Monumental failure

The thesis that it is too early to pass a judgement on the performance of a leader, who is just about to step down on the completion of his tenure, is sound enough as a rule of general application because it is only time that will tell whether the policies he had adopted would have a beneficial outcome for his country and, in the case of a superpower, the world as a whole.
However, there could be strikingly obvious examples that defy this logic, their motives and impact so glaringly Machiavellian. Downright malafides and inescapably disastrous, these policies would not need the hindsight of historians to pronounce their verdict. This write-up confines itself to President Bush's adventures abroad where failure is writ large and success, if any, appears as a negligible footnote.
His has been a presidency dominated by botched-up wars. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have been catastrophic, both for the US and the people it has tried to subjugate. The results are before everyone to see. Washington, the sole superpower with a commanding global influence as Bill Clinton vacated the White House, found its stature precipitously fallen well before his successor and present incumbent George W Bush could fade into history to be remembered, as one US critic put it, the "most disastrous choice" Americans had made to lead them. Enemies aside, close allies of the US felt alienated as a result of his attitude of 'going it alone'.
Washington's noises about Baghdad's possession of WMD and links with Al-Qaeda, it is now established beyond doubt, were simply a charade it played to scare the world, and particularly US citizens, into joining the chorus of war. The so-called War On Terror that began with the aggression on Afghanistan, and later extended to Iraq on purely cooked up charges, has instead terrorised a vast section of humanity, not merely the people of Iraq who have, according to a latest report meticulously compiled by an NGO, lost 1.29 million of their kith and kin, a large number deliberately targeted.