On the day that changed everything, the sky was painted a rich blue, like a shade from Monet's palette. Bathed in sunlight, the leaves shone vibrant red. Shadows flickered like soft brushstrokes on America's East Coast that September day. Not a breeze was stirring.

The world that Tuesday morning: beautiful and perfect and peaceful, an ode to autumn. In the space of a few minutes, this harmony was shattered by jangling horror. And then the dirge began.

The weather had been gorgeous when they headed off to work in New York and Washington, taken their children to school, or drove off to do whatever they were doing that day, the survivors would later say - the way people say things when they're numbed by helplessness. And overcome by guilt for having walked away from a hellhole that swallowed nearly 3,000 souls.

8:46 a.m., World Trade Center, New York, North Tower: The hijacked Boeing 767, American Airlines Flight No. 11, rams into the skyscraper between the 93rd and 99th floors. Upon impact, the aluminum tanks rip apart, spewing a torrent of fuel that is ignited by sparks from the shearing steel. Everywhere in the building people are screaming. Seized by utter panic, they clutch at chairs, cabinets, anything that gives them purchase. They are crushed against desks and slammed into walls. And within seconds, they are incinerated by the inferno, leaving hardly a trace behind.

9:03 a.m., World Trade Center, New York, South Tower: The hijacked Boeing 767, United Airlines Flight No. 175, barrels into the skyscraper between the 77th and 85th floors. Apparently about to miss their mark, the terrorist pilots had to change course at the last minute. The United plane is traveling at a much higher speed than the American jet when it impacts: 586 mph vs. 486 mph. The ground moves, the earth seems to quake, and the sheer force catapults people to their deaths. The structural damage to the building is much more devastating than in the North Tower.

Amid the tragedy, miracles happen, miracles that will inspire life-long stories. One of the three stairwells somehow remains intact. An escape route beckons to the panicked, sobbing still-survivors on the floors above the point of impact - if they head in the right direction. Anyone who decides to stay put is doomed - to be consumed by the devilishly fast flames, returned to dust.

The South Tower collapses at 9:59 a.m., the North Tower at 10:28 a.m. And as the Twin Towers crumble, the world as we knew it disappears.

These weren't just any old skyscrapers razed by a terrorist wrecking crew. The World Trade Center was the ultimate icon of capitalism, a jewel in the crown of the Western world, epitomizing the grandeur, authority and supremacy of the earth's one remaining superpower. A nation that, until this very moment, had considered itself invincible.

And still it isn't over; at 9:37 a.m., the next items on the terrorist agenda follow. First, American Airlines Flight No. 77 drives an aerial bayonet into the Pentagon, the nerve center of the greatest military power the world has ever known. Then, at 10:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight No. 93 plows into the ground outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and explodes. What was the terrorists' ultimate target? The White House? The Capitol? No one knows.

UA 93 drills a crater into an empty field only because a handful of passengers found the courage - in the face of death - to attack the hijackers.

Five years have passed since September 11, 2001. As with the day JFK was shot in Dallas, people will never forget where they were when 19 terrorists turned four airliners into weapons of mass destruction. Many images of 9/11 have been etched permanently in our minds. The people who, in utter desperation, exercised their final freedom by plunging 300 yards to their deaths rather than being cremated alive. The people who tottered from the collapsing towers, stunned and coated in soot, heading anywhere and everywhere - as long as it was away from the inferno. The gray clouds that mushroomed when one tower and then the other disintegrated. The gaping wound in the Pentagon, symbolic of a rift that rent the world that day. For those condemned to die, cell phones were the only outlet. They called home to say goodbye. But they also called to prevent their assailants from having the last word. Six days later, the British writer Ian McEwan summed up his impression this way:

A San Francisco husband slept through his wife's call from the World Trade Center. The tower was burning around her, and she was speaking on her mobile phone. She left her last message to him on the answering machine. A TV station played it to us, while it showed the husband standing there listening. Somehow, he was able to bear hearing it again. We heard her tell him through her sobbing that there was no escape for her. The building was on fire and there was no way down the stairs. She was calling to say goodbye. There was really only one thing for her to say, those three words that all the terrible art, the worst pop songs and movies, the most seductive lies, can somehow never cheapen. I love you. She said it over and again before the line went dead. And that is what they were all saying down their phones, from the hijacked planes and the burning towers. There is only love, and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against the hatred of their murderers.

