Will they spit on George W Bush

Thomas Stearns Eliot observed in one of his most famous poems 'this is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper'. It is beginning to look as though this is the way the 'Bush' era in world history will end.

The probability that Mr Bush will lose his overall majority in the political oligopoly that passes for democracy in the American world, is becoming all too possible-and as a result Uncle Dubya will eke out his remaining days in office as a lame duck deluxe; not only for being powerless but for having ruined the careers of many of his party honchos due to sheer incompetence, many of whom will spit at the sound at the sound of his name.

It has always been one of the great fascinations [to me] of our post-velvet revolution era that we could experience the back-to-back phenomena of witnessing arguably America's smartest president: the fellatio dependant Mr Clinton, and the inept, bumbling, morally uptight Mr Bush junior: he of the prep school smirk.

And now it's over.
All bar the shouting.

Well. A week is a long time and maybe the latest 'spin' on the mess of pottage that is Iraq may tune over a few lost souls - As I observed in my previous blog some 90 plus million American are apparently so inherently 'Alzheimeresque' in their functioning that arcane political argument is incapable of penetration and those people -if they vote, would simply vote by reflex-When you live in a world in which you are bombarded daily with a cornucopia of messages then forgetfulness is not even an issue-getting your intention for a split second before you forget is critical.

George Bush's spin on Iraq can be measured against the progress in New Orleans-there are probably some peripheral successes but overall its been something of a failure.

People who have read my blog for years will know that I supported the invasion of Iraq and considered it to be a useful strategic move in the overarching struggle to combat the irrational use of force and violence to enforce rule over human beings by other bullying thug type dictator type humans. We conveniently forget that Saddam Hussein was a bellicose man given to loud threats and bluster and who failed when called out. Others like Kim Jong Il in North Korea are still scaring the suited people with their empty vessel noisiness.

Pre-emption as a matter of Imperialist policy was revolutionary and Bush believes himself to be a revolutionary for the American Way-itself a revolutionary concept under immense strain, as he has paradoxically reached out to promote American style democracy abroad while restraining it at home. Being a change agent is always problematic. It is compounded when the participants drag their feet-and having taken the leap Uncle Dubya went 'schnorra' and simply never put enough human bodies in harm's way to make the job happen.

And of course we reckoned without the greed factor.

The entire exercise allegedly became a grooming ground for boosting the profits of particular corporations, and the people doing the occupying put no resources, only self serving administrators into the job of reinstating Iraq into a proper place: if that was ever possible and it could be that it is not.

Perhaps Iraq should be three interdependent independent regions each linked in a confederal arrangement that allows for considerable internal autonomy-Now that would be an American revolutionary process, given the extent to which State Rights rule in the USA. However as part of a series of cynical trade off's, to rationalise the revolution that George Bush chickened out over, this sensible arrangement has been resisted by the parties involved to satisfy external powers eg: Turkey, which resists the idea of a quasi-independent Kurdish homeland [I've never really understood why everyone hates the Kurds or even what the Kurds are apart from reminding me of 'little miss Muffet who sat on her tuffet-.']

The Sunni whatever Iraqis dominate Baghdad I understand but wont let the Shia whatever Iraqis who apparently dominate the oil rich south have their own turf because that would mean that they would have to do something radical to maintain their standards of living in oil poor Baghdad without all the freebies that come from having manna in your backyard. [There's another thing. What is this with Sunni and Shia that makes these two apparent branches of Islam resemble the warring factions of the Reformation? One presumes the difference is as absurd as that point of principle that apparently divides the Roman Catholic from Eastern Orthodox. Whatever it is it is a murderous difference.]

Obviously these Sunnis whatever lack the imagination that made Hong Kong thrive and that drives Dubai to become a dominant trading centre where everyone practises useful skills, instead of living off oil revenue like a nation of remittance men. Perhaps the problem of having manna in your backyard is a core problem in development.

Whatever it is that motivates all these people is unclear. What is not unclear is that the USA is over-militarily. Now that may sound a tad bizarre and I am having difficulty myself in dealing with the concept. According to our understanding of human history the Egyptian empire lasted for thousands of years. The Roman era lasted about eight hundred and the British era less than half of that. The rucial development over these eras was the slow acceptance of asymmetrical forms of warfare,

In those past eras were a town to behave badly towards, say the Romans, the Persians or the Mongols then the entire region would simply have ceased to be. For instance cities like Merv, Nishapur, and Balkh in North Eastern Iran never recovered apparently after the Mongols extracted revenge for the gratuitous murder of traders travelling under the protection of Genghis Khan. The records indicate wholesale slaughter in revenge. Quite correctly this genocidal behaviour is frowned upon these days unless it is happening in places like Darfur or Rwanda where we dither about long enough to facilitate the murder of the odd few million people. So the scope is ripe for the excesses of asymmetric suicide bombers and they have demonstrated all to well how restrictive it is for the huge USA to handle this type of warfare and simultaneously remain the 'good guys'.

