WASHINGTON -- As George W. Bush's wartime presidency enters its final weeks, there is increasing speculation about his legacy and how his two terms in office will be seen throughout the course of history.

But history is a funny thing that can dramatically re-evaluate past events in a far different light when they are compared in the mists of time to what follows them.

Consider Harry Truman who left office as the most unpopular president in modern history but is now seen as a decisive figure who led the nation in two wars, abruptly ending one of them with a swift decision to use the atomic bomb.

History's rehabilitation of Truman's legacy occurred over many, many years, and I suspect that Bush's presidency, too, will undergo a long-term re-evaluation that will look more kindly on the challenges he confronted as a wartime leader who faced a fiendishly different kind of conflict.

Bush has begun opening up recently about how he sees his legacy -- first in an interview conducted by his sister, Doro Bush Koch, as part of an oral-history project for National Public Radio and then in an interview with Charlie Gibson of ABC News.

He is proudest of his $15 billion offensive against AIDS and malaria in Africa that has saved millions of lives and the passage of a market-oriented Medicare prescription-drug program that has lowered medical costs for the elderly.

In national security, he points to his record in the aftermath of the deadly terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001: He toppled two terrorist regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, liberated some 50 million people, and planted democracies in the middle of the world's worst terrorist breeding grounds.

His biggest regret on that score is the presumed faulty intelligence that led him to base his invasion of Iraq on the belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

No evidence was found to show that such weapons existed, though Hussein used poison gas and other materials to kill thousands of Kurds. And the FBI agent who met with him daily in the final months before his execution said Hussein told him that he had planned to resume a program to produce nuclear materials.

The history of those wars, much of which remains unknown, is still a work in progress. There is still a lot of information, and maybe long-buried evidence, to be learned about the dangers that this Iraqi madman who had started two wars and was still threatening his neighbors. Continued...