In an American Scholar article in Autumn 1993, then in a book in 2001, the historian Bernard Lewis asked about Islam's decline from high civilization to closed-in regression, "What Went Wrong?" The same question can be asked about George W. Bush's Middle East policy, with one distinction: a few weeks of deceptive military victories in Iraq and Afghanistan aside, it never had a high point in eight years.

Bush this week is making what will likely be his final trip to the Middle East as president (parachuting flash-visits to Iraq and Afghanistan notwithstanding). It's one of eight foreign trips he's undertaking in 2008 as domestic policy wears on him and foreign travel gives him a chance at what "a political and a psychological books," as The Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg put it Sunday.

But how much of a boost can he get from the Middle East?

In Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Lebanon, in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the "war on terror" and al-Qaeda's free reign in Pakistan, with regards to Iran's nukes, even with regards to oil policy and Saudi Arabia or relations with North Africa and the Maghreb, which Bush has virtually ignored, conditions today are more belligerent, more unstable, or, in Iraq's case, more catastrophic than they were eight years ago.

Hamas is as entrenched as ever in Gaza. Hezbollah faced down the Lebanese government and its army this month, bringing Lebanon a hair away from a resumption of dormant its civil war. Bush thought he was moving Israelis and Palestinians toward a "final" peace agreement with his carefully choreographed conference at Annapolis late last year. But he proved as personally committed to that conference as he was to his "road map" for peace in 2002--which is to say, not committed at all.

There's a reason for the disengagement and the failures it brought about: "At no point," writes Aaron David Miller in his just-releast The Much Too Promised Land, "did anyone, with the exception of several lonely souls at the State Department, believe that advancing the Arab-Israeli issue might actually help in the president's war on terror and his goals in Iraq." Bush himself certainly didn't think so. Vice President Dick Cheney scorned any connection between the Arab-Israeli issue and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So here we are, at a worse point for American involvement in the Middle East than, possibly, ever. How did we get this low this fast? Here's a country-by-country profile of the Bush presidency and the Middle East.