Laura Bush stands up for her old man

The US first lady Laura Bush says critics who say the presidency of her husband, George W. Bush, has been a failure are dead wrong.

A new national CNN poll published on Friday suggested that 75 percent of Americans are glad the Bush presidency is almost over.

President-elect Barack Obama will take office on January 20 and will inherit an economy in recession and two unfinished wars in the Middle East.

Mrs. Bush, however, says critics of her husband are wrong.

"I know it's not, and so I don't really feel like I need to respond to people that view it that way,'' she said in a Fox News Sunday interview.

"I think history will judge and will see later,'' she added.

Mrs. Bush said the president managed to keep Americans safe in the aftermath of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

President Bush toppled former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and liberated millions of people in Afghanistan and Iraq from oppressive governments, she maintained.

Critics of the Bush administration, meanwhile, contend the US turned its military might and resources to the war in Iraq before finishing the job in Afghanistan, the Associated Press reported.

"We've stayed very, very invested in Afghanistan. Not as invested militarily, maybe, and maybe that's what the critics say, that it should have been more military. But I think we stayed very invested."

More than one million civilians and at least four-thousand American soldiers have lost their lives in the two lengthy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On other issues, Mrs. Bush said although her husband laughed off the shoe-throwing incident in Baghdad, she considers it to have been an "assault" on the president of the United States.

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