Drezner on Bush: Was He a Disaster or just Out of His Depth?

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Drezner pushes back against revisionists who are trying to make Bush's legacy to be non-terrible:

At best, George W. Bush was a well-meaning man who gave the occasional nice speech and was thoroughly overmatched by events. At worst, he was the most disastrous foreign policy president of the post-1945 era. 

That's about the most charitable way one could put it...

The Bush administration was a disaster. It is, in a way, fitting, I think. We allowed the GOP to conduct a soft coup in the election of 2000. People should still be demonstrating in the streets about that. We allowed the Republican party to subver American democracy, and we paid a heavy price for it, including, iner alia, no seroius effort to stop 9/11, and a radically counter-productive war that could ultimately cost us $6 trillion. And that's to mention only the treasure, not the blood, nor the loss of moral authority. The Bush administration was a self-inflicted wound that might take a hundred years to heal.