John Judis has written a useful summation of Bush administration failures in this morning's LA Times.

This Road to Hell Is Paved With Bush's Bad Choices Misguided tax cuts hurt the economy, and diplomatic bungling resulted in our foreign policy crisis. By John B. Judis, John B. Judis is senior editor of the New Republic. With the Cold War's end, many Americans thought we could close our air raid shelters and take the trillions of dollars that had gone into the military and put them into making our lives better by turning toward the pursuit of happiness rather than the defense of our liberty. And some of that did happen in the last half of the 1990s, during the Clinton-era boom. But only three years into a new century, the United States finds itself plagued by rising unemployment, soaring budget deficits, constricted civil liberties, the threat of terrorist attack and the prospect of a war with, and occupation of, Iraq. We've gone from the best of times to the worst of times. The Bush administration tells us that it is entirely because of Al Qaeda and now Saddam Hussein that we face these difficulties, but the dark clouds that hang over our country are largely the result of Bush administration policies.

Judis makes several points to back up this assertion. Here's my take on them: 1) While the initial economic downturn may have been an inevitable letdown from the high-flying 90s, Bush's economic policies have been the perfect prescription for sustaining that downturn and making it long-term. 2) Bush's foreign policy has been a series of cart-before-the-horse train wrecks. (a) He pushed the idea of regime change in Iraq, quite possibly through invasion, before winning over allies to his position that Sadaam cannot be trusted. Thus giving everyone the justified suspicion that Bush has never been interested in a peaceful solution to the Iraqi problem. (b) Rather then use America's considerable influence to force both Israel and the Palestinians to the table to work out a mutually agreeable solution, Bush has instead bluntly sided with Israel to the point where few in the middle-east can ever trust America to be a neutral party in the conflict. (c) Those failings, combined with his de-prioritization of the hunt for al Qaeda, have produced an environment in which the threat from terrorism is even worse then it was before 9/11.