The current issue of The Economist lists the U.S. president's surprisingly robust record in dealing with sub-Saharan nations. U.S. aid, especially in dealing with the AIDS crisis, has been substantive. Democracy and sound economic policies have steadily spread across the African continent. Congo and Darfur remain huge global crises, but elsewhere American engagement has been low-key, realistic and substantive. And bad though Congo and Darfur are, they did not get that way as the result of an American military invasion.

The key to American success in Africa has been applying policies of both altruism and self-interest with a caution and a modesty that have been sadly lacking from the Middle East. The United States successfully brokered an end to the ferocious and long-lasting civil war in Sudan. It did not call for regime change in Khartoum or try to force democracy, American-style, down the throats of the Sudanese people.

U.S. diplomats have consistently sought to end crises and defuse potential trouble spots, a role they have been laying with conspicuous success in Kenya. Consequently the United States has not been seen as a disruptive influence in the region but as a reassuring force for stability. The Economist noted that Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf actually wants the Pentagon to put the headquarters of its Africa Command – AFRICOM – in her country. It would be hard to imagine the leaders of Jordan, Egypt or Saudi Arabia thinking that way.

Just imagine if Bush had applied those policies in the Middle East: Hands-on U.S. diplomatic involvement would have been applied to rein in Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and nip the cycle of violence of the second Palestinian intifada in the bud.

The United States could have held its nose and dealt with Saddam Hussein in Iraq, just as it dealt with Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Beshir, whose human rights record was in reality far worse than Saddam's. It could have worked constructively with Syrian President Bashar Assad as it has with President Thabo Mbeki in South Africa. It could have quietly encouraged slow and measured moves toward more democracy in countries that would have been more willing to carry them out because they realized U.S. policies in the region were aimed at constructive stability, and were not irresponsible adventures that bore no relation to political realities there.

Most of all, Bush could have engaged relatively moderate Iranian President Muhammad Khatami from 2001 to 2005 to scrap Tehran's nuclear program the way he successfully persuaded the far more extreme and notorious Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi to do so.

Bush did not really care about Africa, so he left well alone there, and as a result things got better. But he listened to Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz who fancied themselves experts on the Middle East, and the whole world knows what the outcome was.

If only Bush had thought the Middle East was part of Africa.