Bush has been the most

disastrous president of modern times. Just count the days till we

can cheer his departure

End of a destructive era: Outgoing President Bush

TV viewers will know it as the oldest sitcom joke in the world: a relative from hell arrives on the doorstep, demanding to stay the night. Cue the children fleeing to the neighbours for refuge, while dad stomps off to the pub.



Well, that is the jape that the President of the United States has been playing on every major capital in Europe.



In Rome, Paris, Berlin and most recently London, George W. Bush's farewell tour has drawn less welcoming crowds than a Russian Eurovision song contestant.



It is a tragic irony. Whether people admit this or not, America remains the focus of much of the world's attention, hopes, admiration, envy.



Yet Bush, seven months away from leaving office, has become its least loved leader of modern times.



Does he care? 'Only to the extent that it affects people's views of the citizens I represent,' he shrugged to a British interviewer at the weekend. 'Do I care about my personal standing? Not really.'



This is probably true. Throughout his political career, Bush has been driven by a profound sense of his own rightness.



One of his shrewdest recent biographers, a fellow Texan named Robert Draper, entitled his study of the President, Dead Certain.



George W. has always been dead certain. Of Iraq today, he says: 'Democracy is succeeding there. We're beginning to see progress… The Iraqi people are living in a free society.'



He perceives himself, as he has done since 9/11, as a war president who has simply done the necessary things in response to the evil people who threaten his country.



We foreigners, of course, see it somewhat differently. We perceive a president who has transformed overwhelming global support for the United States after the terrorist attacks of 2001 - his first year of office - into the situation of 2008 in which Bush's country is widely unloved, even hated, around the world, and has lost the trust of some of its oldest allies.



In the wake of 9/11, some ignorant, powerful and thus dangerous men in Bush's administration saw an opportunity to pursue their own cherished ambitions.



Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Assistant Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, like the President himself, were neo-conservatives.



Top of their agenda was the toppling of Saddam Hussein. They cared nothing for the fact that the CIA could find no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.



They saw only that the American people would support military action against the nation's enemies.



This gave the neo-cons their break: they could start by Max Hastings their very own all-singing, all-shooting war. Afghanistan came first.



That cause possessed legitimacy in the eyes of the UN and much of the world, because the Taliban had provided Al Qaeda with safe havens from which to attack America.



Kabul fell swiftly to the warlords of the Northern Alliance, backed by the CIA and U.S. air power, in December 2001.



But the moment the campaign seemed won, Bush and his people walked away from the Afghans.



Descent Into Chaos, a fine new book by a Pakistani journalist named Ahmed Rashid, details the manner in which Afghanistan was allowed to fall apart, because the Bush Administration said without apology as it left in 2002: 'We don't do nation-building.'



All the Stealth bombers, special forces and cruise missile launchers were hurried away to attend Bush's banquet, the war which he really cared about - against Iraq.



We do not need to repeat that story. What matters is what we are left with. In fairness to the U.S., a lot of lessons have been learned since 2003.



Outside the White House, at least, in the State Department and the U.S. Army, there is understanding of past mistakes.



The past few years in Iraq and Afghanistan have been spent attempting to undo the consequences of all the foolish things done at the outset.



Levels of violence in Iraq have now fallen. Al Qaeda fighters in the country (there were none there, of course, before Bush came) have suffered heavy defeat.



But there is still little sign that the Iraqi national government is working.



The Iraqis might eventually be able to stand on their own feet. But it remains unlikely that they will do so as part of an integrated nation with freedoms we would recognise.



Bush has made another big mistake, by identifying the security interests of the U.S. entirely with those of Israel.



At the weekend, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice belatedly criticised Israel's new settlements on Palestinian territory as 'unhelpful' to peace.



Yet, throughout this administration, Israel has been able to do pretty much as it chose to the Palestinians, with the assurance of support from Washington.



It is nonsense today to talk about a 'Middle East peace process'. There is no such thing.



Progress in the region can come only when the U.S. is ready to lean on Israel as well as the Palestinians.



Bush's policies towards Israel, as well as towards Saddam, have made it much more difficult for the West to handle Iran, always a graver threat to global stability than Iraq.



We take less notice of Bush's economic policies than of what he does abroad. But American bankers regard the failure of these at least as seriously as Iraq.



One of them said to me at dinner last week: 'He had the chance to fix the problems, including our huge budget deficit. He never took it.'



Bush's big economic pitch was to cut taxes for the rich, his favourite constituents.



By doing so, he deepened social divisions inside the U.S., and worsened the problems of a nation spending a fortune on its foreign wars.



His successor will inherit an economy in recession, together with precious little scope for imaginative action.



Bush, like Blair and Brown here, has spent all the money. His reputation among his own people is not only as a war-maker, but as a bungler.



Most Americans were at least as dismayed by the failure of Washington's response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans three years ago as they were by Iraq.



But the sorriest aspect of Bush's legacy is his destruction of one of America's most priceless assets, its moral authority.



U.S. policy is always driven by self-interest. But for most of modern times, that self-interest has been perceived by many other societies as enlightened. America's values are also ours.



What has served U.S. purposes has also served us, especially through the Cold War.



Today, by contrast, much of the globe feels alienated from American goals, whether on trade, climate change (Bush is a sceptic), economics or war.



The great challenge for this president's successor is to rebuild not only alliances abroad, but trust.



This can be done, especially with the surge of global goodwill that would greet an Obama victory. But it will be tough, because Bush will leave such a mess.



Pity the Queen at the weekend, obliged to make small talk with George W. on his final lap of dishonour.



Spare a crumb of sympathy for Gordon Brown, committed to exchange platitudes with this discredited, almost time-expired leader of the greatest nation on earth - and even to send a few more British soldiers to Afghanistan to please him.



Bush has been the most disastrous U.S. president of modern times. It will take years to repair the damage he has inflicted. We should start counting the days until January, when we can celebrate his departure.