The past five years have weighed heavily on the victims' friends and relatives. They have also placed a burden on entire nations. Two wars, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq: neither country is at peace today. At first the United States and Europe closed ranks; yet soon amity turned to enmity in one of the worst ideological conflicts the two continents have ever seen. The United States, by its own definition not an imperial power (or, at worst, a benevolent one), considered itself "at war." To wage its "war against terror," the U.S. president availed himself of immense powers both at home and abroad. He suspended many of the civil rights that his nation had always cherished, and elevated the "preemptive strike" to a divine doctrine: America had every right to launch an unprovoked attack against any country suspected of abetting terrorists.

The United States squandered the international sympathy and solidarity showered upon it in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Even in Tehran, people had spontaneously taken to the streets, while the French newspaper Le Monde had declared: "We are all Americans." But the Bush administration decided to go it alone: it scoffed at traditional alliances and institutions like the United Nations, and arbitrarily ignored international law.

Now, after the military fiasco in Iraq and the moral disaster in Abu Ghraib, the pendulum seems to have swung back slightly. From the American point of view, "Old Europe" is no longer populated by village idiots suffering from a debility called "appeasement"; the United Nations is more than a bloated, superfluous bureaucracy; and multilateralism is no longer taboo. Today the United States has rediscovered restraint - but it is unclear whether this change of course was born of conviction or necessity. Failure is an unrelenting taskmaster.

The dreams of swift strikes and longlasting victories in the war against terror are in tatters, along with illusions of regime change in the Middle East. Much has changed over the past five years, but little has improved. The world has become a more violent and complex place. Osama bin Laden, who has declared war on the West in general and the U.S. superpower in particular, is still at large - presumably hiding out along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Now Nine-Eleven has become political shorthand, understood around the world. It marked the end of the Cold War and the start of a new conflict with intertwining threads: the war against terrorism, the prevention of nuclear proliferation, and the race to sate industrial societies' voracious appetites for fossil fuels.

World politics have always been multidimensional. Yet in the years since 9/11, several new dimensions have been added. One, of course, is al Qaeda, the hydra that sprouts new heads for every one that it loses - see Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. Another is central Asia, the fresh treasure trove of oil and natural gas which has drawn the United States' strategic eye. Then there is Afghanistan, where the radical Taliban were overthrown but are now launching a bloody comeback that will be hard to stop. Not to forget Iran, whose nuclear ambitions are fast gaining momentum, and North Korea, which brazenly tested its missiles on America's Independence Day earlier this summer. Last but not least, there is America's renewed rivalry with Russia. Vladimir Putin is pushing to regain a dominant role in world politics - a bid powered by the country's vast natural resources.

The United States now has credibility issues that are both political and moral, and a superpower status that rests solely on arms supremacy. The nation is light years ahead when it comes to investing in military might; in the list of big spenders, it devotes more funds to weapons than the next 10 countries combined. The period after 9/11 was the nation's "unipolar moment," as the columnist Charles Krauthammer, the prophet of imperial regime change, stated several years ago. Today other countries in other regions are making world history. The Asian century is dawning at this very moment. India, and above all China, are experiencing dramatic economic booms, and styling themselves America's peers on the world political stage.

Bush's baptism by fire: A president comes of age

In the summer of 2006, George W. Bush flew to Budapest for the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising. Many lives were lost when the Red Army marched in to prop up the communist regime and the United States opted not to intervene. At the height of the Cold War, there was unwritten agreement between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union: There were to be no attacks across the Iron Curtain. At the granite monument to the victims, Bush deposited a wreath of white lilies and purple orchids, tied with a red, white and blue ribbon. He gave several speeches, in which he touched upon the past but always returned to dwell on the present. His lesson from history: "Liberty can be delayed, but it cannot be denied."

He was talking about 20th century Hungary. But he meant 21st century Iraq. He is always referring to Iraq, no matter what country he is visiting. On the record, he is reluctant to talk about his place in history. "We won't know. We'll all be dead," he says in his famous homespun vernacular. But George W. Bush knows one thing: His political legacy is inextricably intertwined with the country known as the cradle of civilization.

