'History News Network' rated Bush the worst president in the nation's history http://www.buzzflash.net/story.php?id=86618 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.
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