As we approach the end of the Bush 43 presidency, it may be time to evaluate the abysmal record of this administration, perhaps the worst in American history. Much of our disappointment with President Bush stems from the debacle in Iraq, both in regard to his miscalculations that led the nation to war, and then the occupation that followed. Along the way, the United States, which had gained much of the world's sympathy after 9/11, managed to alienate many of our traditional allies and negate the role of the United Nations as the source of legitimizing our invasion of Iraq. In addition, the Bush administration, by taking a hands-off mediating role in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, had much to do with the deterioration of the peace process that now makes the conflict seem as far from being resolved as it ever was.

I know of no better way to gain an understanding of the reasons for the foreign policy failures of the Bush administration than to read Dennis Ross' new book. Ross — the former Middle East envoy and chief peace negotiator in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, as well as the author of The Missing Peace, the author's inside account of the events that led to the breakdown in the Camp David summit between Israel and the Palestinians in 2000 — has written an important book about how the absence of statecraft in Iraq and in the Middle East has led to the present decline in America's international image throughout much of the world.

Ross defines "statecraft" as the use of the nation's economic, military, intelligence, media, and diplomacy to effectively pursue its interests internationally and affect the behavior of its adversaries. In several well-crafted chapters, Ross details how the Bush 41 administration used statecraft to overcome Soviet resistance to a unified Germany and to create a coalition that was able to confront Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iraq in 1990 — without the disastrous results that characterize the current situation in Iraq. Ross specifically credits then Secretary of State James Baker for "working the phones" and relentlessly pursuing every aspect of diplomacy to build the coalition that defeated Iraq without eliciting the type of criticism that followed America's invasion of the country under Bush 43.

Ross' tome is a brief for the use of greater diplomacy and political realism, as the United Sates faces such problems as: resolving the deteriorating Israeli-Palestinian conflict, confronting Iran as that nation moves toward building nuclear weapons, facing the widespread appeal of radical Islam, and dealing with the potential of conflict with China as that nation steadily emerges as a possible rival for access to the world's energy resources.

But Ross' work is more than a plea for reasoned statecraft; it is a condemnation of the neoconservatives who pushed for the invasion of Iraq without much forethought as to its aftermath and the Bush administration which, states the author, "want no limits on the exercise of American power or sovereignty — not from the United Nations, not from the International Court, and, as we have seen, not even from something like the Geneva Convention on the rules governing torture of those we seize as we combat terrorism."

In the case of German unification, the Gulf war, and Bosnia in August 1995 — when the Clinton administration decided to take action against Serbia's policy of "ethnic cleansing" — both Bush 41 and Clinton left nothing to chance. As Ross notes, both administrations pulled together the international community to build a consensus for action. The present Bush administration, however, as displayed in Iraq, has opted for a policy of wishful thinking, and "the confusion of objectives there leads to a confusion of means. The divisions within the administration," states Ross, "are so poisonous that they make reality-based assessments impossible."

The author observes that the administration was so blinded by its own arrogance that those who knew the most about the realities on the ground in Iraq "were relegated to irrelevance because of their perceived opposition to the war and its purposes." He also notes that the planning for postwar reconstruction was not taken seriously by those given the responsibility for implementing it. That, states Ross, "unfortunately, has been a hallmark of the George W. Bush administration. Iraq in foreign policy and Katrina in domestic policy are the poster children of an administration that too often fails when it comes to planning and follow-through."

This timely and instructive book makes it clear that if there is to be a resolution of the many conflicts that the United Sates will face in the near future, statecraft must no longer be a lost art; it is, as Ross concludes, "time to rediscover it."

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WE DID NOT foresee an insurgency; we foresaw a rapid movement toward a model democracy, and we would be its enablers. We would de-Baathify the system and we would disband the military — strategic blunders on par with the decision to have an American administrator guide post-Saddam Iraq to the promised land. Our assessments were shaped by an ideology, not by the realities of Iraq. The first task of statecraft is to have objectives that are clear and not confused. They can be ambitious, but they must fit the world as it is, not as we wish it might be; it takes well-grounded assessments to refine objectives and shape them so they fit reality.

— From Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World by Dennis Ross