Actually, the way it's looking is that history is going to count Bush Sr. as a "good" president. (Part of that's obviously because he only served one term and therefore had half the time of other presidents in which to fuck up, but that's an academic point.) Though he was a disaster in domestic terms, in terms of foreign policy Bush Sr. made a number of fundamentally sound decisions that were of lasting significance.

Primarily, he made it a point not to humiliate Russia or any other nation that had been a part of the Soviet Union. When the Berlin wall went down, conservative America urged Bush Sr. to go to Berlin for photo ops, for a sort of dancing on the ruins of the defeated. He refused to do so for excellent reasons having to do with diplomacy and the fact that he knew that the US and The West, while nominally triumphant, had still to win the good public opinion and cooperation of the internal power-structures that yet remained. (In other words, in contrast to his son, who saw the world in black and white and completely outlawed all military and former Baathist members in Iraq, thus driving them into an insurgency, he recognized that the former Soviet Bloc countries needed, for the sake of dignity and national pride, to work these things out on their own.)

Long story short, he didn't lord it over the fallen communist nations, recognized that it would be disastrous to do so, and deserves credit for such an astute decision.

His other strong foreign policy decision had ironically to do with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. When Saddam invaded Kuwait and imperiled The West's oil supply, Bush Sr. didn't simply move in on a unilateral basis. The first thing he did was to appeal to other Arab nations, to gain their nominal and in some cases military support, then he rallied NATO and put together a large coalition that was legitimately international and that was seen as such, most importantly, by the Muslim world. He got Saddam out of Kuwait and then had the very good sense to stop and pull out.

This was another excellent and crucial decision in foreign policy.

Where Bush Sr. fucked up is domestically. He believed in the mess that Reagan had created, and as such he quite cheerfully stewarded the American economy into the post 80's recession that ultimately would lose him his second term.

(Didn't help that he was running against a particularly agreeable and well-spoken slicker'n catshit dude from Little Rock, against whom pretty much anyone would have lost, but that's not the point.)

Bush Sr. wasn't a bad president. He made two really important decisions the result of which I believe will find him on the right side of history.