Bush certainly enters his last 100 days looking like a Bizarro parody of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's legendary first 100. Yet there have been a number of longer-term policy successes, or at least lack of failures that he can point to, although far fewer than his most enthusiastic remaining defenders like Fareed Zakaria and Charles Krauthammer have claimed.

Bush's most salient success so far, in fact, has been in the area where he has been long and most heavily criticized: More than seven years after the mega-terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, killed around 3,000 Americans, there has not been a single significant terror attack on the U.S. mainland since.

For all the criticisms of Bush's controversial USA Patriot Act, it has worked in its essential functions. Had the decades-old legislative restrictions on the FBI and other U.S. national security agencies not been in place in the months prior to Sept. 11, the plot of Mohammad Atta and his al-Qaida cohorts could have been nipped in the bud. The FBI and the CIA would have been mandated to cooperate closely rather than have administrative and legislative walls imposed to prevent them from cooperating.

Ballistic Missile Defense is another area where some progress has been made, though far less than should have been because Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his first Pentagon team rushed so recklessly to deploy Ground-based Mid-course Interceptors in Alaska without following the more than 40-year-old testing procedure for the GBIs' individual components first. Billions of dollars and years of work were wasted because industry engineers and Missile Defense Agency and U.S. Air Force technicians and experts had to eventually make good that failing.

Nevertheless, the United States by the end of the Bush administration had the rudiments of a defense against nuclear-armed ICBMs fired by so-called rogue sates in place at last.

With work proceeding aggressively on other missile defense systems, BMD against intermediate-range missiles had become an established, mature technology, with nations around the world from Israel to South Korea, Japan and Taiwan eagerly buying American interceptor systems and the radars to guide them.

The Bush administration also multiplied the amount of money that it spent on fighting AIDS in Africa from less than $1 billion a year to more than $6 billion. It approved the biggest emphasis on Africa, in large part from recognizing the need for African oil and to fight the spread of Islamist extremism on the continent since the days of President Jimmy Carter.

Africa under Bush could in no way be called a success story: The continuing mayhem in the People's Republic of Congo that cost millions of lives made sure of that. So did the continuing genocide in Darfur. With U.S. forces still bogged down in Iraq and facing the prospect of a wider war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, there was no surplus military muscle left to rein in the government of Sudan on that issue.

Nor did the United States seem capable of raising a finger to help force President Robert Mugabe from office despite the continuing tyranny, economic chaos and escalating misery he was inflicting on the people of Zimbabwe.

But at least for the first time in a generation, Africa was no longer subject to consistent malign neglect from a president and his policymakers in Washington. Bush also showed some constructive vision in seeking to develop a strategic relationship with Ethiopia.

Bush also won some plaudits for avoiding a conflict with China, but this appears to have been more the result of his unanticipated obsession with the war on terror and nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan than as a maintained and successful act of strategy.

The annual U.S. trading balance with China continued to soar during Bush's years in office, becoming the largest ever experienced by any nation at the expense of another in the history of the world, and now the State Bank (OTCBB:SBAZ) of China holds around one-third of U.S. Treasury bonds.

Nor was there any sign that Chinese leaders had mellowed towards the United States during Bush's presidency. The main thrust of Chinese weapons procurement and deployment remained focused against the United States, ranging from the construction of electric-diesel attack submarines to commanding the Strait of Taiwan with an arsenal of more than 1,000 land-deployed missiles.

Bush entered his last 100 days in office with Iraq looking a lot more stable than it had two years before. In Gen. David Petraeus, he finally found a general who understood the principles of counterinsurgency warfare.

But even there, Bush was forced during 2008 to yield to the demands of the Shiite-run government in Baghdad he had done so much to create that U.S. ground forces leave Iraq within a set period of time during the next administration.

Far from getting a permanent lock or prime position of power over what may now be the largest easily accessible oil reservoir in the world, Bush will leave office facing the reality that Iranian influence in Iraq will soar as soon as U.S. combat troops finally leave.

Bush may have shown his surest touch when it came to supporting and working with traditional U.S. allies. He backed Israel to the hilt during the five long years it fought its worst terrorist campaign in its history. He stayed close to British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He was rewarded with the rise of strongly pro-American leaders in Germany, France, Italy, Canada and South Korea. He reinvigorated the U.S.-Japanese alliance working in partnership with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

Almost every two-term administration looks worse than it really was by the time its president and officials leave power: Usually it takes a few years for history to provide a more balanced perspective. Ironically, Bush's best hope for credit on the things he did right may rest with his successor's ability to put right the things he did wrong.

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(Analysis by Martin Sieff)