesn't change the reality that his Presidency has been a disaster, at home and abroad.

Take the Surge, which along with some purely Iraqi events has improved the security situation over there. The deliberately uncounted hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead are still dead; the millions of exiles are still exiled. It's good that things are better now, but that shoudn't get him off the hook.

I suppose we could say, "Good job, Bush - in the past year, you haven't caused any new foreign-policy disasters!" which would be grading on quite a curve right there, except that his overcommitment to Iraq meant that we had nothing left for any other international crisis, and Putin knew it.