KEY POINTS:
We all know that the US runs the world. Anything that happens there has great consequences for the rest of humanity. Non-Americans know that the Bush Administration was full of ideological nutters scaring the hell out of the rest of the world. But none of us can do anything. We have to hope that enough of the ordinary American people would eventually wise up.
And this week they did. We can breathe a sigh of relief. The beginning of the end for the neo-conservatives in the US is imminent.
President George W Bush and his cronies manipulated the US public's emotions after 9/11 to invade Afghanistan and Iraq by creating the right touch of hysteria. The US voters were prepared to give their "wartime president" the benefit of the doubt. But the endless lies had become harder and harder to stomach.
The swing to the Democrats that allowed them to regain the US House of Representatives and the Senate wasn't so much an endorsement of the Democrats but rather a rejection of Bush's policies and lies. There is a perception by the US media - at least those controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his right-wing fellow travellers - that the US is a conservative country. This is not true. The majority of the US public supports the Kyoto protocol, a hefty rise in the minimum wage, universal healthcare and raising tax for the wealthy. Even on the so-called "moral" issues they are pro-choice, and significant numbers support gay rights and even same-sex marriages. Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority believe that elections are controlled by well-funded vested interests and that their politicians are more likely to be influenced by professional lobbyists than by them. Most also believe that voting for their leaders is a waste of time. Less than half of those eligible to vote participate in any election. The only reason the US has right-wing governments is that they get to pick between a right-wing business candidate and on most occasions another right-wing business candidate.
Any candidate standing for public office spends millions of dollars, which ensures that only candidates from wealthy backgrounds or those who are supported by wealthy interests have any show at all.
Most Americans don't see the point of voting. But they are wrong. Elections do matter. You only have to look at the voting debacle in the 2000 presidential elections to know what a small number of votes can do. Would Iraq have happened, had Al Gore been elected president rather then Bush? Absolutely not.
Unlike New Zealand, incumbent politicians in the US decide their own electoral boundaries of their constituencies and appoint the polling managers and staff who run the actual elections; 90 per cent of Congressional seats have been drawn deliberately to favour incumbents. In New Zealand, our electorates are drawn up by a non-partisan group of judges and officials, based on population data and accepted communities of interest. This process has served us well and removed political gerrymandering. In the US, not only are the boundaries drawn up by the politicians, but so, too, are those who actually run the elections.
But fortunately for the rest of the world, in this week's mid-term elections no amount of manipulation was going to save the Republicans. The pendulum has swung against the warmongers. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld was the first of the Republican neo-conservatives to go, the day after the election. US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, will be next.
It shocked me that even a year after 9/11, six out of 10 Americans still believed that Iraq was responsible for the attacks. Even more were convinced that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. There was no doubt in my mind that the only reason Bush authorised the invasion of Iraq was that he knew there were no such weapons. His comments about the "axis of evil" - North Korea, Iran and Iraq - has ensured that the other two regimes have plenty of nuclear bombs to protect themselves, should the US come calling. The irony, of course, is that the world is a more unsafe place now than it was before Bush declared war on terror.
The Taliban is becoming stronger every day in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden is still sending the occasional video clip to TV stations exhorting his followers to blow up more innocents. The war on terror was going to bring democracy to the world. Unfortunately for Bush, democratic elections, such as in Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon, have delivered governments that are strongly anti-America. Just to rub salt into his wounds, the Nicaraguan people elected former Marxist revolutionary Daniel Ortega - the nemesis of George W Bush's father - as its new president the day after Bush's party got a bloody nose in the US elections.
Bush's key allies these days supporting his campaign for democracy are undemocratic authoritarian states, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which is run by a religious sect more feudal and radical than some of the Islamic terrorists that Bush says he's fighting. The only way out of the Iraq mess was for American voters to turn against their leaders. This week they did.
God bless America.
