Bush's Place in History.

[mkemse]

"it was postd on CNN.com, and there was discussion a few years back that the US considered invading Iran as a way of stoppin it's nuclear program
This the enitre article"

You simply do not understand the process of military planning! It is a constant daily exercise covering many ideas that would probably surpirse the heck out of you.

You asked for documenttion, so i posted what I found that The US was resdy to invaeIraw a few posts back, simply replying to your request for doumentation

Bush's Legacy will be his Lack of timely response to Katrinam 3 years later they are not alot better off then they are now, His failure in Somolia, his "need" to Invade Iraq rather then concenrtate of Bin Lafen in Afghistan after 911, his search for non exsistant WMD in Iraq which never existed as Colin Powel even addmitted prior to leaing his postion in the Adm. He lack of any type of support for Soviet Georgia beyond telling Russia to leave, his inability to deal with the Palastine, he was supporting a pouppet goverment that did not control anything, Hamas did andstill does
he left office with one of the lowest approval ratings of any President and even lower then Nixon's prior to leaving office the polled 109 Poitical Historian 45% said he was the worst President in US jhistoiry, 35% said his is among the top 10 qorst pPresident in history

This will be his legacy his failued Foreighn Policies:

Bush Foreign Policy – How Deep is the Failure?

By G. John Ikenberry - December 1, 2006, 8:53AM
Bush’s war in Iraq has been repudiated, the midterm elections did this. There is now wide open intellectual space to debate America’s next foreign policy. Jackson Diehl made this point in his commentary on the Princeton Project in Monday’s Washington Post.

The debate now is really over how deeply flawed Bush foreign policy is. Is Bush failure primarily about Iraq or is it rooted more deeply in philosophy and grand strategy? And if the failure is about philosophy and grand strategy, is this an indictment only of neo-conservative ideas or of liberal internationalism itself?

Two groups are narrowing the critique. First, neo-conservatives are arguing that Bush failure is, well, because of Bush – incompetence and the failure to fully push their ideas. The debacle of today’s foreign policy does not discredit neo-conservatism – the ideas were never fully implemented. This is Bill Kristol's view, expressed last May: “Much of the U.S. government no longer believes in, and is no longer acting to enforce, the Bush doctrine. . . the United States of America is in retreat.” Soon it will be the weak-kneed Democratic congress that will also be implicated in Bush failure. Second, some liberal hawks who supported the war are also making a very limited critique. To be sure, the war itself is now seen as a mistake – certainly its conduct – but the general Bush orientation toward terrorism and the use of force is taken as essentially valid. Indeed, these liberals would say that the primary challenge for Democrats is to convince voters that they can “do national security” like Republicans can. This political imperative makes a thorough-going critique of Bush failure difficult -- and unwise.

But the flaws run deep.

Now is the time for an honest post mortem of Bush foreign policy. Bush foreign policy has failed not just because of incompetence or bad luck in Iraq. The entire intellectual edifice of Bush foreign policy – such as it is – is deeply flawed. And let’s be clear. The Bush administration’s grand strategy is not simply a variation on earlier postwar liberal internationalist grand strategies – as some conservatives and liberals suggest. It was a radical departure from America’s postwar liberal hegemonic orientation – and the world has bitten back.

Martin Wolf makes this point in a column in Wednesday’s Financial Times, drawing on the arguments that Charles Kupchan and I made in a 2004 article in The National Interest.

“The signal feature of this administration has not been merely its incompetence, but its rejection of the principles on which U.S. foreign policy was built after the Second World War. The administration's strategy has been based, instead, upon four ideas: the primacy of force; the preservation of a unipolar order; the unbridled exercise of U.S. power; and the right to initiate preventive war in the absence of immediate threats.

"The response to the terrorist outrage of September 11, 2001, reinforced the hold of all these principles. The notion of an indefinite and unlimited ‘war on terror’ became the fulcrum of U.S. foreign policy. It led to the idea of an "axis of evil" connecting Saddam Hussein's Iraq to theocratic Iran and Kim Jong-il's North Korea. It brought about the justified invasion of Afghanistan, but also the diversion into Iraq. Not least, the idea of the war on terror led to the indefinite imprisonment of alleged enemy combatants without judicial oversight, toleration of torture, "extraordinary rendition" of suspects, the extra-territorial prison at Guantánamo Bay, and, by indirect means, the abuses at Abu Ghraib. All this has been bad enough.

"It is made worse by what John Ikenberry of Princeton University and Charles Kupchan of Georgetown aptly describe as the ‘sloppy intelligence, faulty judgment, and ideological zealotry’ that marked implementation, above all in Iraq. Yet the poor implementation is not an accident. A belief in the primacy of the military naturally led to the transfer of responsibility to the Department of Defense; a belief in the efficacy of force created the conviction that victory meant peace and a swift transition to democracy; and disdain for allies guaranteed the absence of co-operation in postwar occupation.

"The U.S. must now start again. It must design a foreign policy for the current age. In doing so, it should discard almost everything the Bush administration has proclaimed.“

Additionaly:

U.S.: Bush Foreign Policy Legacy Widely Seen as Disastrous
Analysis by Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Jan 13, 2009 (IPS) - While in a farewell press conference Monday George W. Bush once again expressed the belief that his eight-year presidency, particularly his foreign-policy record, will be vindicated by history, the portents are not particularly good.

Already last spring, nearly two thirds of 109 professional historians polled by the 'History News Network' rated Bush the worst president in the nation's history, while another 35 percent said he was among the ten worst of the 42 who preceded him.

And that was six months before the mid-September financial crisis that most economists agree will turn out to be the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930's!

Bush leaves office next Tuesday with the lowest sustained approval ratings of any modern president.