This past summer the U.S. president made a surprise visit to Baghdad. In Iraq, Nuri al-Maliki had just been appointed prime minister and, keen to make an immediate impression, launched a major offensive against the rebels. Bush said he sensed a "tangible difference"; he was encouraged. But the difference was no reason to rejoice. The carnage was spreading, kidnappings were up, and tensions between Sunnis and Shiites were boiling over. The exodus of Iraqi doctors, engineers and teachers had accelerated dramatically. The U.S. president also said that his country would not lose its nerve and pull out its troops. "America is a nation that meets its commitments and keeps its word. And that's what we're going to do in Iraq. It's in our interest that Iraq succeed. More importantly, it's in the interest of the Iraqi people. The challenges that remain are serious, and they will require more sacrifice and patience. And our efforts are well worth it."

Bush has changed since the late summer of 2001, at least linguistically. Gone are the brash Wild West sound bites: "Dead or alive." - "You're either for us or against us." Today the aims sound less exalted: somewhere down the road a tolerably peaceful Iraq, that would be acceptable. But scarcely the prosperous, democratic Iraq that would shine as a beacon of freedom over the entire region.

Similarly, the warmongers in the U.S. government have stepped out of the limelight and into the shadows. Nationalists like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who orchestrated the war, supplied its (fictitious) rationale, from "weapons of mass destruction" to "Saddam Hussein's ties to al Qaeda," who sold the president the (wrong) strategy and fed the illusion about the democratic domino effect that an invasion would produce. Condoleezza Rice has proven a more nimble dancer. In the administration's first term, as national security adviser in the run-up to the U.S. incursion, she howled with the wolves and the Wolfowitzes, raising the specter of "mushroom clouds" from Saddam Hussein's nuclear arsenal - despite, surely, knowing that they were made of hot air. U.N. inspectors had defanged the Iraqi dictator's WMD program long ago. As secretary of state in the Bush's second term, she is appealing to allies for patience, understanding and help.

Immediately after 9/11, the biblical rhetoric that foreign policy rookie George W. Bush invoked served to soothe the wounded soul of the American people: "[O]ur responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil. War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing," he said. The unforeseen consequence of such rhetoric and the - plenipotent - power politics that emerged from it: The man who set out as "a uniter" has become the nation's great divider.

He lent his ear to the nationalists in his inner circle and to neo-conservatives inside and outside the administration. Both mindsets went into building the Bush doctrine, which rests on three main pillars. Number 1: 9/11 must never be allowed to happen again. Terrorists must be hunted down wherever they are, even if that requires the preemptive strikes prohibited by international law. Number 2: Countries that harbor terrorists like the al Qaeda network - and might even give them atomic weapons - are nightmares in the making and must be targeted by any means available. Number 3 (which was rarely elaborated in public): We must safeguard our access to the world's largest oilfields. To this end, we need a strategic bridgehead in the Middle East. The vulnerability of oil supplies from pro-American Saudi Arabia is reflected in the growing swell of opposition to the corrupt royal family - 15 of the 19 9/11 terrorists were Saudis.

The new enemies of the United States in the post-9/11 fight against terrorism were soon identified: Afghanistan, which had offered hospitality to al Qaeda; oilrich Iraq, which was ruled by a harsh dictator; Iran, the sponsor of terror; and the helter-skelter, Stalinist North Korea with its dreams of nuclear arms. All of these countries lined up dutifully in the administration's "axis of evil." Freedom was the remedy prescribed by the U.S. president: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

In 2001, Bush listened to Cheney and Rumsfeld. They were instrumental in the decisions to attack Afghanistan and use force to trigger regime change in Baghdad. They suggested that the "liberators" would be greeted with flowers and that Iraq would follow the same democratic path taken by Germany and Japan after World War II. There were no doubts. Doubt couldn't even be contemplated. And if any doubters did surface - in Colin Powell's State Department, in a CIA with its Iraq specialists or in the nation's newsrooms - they would be crushed. Doubt was tantamount to treason. Doubt was for people who lacked "fire in the belly," and these people usually lived in Europe, or, more accurately, in France and Germany.

