Spot on. George W. Bush and his merry band of neocons were stunningly incompetent. I suppose it was inevitable. Every ascendant power must have their period of hubris, followed by a fall. Some survive it, others don't.

I would add that the utter failure of the GWB administration wasn't just limited to foreign policy. It was effectively the end of America's conservative establishment. Americans saw Iraq, Americans saw the Great Financial Crisis, and while most Americans couldn't articulate this clearly, they felt it in the guts; the WASP establishment was utterly spent, and their incompetence proved it.

Americans reacted by voting in the first non-white president in the country's history, and then by largely abandoning the centre as both liberals and conservatives dashed for populist extremes. And why wouldn't they? The traditional social betters, the elites that had led the country through the Depression, world wars, and the Cold War, had suddenly shown themselves to be emperors without clothes.

The GWB administration was the end of the "old" America; the conception of the country as a white Protestant republic. Future historians will write about that administration as we write about the Crisis of the Third Century for the Roman Empire. A transformative moment for a great empire that, while preserving the state, utterly changed the people and the culture.