August was a bad month for Pax Americana

Jim Lobe has a great article surveying the unmitigated disaster that is US foreign policy after nearly eight years of Bush and Cheney:

Whatever hopes the George W Bush administration may have had for using its post-September 11, 2001, "war on terror" to impose a new Pax Americana on Eurasia, and particularly in the unruly areas between the Caucasus and the Khyber Pass, they appear to have gone up in flames - in some cases, literally - over the past two weeks.

Not only has Russia reasserted its influence in the most emphatic way possible by invading and occupying substantial parts of Georgia after Washington's favorite Caucasian, President Mikheil Saakashvili, launched an ill-fated offensive against secessionist South Ossetians.

Bloody attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan also underlined the seriousness of the Pashtun-dominated Taliban insurgencies in both countries and the threats they pose to their increasingly beleaguered and befuddled US-backed governments.

And while US negotiators appear to have made progress in hammering out details of a bilateral military agreement that will permit US combat forces to remain in Iraq at least for another year and a half, signs that the Shi'ite-dominated government of President Nuri al-Maliki may be preparing to move forcefully against the US-backed, predominantly Sunni "Awakening" movement has raised the specter of renewed sectarian civil war.

Meanwhile, any hope of concluding a framework for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority by the time Bush leaves office less than five months from now appears to have vanished, while efforts at mobilizing greater international diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran to freeze its uranium enrichment program - the administration's top priority before the Georgia crisis - have stalled indefinitely, overwhelmed by the tidal wave of bad news from its neighborhood.