The Bush doctrine needed an ideological substructure; otherwise it might be viewed as brazen power politics focused exclusively on military bases and oil reserves. And, indeed, there really was a broader, unstated goal: a grand, geopolitical design to establish Westminster-style democracy throughout the region. In countless television interviews and newspaper articles, Bernard Lewis, the doyen of modern Mideast studies, laid out the superstructure. The Briton, who was born in 1916, described the region not as a unique social, economic and political phenomenon that had lost the ability to change, but as a geographic region in constant flux, beset by perpetual unrest - just like 20th century Europe between the two world wars. In the autumn of his life, the professor suddenly became a wellspring of influence.

According to Lewis, the Middle East's hatred of the West is rooted in the region's backwardness. He holds up Turkey - a secular country that rose from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire - as a model of what might be. But where are the Atatürks in the Middle East, the visionaries able to boldly face the challenges of change? Not even Lewis knows where to find the answer.

But he did find a willing audience in the White House. "That epiphany - Lewis's Kemalist vision of a secularized, Westernized Arab democracy that casts off the medieval shackles of Islam and enters modernity at last," the U. S. newsmagazine Washington Monthly wrote in retrospect, "remains the core of George W. Bush's faltering vision in Iraq."

Read about Bush and the war in Iraq on Page 2.

Bush and his war: A president implodes

Academic advice is one thing, implementing political objectives and military strategy quite another. In Washington, it seemed that nationalists like Rumsfeld and Cheney had sealed a symbiotic alliance with the neocons - who dominated many think tanks and regarded Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy at the Pentagon, as their natural leader. Ultimately, however, the nationalists and neocons were more antagonists than partners.

Rumsfeld wanted to wage a scaleddown war, a quick in and out. Neither he nor Cheney are friends of nation building; theirs is a cynical view when it comes to power and practicability. They recognized that an America thirsting for revenge was ready to attack more far-reaching targets than Afghanistan - if the arguments were marshaled with sufficient conviction. Using forged documents, the nationalists succeeded in insinuating links between Saddam, al Qaeda and the Twin-Tower terror.

The neocons, disciples of charitable imperialism and ardent supporters of nation building, urged a democratic makeover in the region. It was time, they maintained, to reject the policies of the 1970s and 1980s, when America handed the reins to sinister potentates like the Shah of Iran and the sheikhs of Saudi Arabia. Paradoxically, they tended to favor a force much larger than 150,000 troops; closer to 500,000 would be needed, as General John Shalikashvili had boldly ventured - earning himself a ticket to early retirement.

The first calls for Rumsfeld's resignation came from the circle around the Weekly Standard, a magazine published by William Kristol, the unorthodox thinker behind the neocons.

In his rhetoric, President Bush sided with the idealists. When asked whether he had sought his father's counsel, the devout George W. responded in all seriousness that "a higher father" was inspiring his decisions. The president's stated goal was to democratize and "civilize" the entire Middle East. But in practice, he sided with the realists and cynics, who wanted a quick, hit-and-run war and hoped everything else would somehow fall into place. He thus found himself embroiled in a conflict that was already lost by the time he proclaimed "Mission accomplished" from the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003.

The explosive Middle East is no place to test grandiose ideas; it has been a tinderbox for far too long. Nine-Eleven has its roots here; Nine-Eleven compounded the problems.

In Iraq, countless hopes have been tossed to the wind. The situation was expected to improve many times over in the past - when an Iraqi government replaced U.S. administrator Paul Bremer, when Saddam Hussein was retrieved from his subterranean hideout, when the Iraqis got to elect a parliament, when the constitution was approved, when the Sunnis entered the government, and when al-Zarqawi was killed. But things never improved. They went steadily downhill.

Five years have now passed since 9/11. It will be at least another five before the country has peace and security - if everything goes well. The lesson of the Middle East, where leaders follow every movement in every other country with acute suspicion, is pure and simple: Security isn't everything, but without security there is nothing. Stability is more important than democracy.

The winners of the American war are outside Iraq, and one of them is Osama bin Laden. For al Qaeda, Iraq has become the Afghanistan of the 1990s: the battlefield in its jihad against an infidel superpower. Iran, ironically enough, is another of the winners - and didn't have to lift a finger. Having seen its arch-enemy Saddam toppled, Teheran is happily picking up the pieces.

Iran's influence is spreading in southern Iraq where the Shiites form the majority. The longer the war lasts, the greater the political spoils for the mullahs. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man with apocalyptic visions, has replaced the mild-mannered Mohammad Khatami as president. While a debilitated America falters, Iran is developing the technology to build nuclear weapons, and is well on the way to becoming the region's dominant power. Nine-Eleven as an elixir, a stimulant for the theocrats from Teheran who want to wipe Israel off the map. What bitter irony!

