Bloomberg: B*sh Presidency heading towards "History's Dustbin"

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a6WcY1yLpokg&refer=us



Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) -- George W. Bush came to power in 2001 vowing to make his mark on history by overhauling taxes, pensions and schools. Instead, an item not on the original agenda -- the war in Iraq -- may consign him to the bottom tier of U.S. leaders.

That's the view of a number of historians and presidential scholars, who say that unless Bush's decision to inject some 20,000 more troops succeeds in quelling sectarian violence, he risks joining the ranks of such poorly regarded American leaders as James Buchanan and Warren G. Harding.

``Iraq has done enormous damage'' to Bush's standing, says Robert Dallek, the biographer of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Bush, he says, will rank ``somewhere at the bottom.'' Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist at the University of Texas in Austin, says Bush's effort to reverse the course of events in the war is ``his last chance to avoid the dustbin of history.''


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Hargrove predicts Bush will probably go down in history as ``one of our worst presidents,'' his reputation dragged down by Iraq in much the same way that Vietnam consumed Lyndon B. Johnson's. But unlike Johnson, who is credited with the Great Society web of social-welfare programs and for advancing civil rights, Bush, Hargrove says, ``has nothing to counter-balance Iraq.''