King George and his merry band of foreign policy nincompoops have turned the situation in the Middle East from tenuous to worse and destroyed the US reputation in that region. 

The Shrub's recent five day trip to the region served to highlight and reinforce his Alfred E. Neuman, ignorant simpleton notoriety, Mr.Magoo myopic stupidity, and terrible failures.

These are, beyond a doubt, the worst president and administration in modern US history.

A report and analysis in the Asia Times states: "Bush was expected to press the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for an early meet to raise oil production...Bush found that the Saudi king was not to be persuaded.

"It would have been unthinkable five or six years ago that a visiting US president would receive such an open rebuff in the Middle East. Last weekend's exchanges revealed the extent of decline in the US's dominance of the Middle East through the present Bush administration.

"The huge accumulation of wealth enables Iran to exert influence regionally and ensure there is practically nothing the US can do to stop its rise as a regional power.

"Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov underscored these realities of the new regional order when he called on the big powers recently to 'put concrete proposals on the table guaranteeing the security of Iran and ensuring Iran a worthy, equal place in talks on resolving all problems in the Near and Middle East.'

"Lavrov is not alone in doing some fast-forward thinking. US specialists also realize the need for new thinking regarding the shaping of a nuclear Iran. Essentially, it boils down to reflecting the limits of American power. A leading US expert on Iran, Ray Takeyh a senior fellow at the influential Council on Foreign Relations, took the bull by the horns when he suggested recently that the time had come for the US to "concede to Iranian indigenous enrichment capability of considerable size" and to concentrate instead on ways and means to make certain that "untoward activities" do not take place within the perimeters of its nuclear infrastructure.

"The developments in Lebanon have further exposed that the Bush administration has no effective plan for coping. If the Washington-based newsletter Counterpunch is to be believed, a pre-planned Israeli intervention (with US acquiescence) in Lebanon during the recent fighting had to be called off at the last minute on the basis of intelligence that Hezbollah would massively retaliate. In the view of the US intelligence community, Tel Aviv would have been subject to 'approximately 600 Hezbollah rockets in the first 24 hours in retaliation'.

"To quote well-known British author and Middle East scholar Patrick Seale, 'The Arab Gulf States in particular trade briskly with Iran and are home to a large Iranian population. They do not want to isolate Iran or undermine its economy, as the United States and Israel would like them to do. It seems clear that greater understanding and confidence between Saudi Arabia and Egypt on the one hand and Iran and Syria on the other - free from US and Israeli interference - would do much to ease Lebanon's path to peace and security.'

"In sum, the Bush administration has no Plan B on Lebanon, either.

"The Arabs knew that at any rate, there is an air of unreality in Bush's anti-Hamas rhetoric. Hamas had announced only a couple of days ago that it would send a delegation to Egypt on Monday for a new round of talks with mediators. The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported on Sunday that several former Israeli military and security officials - including ex-Mossad head Ephraim Halevi, former army chief Amnon Lipkin-Shahak and the former commander of Israeli troops in Gaza, Shmuel Zakai - wrote to the government a month ago supporting indirect talks with Hamas and expressing opposition to any large-scale military assault on Gaza.

"They wrote, 'Recognizing that ending the Hamas regime in Gaza is not a realistic goal and reinstating Fatah in the Gaza Strip by means of Israeli bayonets is not desirable ... non-public negotiations should take place with Hamas through Egypt or anyone else acceptable to both sides.'

[Both John Sidney McHypocrite and Barack Obama, please note the above two paragraphs]

The article continues: "Time and again during Bush's Middle East tour, what emerges is this palpable sense that the US has been all but marginalized from a new Middle East that is taking shape. All of Bush's rhetoric couldn't hide the fact that even by adding 300 million Americans to 7 million Israelis, he failed to disprove the erosion in Israel's regional supremacy.

"In a brilliant article recently, former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer underlined that the center of gravity of the regional power and politics in the wake of the Iraq war has shifted to the Persian Gulf. To quote Fischer, 'Indeed, it is now virtually impossible to implement any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without Iran and its local allies - Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine.'

"The point is, the historic failure of the Iraq war is yet to be fully grasped. On a regional plane, as the Iraq war interminably rolls on, the situation is fraught with the immense consequence of the unraveling of the entire system of states that was created in the Anglo-French settlement after the fall of Ottoman Empire in 1918. The Iraq war has triggered Shi'ite empowerment and unleashed historical forces that lay chained for centuries. Its geopolitical significance is yet to sink in as winds of change sweep across the entire region.  (Underline added.)

"Equally, China has appeared on the Middle Eastern chessboard, which would make the decline in the US dominance of the region increasingly difficult to be arrested. Curiously, on the eve of Bush's arrival in the Middle East, a prominent Chinese scholar, Weiming Zhao, professor at the Middle East Studies Institute of the Shanghai International Studies University, assertively wrote: 'China has a significant interest in the Middle East, and any changes in the situation there will affect China's energy security ... Therefore, it will remain a basic posture of China's diplomacy for a long time to come to pay more attention to the development of the situation in the Middle East, to be more concerned with Middle East affairs and to establish closer relations with Middle East countries.'

"Bush's tour exposed that, alas, the US doesn't have a Middle East strategy to address these manifold trends. It seems all the while, the Bush administration was only pretending it had one. A formidable challenge awaits the next US president."

The right wing, necon Bush administration's failed illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq based on lies has created earthshaking negative consequences of historical proportions in the Mid-East region. It has unleashed a dangerous genie from a centuries old bottle the results of which no one can predict with certainty.  The Bushite bumbling fools have caused inestimable damage in the Middle East the aftershocks and ripples of which will be felt for many decades and possibly longer.

And impeachment is still off the table.