For President Bush, the road to Baghdad was supposed to lead to Jerusalem; according to the pollyanna politics of Washington, successful regime change would soothe the simmering conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But the truth of the matter is that Washington will hold little sway over the peace process in the foreseeable future. In the Middle East, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Israeli military have taken matters into their own hands. Nothing happens in this region without the United States but almost nothing is happening with it, either.

America is different. America charts its own, unique path. America insists on being measured only against itself. It is the world's most advanced country yet has remained astonishingly conservative. It is the top producer of pornography, yet pious to the point of bigotry. It builds mininukes to defend itself from dictators while granting almost unrestricted access to firearms to its citizens. It engineers the world's best computers but interprets the Bible literally. It produces Nobel Prize winners by the score but considers Darwin's findings blasphemous. It's the world's freest nation, yet it tolerates numerous taboos. It indulges in a socially unhinged form of capitalism that, unlike in the progressive countries of Europe, does not undermine the Protestant work ethic driving its success.

September 11, 2001 demonstrated the resilience of America's roots. A groundswell of unbridled patriotism swept the land, wrapping it in red, white and blue, turning police and firefighters into national heroes, and wowing the world with its extraordinary solidarity: United we stand.

Unlike Germany with its Red Army Faction and Italy with its Brigate Rosse, America had never seen a major terrorist attack (excluding Oklahoma City in April 1995, the insane act of a lone American). Then the unthinkable happened. The country suddenly realized it was vulnerable - and shifted into high gear. Congress granted the president extensive emergency powers, without even knowing if he was up to the challenge. And George W. demanded a lot to make this democracy durable. He sought to redefine the country's values by suspending parts of its Constitution.

As a result, pockets that were completely undemocratic, not to say totalitarian in nature, were created within the political framework. Nearly five years after 9/11, the New York Times drew the following conclusion: "Ever since September 11, the Bush administration has taken the necessity of heightened vigilance against terrorism and turned it into a rationale for an extraordinarily powerful executive branch, exempt from the normal checks and balances of our system of government."

Vietnam and Watergate: forgotten. Curbs on the CIA, FBI and NSA: history. Rights to a fair trial, to any trial: scrapped for certain people because of the imperative to "fight terrorism." Guantanamo: above international law.

Inside the White House, the powers gained after September 11 were termed "the new paradigm." They allowed the president, as the nation's commander in chief, to override legal constraints - such as the prohibition of torture, the imprisonment of suspects in secret locations, and warrantless wiretapping - when faced with national security issues. The offshoots of this new paradigm according the president extraordinary powers in times of war include the Guantanamo Bay prison for "enemy combatants" - where detainees have virtually no rights. And the flights by CIA planes across Europe, during which terror suspects were likely ferried to countries where torture is standard practice. In November 2001, Vice President Cheney said candidly: "We think it guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve."

The legal locksmith who helped free the president from the shackles of the law and cracked the statutory code is 49 years old, big and bearded. He has no other distinguishing features. Beyond the walls of the White House, hardly a soul knows David Addington. "He is extremely private; he keeps the door of his office locked at all times, colleagues say, because of the national-security documents in his files. ... He does not speak to the press or allow photographs to be taken for news stories," the New Yorker writes.

Seeking neither promotion nor another job, Addington can afford to ignore the ground rules of America's media society. He is the vice president's chief of staff. He thinks like Cheney. He has been at Cheney's side for years. You could call him "Cheney's Cheney."

After the terror attacks of September 11, Addington has wielded a far greater influence than John Ashcroft - the attorney general who served, in public, as the administration's "chief executioner." Addington had a special asset: He had been around since Ronald Reagan's presidency. He knew better than anyone which restrictions were cramping the president's style. More importantly, he knew how to bypass them.

It took years for the Supreme Court to react. In June 2004, it ruled that prisoners at Guantanamo were entitled access to the American legal system and could challenge their detention before U.S. courts. This past June, the court spoke again, dealing George W. Bush a far harsher blow: The military tribunals that the president planned to hold in Guantanamo were a "violation of American and international law according to the Geneva Convention," the justices ruled. The humbled commander in chief, who had carried on and on about the "new kind of war" he had to wage as he saw fit, was suddenly forced to work with Congress. America shifted into low gear.

