John Roughan: Surely the US can elect a better leader than this

COMMENT

We set about solving the problems of the world as usual over a few drinks at the tennis club last Saturday and it came down to this: do we want an explanation for "evil", or not?

Most did not, and they were determined about it. There was no way, they said, to explain the motivation of evil without excusing it.

Evil. Five years ago you never heard the word in real life. It was found only in fairy tales and fundamentalist religious tracts. Now it is everywhere. You hear it in conversation, meet it in serious American essays, headline writers worldwide use it with abandon.

No subject is immune; in the Herald this week investment broker Gareth Morgan applied the word to the savings products of life insurance companies.

I'm tempted to use it myself. Of all the evils of the Bush presidency the worst is that its rhetoric has reduced our ability to think. A word as impossibly heavy as evil met the need of that September morning in 2001, but once the dust settled it was no use to any attempt to understand what had happened, let alone do something about it.

It was no more help than the word "terror", which doesn't begin to describe the nature and variety of the threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism and doesn't suggest practical steps to diminish it.

What do you do once you have identified the enemy as "evil" or "haters" and whose every act you describe as "international terrorism"? What, I asked them at the club, do you actually do with that knowledge?

You can declare "war on terror", I suppose. But as a speaker at the International Bar Association conference in Auckland this week put it, how do you wage war on an abstract noun? Which is more or less the reason Bush quickly lost interest in the real threat and decided it would be more satisfying to declare war on a dictator with a known address.

It still shocks me to the core that the United States started a war.

Like most guests of the US Government, I have attended those security seminars in Washington where there were always one or two nuts who imagined military force could work miracles in places they didn't know much about and didn't care to know much about.

But I never imagined they would get the chance to mobilise unprovoked and march into a country where, predictably, they would not be welcome and their occupation would strengthen the hand of the militant strand of Islamic nationalism.

I suppose it was always on the cards that one day America would elect a substandard President, but somehow I'd imagined the system would prevent it.

Previous occupants of the White House had their faults but there were always compensating strengths. This one is a blowhard when there is an army behind him but as weak as dishwater on every issue requiring political strength.

He claims to be a free trader but has shown little interest in the Doha round of world negotiations, preferring to do one-sided deals with allies and other countries of strategic value to him.

He caved in to pressure from dead-end steel companies and farm lobbies for subsidies and protection. He has no fiscal discipline. He inherited a budget surplus projected to reach $5 trillion in 10 years. With two tax cuts, a needless war and loose spending he has sent the budget into a deficit of $5 trillion that will sooner or later poison the world economy.

Iraq gave him an opportunity to do something decisive in the Middle East. But he talked tough for a day then looked the other way while Israel built walls through the occupied territories, dividing and weakening any potential Palestinian state.

It is tempting to dismiss Bush with his own favourite epithet but he is not evil; nobody is. He is a well-meaning man-child of simple, sentimental certainties, fierce loyalties, unwavering will. Certainty can be a fine quality, Senator John Kerry, acknowledged in their first presidential debate, "but you can be certain and wrong".

Dare we hope Americans elect someone better on Wednesday? Their presidency casts a long shadow. Novelist E.L. Doctorow wrote recently: "The President we get is the country we get. With each President the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul.

"He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into, and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.

"Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail ... "

The US is not the same country that elected George Bush four years ago. That country had literally not a care in the world. The Cold War was over, the economy had been booming for eight years. The main political concern had been the retiring President's sexual weakness. I should have considered all that before predicting Al Gore would be elected comfortably.

I dare no prediction this time. Americans are not the people I thought I knew. Too many reacted to the attack of September 11 like a lynch mob, for which Bush is mostly to blame. They needed leadership that would remind them of the law they stand for and the intelligent restraint that makes effective use of overwhelming power.

Americans are a fearful people at the best of times and susceptible to sentimentality where their country is concerned. They also care about how the rest of the world regards them. Much of the shock of September 11 was the discovery that they could be so disliked. Kerry has campaigned hard on the loneliness of the US in Iraq and Bush has argued just as hard that he has plenty of allies there. It obviously matters to them, as this election matters to us, more than any I can remember.