The legend of a democracy promoter.

• Author: Zegart, Amy
• Position: A First Draft of History

IT'S LEGACY time. As the Bush administration winds down, the race is on to shape how future generations will view the past eight years. The president himself seems keenly aware of the clock, declaring his intention to grab that most elusive brass ring, peace in the Middle East, before he leaves office. Former officials are not waiting that long, publishing memoirs about the Bush years before the Bush years are over. Former CIA chief George Tenet, top Justice Depart- ment official Jack Goldsmith, Pentagon policy chief Douglas Feith and White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan have all penned bestselling insider accounts in the past year. While some kiss and tell more than others, all seek to cast old events in a new light. Setting the record straight has become the most important and popular game in town.

So just what will the Bush foreign-policy legacy be? Over the past several months, I have put this question to more than a dozen leading academics and senior foreign-policy officials from the past three presidential administrations. What I found was surprising. Although the harsh judgments of Bush's performance will most likely endure, so too will his grandest foreign-policy idea: that democratizing the Middle East is the best way to combat the root causes of terrorism and the surest road to peace. For all the criticism of Bush's foreign policy, both John McCain (R-AZ) and Barack Obama (D-IL) embrace the president's "freedom agenda." America's forty-third president may go down as one of the most criticized in American history, but his grand strategy will undoubtedly set the course of American foreign policy for the next administration, and possibly the next generation.

ALMOST NOBODY thinks the president is doing a good job. Bush continues to set public-opinion records--the bad kind. He has received the highest public-disapproval rating ever recorded by Gallup in its seventy-year history. He holds the second-worst approval rating ever (even lower than Richard Nixon's just before he resigned over the Watergate scandal). And 63 percent of Americans consider the Iraq War to be a "mistake." That's the highest recorded opposition to an active war in American history--and a full two points higher than peak opposition to the Vietnam War in May of 1971.

The current prevailing wisdom, expressed publicly by many Democrats and privately by many Republicans, is that democratizing Iraq and the rest of the Middle East is a costly long shot that has done great harm to America's standing and security in the world. William J. Perry, President Clinton's secretary of defense, told me, "I think they'll pay a very negative legacy on Iraq in two respects. First, imposing democracy without understanding the costs. Second, undertaking a war without adequate planning." Former-President Jimmy Carter was far less diplomatic, calling the Bush presidency the "worst in history." The late conservative icon William F. Buckley echoed disapproval across the aisle, declaring in 2006 that Bush was not a true conservative, that the Iraq War had failed so miserably that any European prime minister would be expected to retire or resign, and that the president would have no foreign-policy legacy at all. As one former Bush administration official recently lamented, "What can I say? It looks very bad."

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Many inside the administration are counting on history--lots of it--to overturn this existing consensus. They believe that democratization will eventually come to the Middle East, and when it does, vindication will follow. In May, speaking on the sixtieth anniversary of Israel's independence, the president shared his vision of the world sixty years from now: in 2068, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would be settled; Iran and Syria would be peaceful nations; terrorism would be soundly defeated; and democracy and free trade would flourish across the region "from Cairo to Riyadh to Baghdad and Beirut." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice firmly believes that this ambitious vision is attainable. As she told me in June, international politics is filled with outcomes that seemed unimaginable beforehand and inevitable afterward. She recited with ease what she called the "list of horrors" that confronted President Truman after World War II: raging civil conflicts in Greece and Turkey, 2 million starving Europeans, large Communist electoral gains in Italy and France ("The question," she noted, "wasn't will Eastern Europe go Communist. It's will Western Europe go Communist?"), a permanently divided Berlin, war in the Middle East, a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, a Communist revolution in China, the explosion of a Soviet nuclear weapon five years ahead of Western predictions and the outbreak of the Korean War. "Is there any way to figure," she asked rhetorically, "that in 1989, 1990 and 1991, Eastern Europe is going to be liberated, Germany is going to be unified on Western terms and the Soviet Union would be no more? Or that South Korea would have the eleventh-largest economy in the world? That France and Germany were never going to fight again? That in 2006 you're going to hold a NATO summit in Latvia?" It is a lesson worth remembering. As Nobel Laureate economist Thomas Schelling once cautioned, "There is a tendency ... to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable."

Yet even if Bush's hopeful vision of 2068 becomes reality, judgments of his presidency are not likely to change. Two reasons explain why. First, history more often magnifies than reverses. As years pass, memories fade and vital details are forgotten. All of the complexities and uncertainties swirling around the president and his aides in the moment dissipate and determinism sets in. In hindsight, policies are seen as either brilliant and inevitable (President Kennedy's choice of a naval blockade during the Cuban missile crisis) or colossally stupid (President Carter's aborted rescue mission of American hostages in Iran). In reality, both decisions were vigorously debated. And both were a hair's breadth away from turning out differently. Had Kennedy made his decision on the first day of the crisis rather than the seventh, the United States would have launched an air strike against Soviet missiles in Cuba that could have triggered thermonuclear war. Had one helicopter pilot continued flying to Tehran when a notoriously unreliable warning light went on (the gauge had falsely indicated rotor-blade malfunctions forty-three times before), Carter would have given the rescue mission a green light, which could have altered the course of U.S.-Iranian relations and the 1980 presidential election. But these contingencies get lost with time. Yogi Berra once said that predicting is hard, especially about the future. In foreign policy, predicting the past is even harder.

Harry Truman's presidency...