Stepping back to look at the overall situation in the Middle East for the United States after nearly seven years of Bush administration work, the picture is bleak and dangerous.

It's worse looking at the forest than it is just looking at the trees. There is a major fire burning in the form of the Iraq war and several more tinder-dry areas are smoking. Given the region's history for wars it is fair to say that a hot, dry wind is always blowing.

It is very clear that the top foreign policy priority of the Bush administration since its inception has been the Middle East, made clear in accounts of the early days of the administration as well as in the off-hand way it treated America's traditional allies, Russia, China and the United Nations in the run-up to the Iraq war. With the exception of the United Kingdom, they didn't see a reason for the invasion of Iraq, opposed it and didn't support it once it started.

None of the problems now embroiling the Middle East have much to do with 9/11. That attack was launched from Afghanistan, on the fringe of the Middle East. If there is now al-Qaida in much of the Middle East, it was fed mightily by the war in Iraq.

The hot war now is in Iraq, where the United States has more than 160,000 troops in harm's way. Many more are clustered in neighboring countries and on ships in the region. U.S. deaths in Iraq have dropped over the past few months, but we still have lost more than 3,800, an average rate of 70 per month. The cost of the war continues to run at $280 million per day. In addition to the war in Iraq, with the Bush administration having no credible end-game and the Democrats in the Congress looking more hopeless at stopping it each day, there are three other major issues in the Middle East, with none of them promising anything good for the United States.

The first is the problem of the Kurds, one of America's making. It started during the administration of President George H. W. Bush when the United States compensated the Kurds for not bringing them their freedom after the first Gulf War by providing them with humanitarian aid and protection from Saddam Hussein's legions, which also kept safe the oil in northern Iraq. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 it found the Kurds to be the only Iraqi group that was willing to work with the U.S. occupying force -- in return for U.S. tolerance of Kurdish autonomy.

For the Kurds, autonomy quickly became irredentism, meaning serious trouble with, first, Turkey, and also with other nearby countries with Kurdish populations -- Iran, Syria and Armenia -- a problem that has turned into a nightmare. Kurds based in Iraq are raiding into Turkey and Iran. The Iraqi central government, under President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and the Kurdish provincial governments in northern Iraq are unwilling or unable to do anything about the Kurdish fighters conducting the raids.

Turkey, an essential long-time U.S. NATO ally, is furious. Turkey and Iran are moving closer together to coordinate action against the Kurdish raiders -- a foreign policy setback in itself for the United States. The United States is very close to finding itself in the middle of a Turkish-Iranian-Kurdish fight in Iraq. That's the first problem.

The second one is the pro-war stance that Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are taking over the question of Iran's nuclear program, which could eventually result in its having nuclear weapons. This problem is a perfect one to leave to the international community, especially the International Atomic Energy Agency.

There is a lot of political ferment in Iran at the moment. Players in the domestic Iranian political wrangle include Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who is believed to be dying of leukemia. After him comes the sometimes noxious President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His political situation is shaky; many Iranians find him to be just as foolish and objectionable as Americans do. The irony is that the threats uttered by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and the new economic sanctions the United States has just imposed against Iran help Mr. Ahmadinejad, the extremist, in Iranian domestic politics in much the same way as Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney use Iran to rouse their political base here.

In the meantime, a significant moderate Iranian political and commercial base continues to gather around Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, a man who did quite a lot of business with the Reagan administration when George H. W. Bush was vice president.

The third current U.S. policy train wreck under way in the Middle East is the effort led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to mount a conference in the United States on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

No one would argue that some resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian issue isn't needed. It lies at the core of the current clenched-teeth relationship between America and Muslims across the world. How badly the conference effort is going is reflected in the fact that it was first supposed to take place in October. That was moved to November and now, apparently, to December. It is supposed to be sited in Annapolis, although the administration is being cagey even about the venue.

The problem is that both of the principal parties, Israel and the Palestinians, are in disarray and do not constitute credible, coherent interlocuters for a serious negotiation. In Israel, there is the scandal-bedeviled and ill Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. As for the Palestinians, the Bush administration continues to pretend that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is the Palestinian leader, even though Hamas won last year's elections and militarily whipped Fatah, Mr. Abbas' organization, in Gaza earlier this year.

The bottom line is that the Bush administration's scorecard in the Middle East is dismal. Too bad for us. Bills there get paid in blood as well as money.