National Public Radio's Sunday Weekend Edition had as their lead story a discussion of US foreign policy challenges:
http://www.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.php?prgDate=14-Nov-2004&prgId=10
("Foreign Affairs in a Second Bush term")
What was striking to me was how little Iraq figured in the discussion - yet how it had created the many situations the US faced that had no good outcomes. The failure in Iraq has so tied down the US that it cannot plausibly offer much in the way of carrots or sticks to Iran and North Korea; Russia is laughing at us (and leaking nuclear material ... one of the interesting stories to be written in the future is Putin's), any reconciliation with our allies has to begin with Bush, which isn't going to happen, and there is little that will be attempted in the Sudan.
Issue after issue - and the US is way, way worse off than it was wen GWB took office.
The tone of the two experts was extremely grim and stripped down - rather than using words like "failure" and "disaster," they tried to spell out the outcomes in very simple, neutral language that would convey the situation without instantly being tuned out by Bush supporters: things such as (I'm paraphrasing) - "what we want to happen may not be able to happen," "it may be that the only outcome is for us to live with the situation, "we have nothing to offer that they want."
One of the guys spoke very simply about the possibility of "losing an American city" to nuclear weapons and saying that they would have certainly leaked out of Russia or Pakistan.
You can listen to the segment by going to the link above. I listened to it twice.
Bush supporters, this is your fault.