KEY POINTS:
Posterity can be a capricious judge. Reputations of leaders hailed in their lifetimes, such as Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy, have suffered from reappraisal after their deaths; lesser lights - the late Sir Robert Muldoon, for example, whose autocratic management hamstrung this country's economic growth - is remembered by too many as a lovable rascal.
But as George Walker Bush leaves office, he may be confident that history will, with good reason, look back at his stewardship with a shudder of revulsion.
Historians argue about whether the 43rd presidency has been the worst: the administrations of the dithering James Buchanan, the corrupt Warren Harding, and the foulmouthed, crooked Richard Nixon, the only president to resign, are often mentioned as contenders. But of none may it be said, as it can safely be said of Bush, that he accomplished nothing of merit and wrought havoc with the rest.
For all his protestations to the contrary in his final speeches, he has left the world a good deal worse off than he found it. Seized by an Oedipal desire to outdo his father, he prosecuted a senseless war, predicated on false, probably deliberately deceptive, intelligence, in a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and mired the US in an incalculably expensive and unwinnable conflict that is beginning to make Vietnam
look like a fleeting skirmish. At home, he traduced civil liberties in the name of national security and abroad, notably at Guantanamo Bay and in the hideous policy of rendition, his administration trampled on the very democratic freedoms for which it claimed to be fighting. Bush dismantled existing environmental protections and stymied new ones. And his domestic policies widened the gap between the haves and have-nots in the richest country in history.
The leadership of Barack Obama has yet to be tested. But when he takes the oath of office on Wednesday our time, the world will hold its breath in hope and, at the same instant, expel a sigh of relief. And the world will become a better place when Bush's chopper lifts off from the White House lawn.
