Can Bush Make Foreign Policy Even Out of Office?

Newsweek's Michael Hirsh says President Bush "indicated that he was setting in motion policies that could dramatically affect the presidential race--and any decisions the next president makes in 2009." The policies? They include a long-term "strategic partnership" between the US and Iraq that, says Hirsh, "will become a sworn obligation for the next president [and] would be difficult if not impossible for future presidents to unilaterally breach such a pact."
I don't know about that. As President, Bush has unilaterally withdrawn the US from a number of agreements, including the ABM treaty with Russia, the "Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations" which, as the Washington Post noted in 2005, the US itself had proposed "in 1963 and ratified it -- along with the rest of the Vienna Convention -- in 1969." These, too, were "sworn obligations" cast aside by the current administration.
Those he hasn't withdrawn from or repudiated, he merely ignores, such as international conventions on torture and, of course, the war against Iraq itself. He's even dismissed his own intelligence agencies' collective effort, the NIE on Iran from December 2007. According to Newsweek, an "anonymous" official said Bush "told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views" regarding Iran's nuclear program.
It's clear that the Bush Administration had and continues to have no problem disregarding American international obligations that aren't to its liking. Arrogant, to be sure, and utterly non-responsive to the desires of the American voting public. But it's quite another thing for him and those suffering from similar delusions of grandeur to believe that they might enact policy from Crawford, Texas or elsewhere come January 2009.