A dispute between the White House and the New York Times revealed just how badly the engine was lugging. The same month, the newspaper disclosed that the U.S. government was extensively monitoring international money transfers - solely on the basis of the "emergency laws" of September 11. These transactions are handled by a Belgian company called SWIFT, an organization linking some 7,800 banks. SWIFT regulates, administers and monitors payments worth up to $6 trillion every single day. The U.S. government was particularly interested in money moving from the Arab world to the West.

After the story appeared, President Bush launched an unusually harsh attack on the New York Times, almost presenting the Fourth Estate as a fifth column of the terrorists. "The disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America." The scandal was not that SWIFT had been compelled to provide information, but that the surveillance had been made public. By the same token, the U.S. secret services had stored millions of international calls without judicial authorization - another right sacrificed to the cause of fighting terrorism.

In America, the shock of September 11 has yet to abate. The trauma still lingers. The opposition Democrats are finding it very difficult to mobilize the country against the president - and to declare Iraq a lost cause that is not worth the price in American blood.

Some Americans see things differently from the rest of the Western world: in their eyes, their country has been at war against terrorists since September 11, 2001. But they are only half of the population, perhaps even less. Bush's approval ratings have sunk to just over 35 percent, due also to the crisis mismanagement during Hurricane Katrina and lopsided tax breaks for the ultra-rich. The ratings for his firebrand deputy Cheney are even lower.

The Bush legacy: The failed revolution

Of the many depressing statistics from the president's second term, this is probably his most depressing: More than 50 percent of Americans now consider George W. Bush "dishonest." Such huge credibility gaps are rare in U.S. politics.

He can still call on ardent supporters, including the faithful in his party's religious-fundamentalist wing, but liberal Republicans are becoming estranged, and - if somewhat gingerly - the newly rejuvenated Democratic Party is preparing a counteroffensive. Recently, a group of top security experts that spans party lines - including former generals, secretaries of state and national security advisers - declared the president a failure. In their joint study conducted for Foreign Policy and the highly respected think tank "Center for American Progress," 84 percent disagreed with Bush's statement that the United States was winning the war against terrorism. Eighty-six percent said they thought the world was a more dangerous place. Only 10 percent were expecting positives from the Iraq war. A devastating indictment.

"The Worst President in History?" the U.S. magazine Rolling Stone asked pointedly on a cover in May. Sean Wilentz, Professor of History at Princeton University, is inclined to answer in the affirmative - despite stiff competition from such flops as James Buchanan (1857-1861), who allowed the United States to slide into civil war; Andrew Johnson (1865-1869), who was impeached; and Herbert Hoover (1929-1933), who wanted to abolish welfare during the worst economic crisis of all time. According to Wilentz, these "calamitous presidents" - with Bush - "have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. ... Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures - an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities."

Has the final word already been spoken about the president's legacy? Can he still change course and regain the initiative? Does he even want to?

George W. Bush has pointed out more than once that the United States is guided by its "manifest destiny" to remake the rest of the world in its own image. He placed September 11, the "day of fire," - his archaic term - at the heart of his second inaugural address in January 2005. "[The fire] warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress." He then pledged that, "One day, this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world." No one in the president's circle seemed to register that "untamed" also means "uncontrollable."

In March 2006, the "well-meaning arsonist" (Süddeutsche Zeitung) renewed this inflammatory promise and warned of things to come. Excerpts from the latest version of the National Security Strategy: "America is at war. ... We fight our enemies abroad instead of waiting for them to arrive in our country. ... We seek to shape the world, not merely be shaped by it; to influence events for the better instead of being at their mercy."

The second term sounds like a repeat performance of the first; fire and brimstone, the Wild West and the Bush doctrine live on.

If truth be told, the Texas cowboy is already riding off into the sunset of his revolution. But away from the ranch, beyond the realm of fireside rhetoric, life goes on in a place where foreign-policy reality intrudes. And at some point, this reality will become so insistent that it can't be blown aside with bluster alone. The White House has finally gotten the message: The final two years of the Bush administration could well be dominated by diplomatic endeavor rather than preemptive strikes.