The thesis that it is too early to pass a judgement on the performance of a leader, who is just about to step down on the completion of his tenure, is sound enough as a rule of general application because it is only time that will tell whether the policies he had adopted would have a beneficial outcome for his country and, in the case of a superpower, the world as a whole. However, there could be strikingly obvious examples that defy this logic, their motives and impact so glaringly Machiavellian. Downright malafides and inescapably disastrous, these policies would not need the hindsight of historians to pronounce their verdict. This write-up confines itself to President Bush's adventures abroad where failure is writ large and success, if any, appears as a negligible footnote. His has been a presidency dominated by botched-up wars. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have been catastrophic, both for the US and the people it has tried to subjugate. The results are before everyone to see. Washington, the sole superpower with a commanding global influence as Bill Clinton vacated the White House, found its stature precipitously fallen well before his successor and present incumbent George W Bush could fade into history to be remembered, as one US critic put it, the "most disastrous choice" Americans had made to lead them. Enemies aside, close allies of the US felt alienated as a result of his attitude of 'going it alone'. Washington's noises about Baghdad's possession of WMD and links with Al-Qaeda, it is now established beyond doubt, were simply a charade it played to scare the world, and particularly US citizens, into joining the chorus of war. The so-called War On Terror that began with the aggression on Afghanistan, and later extended to Iraq on purely cooked up charges, has instead terrorised a vast section of humanity, not merely the people of Iraq who have, according to a latest report meticulously compiled by an NGO, lost 1.29 million of their kith and kin, a large number deliberately targeted. Afghanistan, another victim of the superpower's brutality, bore the brunt of daisycutters that pulverised Tora Bora Mountains and yet Osama bin Laden, its principal quarry, could not be caught and the resistance flourished. Despaired of controlling the situation, the US took to cavalierly bombing wedding parties and social get-togethers to create "shock and awe" among the peaceful population in a vain attempt to turn them against the militants. The War On Terror is a long and agonising tale of death and destruction, massive dislocation of life, unending misery of the survivors and deep scars on the minds and bodies of illegal inmates at the torture cells of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and numerous sites at unknown places in the Western countries and elsewhere under the mysterious nomenclature of rendition. Still engaged in the Iraq-Afghan arena and not feeling aghast at the horror and suffering it has inflicted there, the Bush administration openly and shamelessly supported the bloodthirsty Israel in its onslaught against Lebanon and Gaza. On the basis of its influence, the superpower would not let the formal charge of war crimes apply against the Jewish state for its wanton killings in Lebanon and Gaza. But at the bar of public opinion it stands guilty, if for nothing else than using chemical weapons against innocent civilians. Rather, it is the Palestinians of Gaza that Washington accuses of initiating the hostilities. They are routinely termed as terrorists and Israel, the real culprit, as protector of its civilian population. President Bush has been a failure on lots of other counts in the foreign policy domains. His mantra of democracy in the Middle East as a panacea for the gnawing menace of terrorism, which he adopted as a desperate bid to escape the blind alley of Iraq, simply fizzled out and not a word is heard about it any longer. The hatred of the US was so intense among the Arab population that it could not risk empowering them at the cost of pliant rulers. The sweeping victory of Hamas made the US wiser. Bush's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol was based on the unwise ground of saving American businesses additional expense that they would have incurred to implement it, ignoring the fact that his decision would have grave implications for the entire world, including the US. There appeared to be a taint of deception in his acceptance of the minority scientific opinion that the rise in global temperature was a cyclical phenomenon and not the result of greenhouse gas emissions. Even as he later seemed to have converted to the other view, he did not go far enough in promising to take measures enough to check the trend of global warming. If "leaders are entrusted to act in the nation's long-term interests" is taken as a criterion of performance, Bush has irretrievably damaged the American image, evoked hatred not only among Muslims but also other peace-loving people. While political scientists in the US were dreaming of global dominance "in perpetuity", he was striking at the very roots of the concept. No doubt, the emergence of other nations to global prominence was already on the horizon, but his actions led to their strengthening, as they caused a dramatic reduction of the US influence in the world and for President Bush the longest stretch of 47 months of ignominy since polling for public ratings began in the US. How far Barack Obama will be able to repair the damage only time will tell E-mail: mqkay@yahoo.cp.uk