President George Walker Bush's NEW WORLD ORDER

President Bush's broad characterizations of the terrorist threat led him to expand the focus of his foreign policy from al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations to other regimes hostile to the United States, regardless of their connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Following the war in Afghanistan, Bush designated Iraq as the primary new threat to American security. He famously labeled Iraq, along with North Korea and Iran, as part of an “axis of evil.” Over the course of 2002, President Bush announced that the U.S. foreign strategy of containment and deterrence was an outdated cold war policy, and introduced the Bush doctrine, which asserted that in an age of terrorism, the U.S. could no longer wait by defensively until a potential threat to its security grew into an actual one—a preemptive strike was called for. In Sept. 2002, Bush addressed the UN, challenging the organization to swiftly enforce its own resolutions against Iraq, or else the U.S. would have no choice but to act on its own. Many world leaders expressed alarm at this shift in U.S. policy, which stressed unilateralism rather than international consensus. The alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction, Iraq's links to terrorism, and Saddam Hussein's despotism and human rights abuses were cited as the casus belli for “regime change.” The UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution imposing tough new arms inspections on Iraq, but after three months of inspections that resulted in only modest Iraqi cooperation, U.S. patience ran out: on March 19, President Bush declared war on Iraq and U.S. troops, along with their British allies, began bombing Baghdad. By April 9, Baghdad had fallen, and by May 1, combat was officially declared over.
The official phase of the war was swift, but the post-war reconstruction period proved far more difficult. The country was enveloped in violence and chaos and its infrastructure was in ruins. While the Bush administration successfully turned over sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government in June 2004, within months pockets of Iraq were essentially under the control of insurgents. President Bush assured the country that despite these difficulties, the United States would stay the course until Iraq emerged as a free and democratic country. More than a year-and-a-half of searching for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction—one of the prime reasons Bush cited for launching the war—yielded no hard evidence, and the administration and its intelligence agencies came under fire. There were also mounting allegations that the existence of these weapons and their imminent threat to American security was exaggerated or distorted as a pretext to justify the war. The Senate Intelligence Committee's unanimous, bipartisan “Report on Pre-War Intelligence on Iraq,” harshly criticized the CIA: “most of the major key judgments” on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were “either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence report.” The report disputed the CIA's assertions that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program and that it had chemical and biological weapons, and also concluded that there was no relationship between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. With the justifications for the war evaporating, the Bush administration began emphasizing that the removal of dictator Saddam Hussein had been grounds enough for waging war, and that the United States was more secure as a result of it.
Critics of the administration's policy in Iraq described it as a distraction from the war on terror, preventing the United States from effectively battling the war on its genuine fronts. Since the start of the U.S. war in Iraq, the two remaining countries in the “axis of evil,” North Korea and Iran, had grown into alarming nuclear threats. The Bush administration's diplomatic efforts made little headway against Iran and North Korea's defiance and evasion.
II)
Iraq's continued insurgency, lack of political stability, and the acknowledgment that only a small number of Iraqi forces were capable of replacing American troops stationed in the country led to increased domestic discontent. In the face of growing American casualties and the absence of a clear strategy for winning the protracted war beyond “staying the course,” the president's approval ratings plummeted in 2005

III)
As security in Iraq deteriorated in 2006 and reconstruction efforts foundered, the increasingly unpopular war became the president's greatest liability. November 2006 mid-term elections led to a seismic shift in the political landscape, with Democrats gaining control over the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time in twelve years. A day after the election, President Bush, acknowledging that his party had taken a “thumping,” announced the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose intransigent Iraq policies had made him the bete noir of Democrats and many Republicans. In December, the bipartisan report by the Iraq Study Group, led by former secretary of state James Baker and former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, concluded that “the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating” and “U.S. forces seem to be caught in a mission that has no foreseeable end.” The report's 79 recommendations included reaching out diplomatically to Iran and Syria and having the U.S. military intensify its efforts to train Iraqi troops. The report heightened the debate over the U.S. role in Iraq, but President Bush kept his distance from it, indicating that he would wait until Jan. 2007 before announcing a new Iraq strategy.