Afghan Army soldiers attend a graduation ceremony at the Kabul Military Training Center in Kabul, Afghanistan, Oct. 3, 2002.

As a presidential candidate in 2000, George W. Bush said, "I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, 'This is the way it's got to be.'" But after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush evolved into a far more aggressive interventionist willing to use force in other countries and to change their governments and societies.

After U.S. forces and it allies invaded Afghanistan in late 2001 to overthrow the Taliban regime that had harbored Al Qaeda, Bush was faced with a dilemma: What should the United States do with the chaotic, largely lawless country, where regional warlords were inclined to revert to their former cottage industries of drug trafficking and banditry? Afghanistan's problems are daunting; it is a nation where one in 10 babies die in their first year, unemployment is 70 percent, and so many land mines have been buried that the World Bank estimates it would cost $500 million to clear them so that Afghans could simply travel from one town to another without risk of being blown up.

Bush pledged that the United States would not only restore order, but would embark upon a massive reconstruction. But the roughly $1 billion a year in aid allocated by the Bush administration, even when augmented by international humanitarian efforts, proved insufficient to make good on that promise. A year and a half after the U.S. invasion, the country was again perilously unstable, and remnants of the Taliban had regrouped to pose a threat to the interim Afghan regime headed by Hamid Karzai.

But Afghanistan's woes went largely unnoticed back in the United States, as all eyes turned toward Iraq. The Bush administration militarily confronted Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein, whom it accused of menacing the United States with a nuclear, biological and chemical arsenal. After U.S. and British forces deposed Hussein's government in the spring of 2003, however, probers were unable to find any of those weapons, leading critics to charge that Bush had exaggerated the threat.

What they did find was an Iraqi infrastructure that was in decrepit shape after decades of wars, punishing economic sanctions and mismanagement by Hussein's government. Additionally, once freed from Hussein's brutal repression, Iraq became a cauldron of ethnic and religious tensions that threatened at any moment to boil over into more violence. The Bush administration announced its intention not only to rebuild the Iraqi nation, but also to transform it into a model democracy that would help spread egalitarian ideas throughout the Middle East.

That ambitious vision, however, got off to a rough start. In contrast to its skillfully planned war, the Pentagon had spent relatively little time figuring out what it would do after the victory. The U.S. military occupation government, headed initially by retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner and then by L. Paul Bremer, was slow to restore electricity, public security and other necessities of life to the Iraqi population. Once the statues of Hussein were pulled down, many Iraqis grew frustrated and vented their anger at the American occupiers they'd cheered a few months before. (A Gallup poll of Baghdad residents released in September 2003 showed that while a majority felt that it was worth enduring hardships to remove Hussein, 44 percent still viewed the United States unfavorably, compared to 29 percent who had a favorable view.)

Members of a U.S.-appointed Iraqi advisory council were assigned to draft a constitution, as a first step toward eventual self-rule, but the process became mired in internecine bickering. Nevertheless, the Iraqi leaders began to agitate for a quicker transfer of power. Meanwhile, an underground resistance movement — apparently augmented by radical Islamic fighters from elsewhere in the Middle East — bedeviled the occupation regime with sabotage and staged increasingly bold attacks upon U.S. forces and Iraqis supporting the reconstruction effort. The Bush administration's nation-building program also ran into financial difficulties, as both the public and some members of Congress questioned a request for $20 billion in funds to underwrite Iraqi reconstruction. Some called for the United States to turn over control of Iraq's rebuilding to the United Nations.

But the Bush administration resolutely defended its nation-building efforts in Iraq. In the fall of 2003, Bush assigned perhaps his closest aide, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, to oversee the reconstruction of Iraq — a move that some saw as a tacit admission that the Pentagon had dropped the ball. Meanwhile, officials embarked upon a campaign to convince Americans that not enough attention was being paid to what the Bush administration saw as its successes in Iraq, such as restoration of electricity to prewar levels. In a speech in early October, Bush himself maintained that the Iraqi situation was "a lot better than you probably think."