The Boston Globe has a three part series on how the GOP is governing the country.

Back-room dealing a Capitol trend
Energy bill a special-interests triumph
Medicare bill a study in D.C. spoils system

Bush’s approach to North Korea has caused some regression from the previous state. Are the multilateral talks now going on worth the cost we have paid?

Iran appears hell bent on getting nuclear weapon capabilities and have an expressed desire to attack Israel with them. They are also aligned to Hezbollah, a believed to be terrorist group. It’s frustrating that the president doesn’t seem to have a strategy with Iran other then to let the IAEA do their work. It seems like Bush can only operate in one of two modes, completely hands off or getting ready to invade. The other possibility is that Bush can’t actually handle more then one thing at once, and Iraq is sucking all of their attention.

Things to continue investigating: There has got to be more data on the whitehouse’s Iran policy out there.

War:

While there was some concern that we were going into Afghanistan without proof of the ties between Al Queda and 9/11, it appears that the right thing happened. What’s not good is that Osama managed to escape or elude capture.

Post War:

Afghanistan has taken a number of baby steps to being better, an election that includes women’s suffrage is a good step, but there are a lot of concerns. The country still has heavily controlled by war lords and the Taleban continues to fight for control of the country. Opium production has become a serious problem again. Women have taken a number of minor steps but there is still a lot of social issues like women needing their husband’s permission to vote. We do not appear to be effective in making sure that development money promised for the country has been delivered.

The end result is that we could do better, but we are not doing horrible. The situation seems stable.