Before the Bush Presidency:
"I don't have any idea about foreign affairs," George W. Bush told Condoleezza Rice while he was governor of Texas, but angling for the presidency. "This isn't what I do." (The remark is quoted in Bob Woodward's State of Denial (Simon & Schuster, 2006). Rice was hired to educate him. A trip to the Middle East was organized in December 1998 to introduce him to the region. In a helicopter trip with Israel's Ariel Sharon over Israel and the Occupied Territories, Bush recoiled, declaring the place a mess the United States should not be involved in.
Bush and 9/11:
In the early months of the Bush administration, Bush's only Middle East concern was Saddam Hussein and his alleged weapons of mass destruction. Following 9/11, Bush asked members of his administration to find any link between 9/11 and Saddam. None were found. Still, Bush pressed on with a two-front strategy: Uprooting al-Qaeda from Afghanistan, and removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.
Bush and Afghanistan:
Bush ordered an attack on Afghanistan's Taliban regime on Oct. 7, 2001. By early December, U.S.-backed Afghan forces had reclaimed the country's major cities. But U.S. and Afghan forces bogged down in the Afghan mountains around Tora Bora, near the Pakistani border. Osama bin Laden escaped to Pakistan, along with thousands of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. The Bush administration's failure to capture of kill bin Laden at Tora Bora would undermine its credibility in the "War on terror" for the next seven years. So would its fitful commitment to reconstruction.
Bush and Iran:
Iran in 2001 was moderating. It made two openings to the Bush administration. Iran provided tactical and intelligence support to the American effort in Afghanistan (Iran opposes the Taliban and al-Qaeda). And it made back-channel offers to resume diplomatic relations. Bush answered in his 2002 State of the Union address by including Iran in the "Axis of Evil," with North Korea and Iraq. Iran rapidly radicalized again, and in 2005 elected the belligerently tempered Mahmoud Ahmadinejad president.
The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and the Bush "Road Map":
Following the Clinton administration's 2000 failure to mediate a lasting Palestinian-Israeli peace, and Bush's explicit disengagement from the conflict, hostilities between Palestinians and Israelis spiraled. By 2002, violence forced Bush to act. He delivered a couple of speeches , dubbed the "Road Map" for peace. But as Aaron David Miller writes in The Much Too Promised Land, "the only real problem with the road map was that neither the Americans, the Israelis, nor the Palestinians were serious about implementing it." Nor have they since.
Bush and the Iraq War:
Under the pretext of ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, Bush launched an Sunnis and Shiites.[/link">. Bush failed to plan for the invasion's aftermath. Iraq's democratic gains crumbled as violence, factionalism and tribalism predominated. A Bush troop "surge" tamed, but didn't end, the war.
