Over the next four years President Bush’s credibility suffered. Several issues—sectarian violence in Iraq, mounting death tolls, and the failures of the U.S.-supported Iraqi government—turned the majority of Americans against the war. In 2008 polls showed that 54 percent of Americans considered the invasion of Iraq a mistake, and 49 percent wanted U.S. troops to return home (compared with 47 percent who opposed withdrawal).

Bush’s handling of a major natural disaster further diminished his popularity. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf coast states of Louisiana and Mississippi. This powerful storm devastated New Orleans, a city with a population of nearly 500,000, a majority of whom were African American. The flood surge caused poorly maintained levees to break, deluging large areas of the city and trapping 50,000 residents. Not only did local and state officials respond slowly and ineptly to the crisis, but so, too, did the federal government.

In the days after the storm hit, chaos reigned in New Orleans. Evacuees were housed in the Superdome football stadium and a municipal auditorium without adequate food, water, and sanitary facilities. The flooding killed at least 1,800 residents of the Gulf coast, New Orleans’s population dropped by around 130,000 residents, and critics blamed the president for his lack of leadership and slow response to the disaster. Overall, Hurricane Katrina was as much a human-made disaster as a natural one.

Displeased with the Bush administration, voters elected a Democratic majority to the House and Senate in 2006, yet little changed. American troops remained in Iraq and Afghanistan. The war on terror had become a permanent part of life in the United States, much like the national security state during the Cold War. At the same time, Osama bin Laden remained in hiding, and al-Qaeda had regrouped in Pakistan and Yemen. The Bush administration did little to address the perennial problem of Israeli-Palestinian relations, one of the chief elements that fueled terrorism and Islamic radicalism. Making the situation even more combustible, in 2006 Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement), which the United States considered a terrorist organization, won Palestinian parliamentary elections and posed a new threat to peace in the Middle East.

With turmoil continuing in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, the threat of nuclear proliferation grew. Iraq did not have nuclear weapons, but Iran sought to develop nuclear capabilities. Iranian leaders claimed that they wanted nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, but the Bush administration believed that Iran’s real purpose was to build nuclear devices to attack Israel and establish its supremacy in the region.

REVIEW & RELATE

How did President Bush put compassionate conservatism into action?

How did the war on terror affect American foreign policy in the Bush administration?