Happy Birthday, Mr. President. And, thanks for making the world a much more dangerous place. Your incompetence, lies and ineptitude have created a frightening legacy.
Both of the major national papers today analyzed the fact that Bush is likely to leave the world a far more dangerous place than when he took office in 2001. Bush already told us that the Iraq debacle will be left for the next President to solve, but that's just one crisis.
The Washington Post looks at the panoply of foreign policy disasters that have festered during Bush's tenure:
From deteriorating security in Afghanistan and Somalia to mayhem in the Middle East, confrontation with Iran and eroding relations with Russia, the White House suddenly sees crisis in every direction.The New York Times focuses primarily on the North Korean crisis:
North Korea's long-range missile test Tuesday, although unsuccessful, was another reminder of the bleak foreign policy landscape that faces President Bush even outside of Iraq. Few foreign policy experts foresee the reclusive Stalinist state giving up the nuclear weapons it appears to have acquired, making it another in a long list of world problems that threaten to cloud the closing years of the Bush administration, according to foreign policy experts in both parties.
"I am hard-pressed to think of any other moment in modern times where there have been so many challenges facing this country simultaneously," said Richard N. Haass, a former senior Bush administration official who heads the Council on Foreign Relations. "The danger is that Mr. Bush will hand over a White House to a successor that will face a far messier world, with far fewer resources left to cope with it."
The Bush administration has tried to ignore North Korea, then, reluctantly, to engage it, and then to squeeze its bankers in a manner intended to make the country's leader, KimSo while Bush continues to obsess about turning 60 (documented in a piece on the Today Show and given front page coverage in the Times ), the world continues to become more dangerous by the day. Nice work.
Yet none of these steps in the past six years has worked. So now, after a barrage of missile launchings by North Korea, President Bush and his national security advisers found themselves on Wednesday facing what one close aide described as an array of "familiar bad choices."
The choices have less to do with North Korea's newest missile — which, as Mr. Bush pointed out on Wednesday, "didn't stay up very long and tumbled into the sea" — than with the bigger question of whether the president is prepared to leave office in 2009 without constraining an unpredictable dictator who boasts about having a nuclear arsenal.
"We're at the moment when the president has to decide whether he wants an unconstrained, nuclear North Korea to be part of his legacy," said Jonathan D. Pollack, a professor of Asian and Pacific studies at the United States Naval War College who has spent much of his career studying North Korea and its improbable strategies for survival.
