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As Barack Obama approaches the halfway point in his first term as president, there is growing disappointment over his perceived failure to have lived up to the hopes inspired by his 2008 campaign and election. That is largely because those hopes were unrealistic.

Obama inherited from George W. Bush the In-Box from Hell. The war in Afghanistan was already a disaster, going from bad to worse for six years - with onerous consequences in civilian and military lives lost. On Day One, he confronted a pair of dangerous dilemmas over the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, and the task of trying to breathe life into a moribund Middle East peace process.

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