With the exception of hard-line neo-conservatives and other far-right hawks who ruled the roost in Bush's first term, the overwhelming consensus of veteran analysts here is that his "global war on terror" - for which he is likely to be most remembered - has inflicted unprecedented and possibly permanent damage on Washington's image abroad.

The latter problem may not matter to those who, like Vice President Dick Cheney and the "neo-cons", have long disdained diplomacy and other forms of "soft power".

But the unexpected difficulties confronted by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq - as well as the transparent failure of "hard power" to have the desired effect in other "terror-war" theatres, such as Somalia and Pakistan (or Lebanon, in Israel's case) - have exposed the limits of a U.S.-dominated "unipolar world", and the ability of the U.S. armed forces to enforce it on their own.

"The elementary truth that seems to elude the experts again and again - Gulf War, Afghan war, next war - is that power is its own reward," chortled the ‘Washington Post’s’ neo-conservative columnist and champion of "unipolarity", Charles Krauthammer, after U.S.-backed forces chased the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan in late 2001 in a concise - and now highly ironic - statement of the administration’s first-term worldview and strategic intent. "...The psychology in the region is now one of fear and deep respect for American power."

Particularly destructive to Washington's image, of course, were the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the use of "aggressive interrogation techniques" - which most human-rights experts call torture - against terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and secret U.S.- controlled prisons around the world.

Uncritical backing for Israel, even when it waged a series of military campaigns, most recently in Gaza, that appeared to give scant regard to the welfare of the civilian population, were also damaging.

"The Bush administration has left you (the U.S.) a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza...," declared no less a friend than former Saudi ambassador and intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal, in a speech last week that created quite a sensation among experts here.

"Neither Israel nor the U.S. can gain from a war that produces this reaction from one of the wisest and most moderate voices in the Arab world," remarked Anthony Cordesman, a highly regarded Middle East specialist at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) last week, who once called Bush’s hopes of democratising the Arab world by invading Iraq as "cross(ing) the line between neo-conservative and neo-crazy."

In fairness, the unilateralism and militarism that dominated most of Bush's first term, when Cheney, then-Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and their neo-conservative advisers were in the saddle, softened considerably in his second.

This softenign was due to both the discrediting of pre-war assumptions about Iraq and the ascendancy of administration realists led initially by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and, after Rumsfeld's resignation in November 2006, his successor, Robert Gates.

While the hawks strongly opposed any engagement with the surviving members of the "Axis of Evil", North Korea and Iran, the realists successfully persuaded Bush that pressure, isolation and military threats had actually proven counter-productive to U.S. interests.

The realists also convinced him that diplomatic engagement would have the benefit of demonstrating to the rest of the world that Washington was prepared to exhaust at least some diplomatic remedies before resorting to war.

In fact, the second term witnessed a notable softening - hawks would say "appeasement" - in Washington's position in a number of areas, including, remarkably, limited co-operation with the previously-despised International Criminal Court (ICC), a more forthcoming rhetoric - if not actual policy - on global warming, and even deference to Washington's European allies in dealing with a resurgent Russia, notably during last August's conflict in Georgia.

With the military bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, multilateralism and diplomacy ceased to be dirty words.

Indeed, the administration spent considerable effort in its second term patching up ties with what Rumsfeld had once contemptuously referred to as "Old Europe" - that part of the globe that had been most alienated by the neo-imperialist trajectory of the first term.

This is apart from the Arab and Islamic worlds and, to a lesser extent, Latin America, where old resentments flared over Washington's endorsement of, if not complicity with, a failed military coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002.

Judging by opinion polls and expert opinion here, Bush fared considerably better in Asia, where, to the disappointment of Rumsfeld and Cheney, he built on the progress made by his father and Bill Clinton in deepening ties with China, and did so without alienating Washington’s closest regional ally, Japan.

In addition, Bush's courtship of India, capped by the controversial nuclear-energy accord ratified by Congress last summer, is considered by many analysts here as his greatest foreign-policy achievement.

Bush’s five-year, 15-billion-dollar AIDS initiative - launched in part to highlight his "compassionate conservatism" on the eve of the Iraq invasion - also helps explain his not-insignificant popularity in sub-Saharan Africa (although 15 billion dollars is currently what his administration is spending each month on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

He is also given credit for his role in ending the long-standing civil war between Khartoum and the insurgency in south Sudan, although that diplomatic success, however fragile, stands in rather stunning contrast to failures in Darfur, eastern Congo, and Somalia where, if anything, the U.S. efforts to keep Islamist forces from gaining power have been little short of disastrous.

To his defenders, Bush’s finest moment – and one on which he appears to pin the greatest hope for his legacy - came two years ago when, despite the unprecedented popular disapproval of the Iraq war and the advice of foreign-policy establishment, he "surged" some 30,000 more U.S. troops into Iraq as part of a new counter-insurgency strategy designed to halt the country’s precipitous slide into all-out sectarian civil war.

While favourable trends within the Sunni community were already well underway at the time as former insurgents, backed by U.S. funding and weapons, had turned against al Qaeda in Iraq, the Surge clearly helped reduce the violence in Baghdad.

But whether the Surge has set the stage for its strategic goal of national reconciliation, or even the kind of democratic state that Bush had hoped would become a model for export to its Arab neighbours and Iran, remains far from certain.

If it has, Bush may yet be hailed as a 21st century Harry Truman, whose low approval ratings at the time of his departure from the White House in 1953 nearly rivals Bush’s but whose sponsorship of NATO and the Marshall Plan, among other early Cold-War initiatives, are now recognised as significant achievements.

If, on the other hand, Iraq falls back into chaos or splits apart or evolves into a new dictatorship or becomes even more closely tied to Iran than it already is, then Bush’s fate as the worst U.S. president would almost certainly be sealed. History will have to decide.