What was billed a few years back as 'The American century' has become the American decade. What the bombers of Baghdad have done [and the Taliban in Afghanistan for that matter] is checkmate the most powerful military structure the world has ever known and George Bush is the patsy that allowed it to happen. Perhaps he should re-spin his story to suggest he intended, through his pre emptive act, to by-pass the consensus seeking appeasement structured U.N., to wreck the global oil consensus and affect the hydrogen revolution-or failing that, the alternate energy revolution-and he did make that topic the theme of his State of the Union speech immediately prior to the invasion and which I blogged about then.

A schoolmaster to whom I was speaking at a recent sports function said that he never went out of his way to catch kids smoking because he preferred the kids not to find out that there was in reality nothing that could be done about it. The punishment was so structured to follow rules of fairness and give the child the right of due process that consequence became shredded and meaningless. One could say that the Alzheimer effect had become rooted. Once the knowledge of human toothlessness in the absence of violence got out and about then this became bad for the long-term morale of the entire show, if that cryptic statement was meaningful, he added, as an aside. What was needed he concluded was the form of rules, without anything of substance taking place to revel the emptiness of the form.

There are people abuse this system, seeing democracy's greatest strength: the wilful cooperation in a vast public experiment to achieve a common purpose, a better life for all, as a weakness open to exploitation as a tool for overthrowing systemic order and introducing a new vision.

There are people who describe George Bush as a 'revolutionary' and notwithstanding that most of those people are his loving acolytes there is a certain truth in what he attempted in Afghanistan and Iraq. The 'Neocon' vision of exporting democracy via the medium of American imperialism was a grandiose vision that has been universally rejected and soundly trounced. With luck the Neocon vision has been set back by a century. George who would be Caesar simply had no concept of the cost-unlike the schoolmaster he failed to grasp how ephemeral the whisk of power has become in a world where everyone can have a nuke and how your very lifestyle can be used as a weapon of war by those who would resist the change Bush allegedly sought, and when those who resist don't have an issue with using themselves as the weapons..

Ultimately though GB comes across as something of a whiner. Outraged by 9/11, which was undeniably something to be enraged over, it seemed he lost all reason and sense of proportion if indeed he ever had them. In retrospect he reacted like a spoilt kid whose toys have just been confiscated by some poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks. One always has a sense with George Bush that he is playing in his own movie-and John Wayne is his lodestar. Having taken Iraq without so much as a fight [the revolutionary guard and other elite corps such as they were just evaporated and seeped into the underground], el Gaucho needed to avoid Washington pressure so he parked off and went home to the ranch, surrounded by protesting grieving mothers never imagining for one moment that he was anything but a beloved hero-his delusions seem so much more grandiose even than those of Robert Mugabe.

If you rode on an elephant against a pack of wolfhounds you would prevail but as Hannibal discovered when he crossed the Alps with his elephants, wolfhounds can often trump elephants especially if you shortchange the elephants, and leave the flanks exposed-presumably we once hunted mammoths that way.

The British Empire eventually ended because the costs of maintaining it were prohibitive. The Monroe doctrine recognised that reality and used financial muscle to control America's sphere of influence, and left the troops at home: available for quick sorties. George Bush thought he had a new doctrine: Go in quick and light, take the capital declare freedom reigns facilitate new compliant government and leave the liberated nation to bond fall in love and stay married ever after and it hasn't worked that way. Maybe it never could have.

In all probability the voting public [of America] will vote their disapproval about the poor war results over this next ten days. The death rate is now mounting by the minute. The transformation process, what one hears of it, seems patchy and sporadic. So far George Bush is barely maintaining even a façade of successful achievement engaging now in semantic wordplay relating to timetables and benchmarks as an excuse for political inaction.

Watching some clips of his presentations this week on CNBC I had the sense that he was more than ordinarily baffled at the reverses he was having. What do you do with those wolfhounds that tear at your flanks with such determined ferocity that any escalation on your part is like to blow your own legs off? From the crinkly way he furrows his brow under pressure he manages to convey the idea that thought is painful: like shitting with haemorrhoids. He looks more and more like the loser he appeared to be against John Kerry.

One of my children once worked for a year as a childminder for a wealthy American Midwest family where one spouse was a democrat and the other a republican and she reported that her hosts would intermittently have bitter arguments over dinner about arcane actions perpetrated by this or that 'failed' president. Some of these events apparently occurred sometimes sixty or seventy years ago, in some cases back to the civil war; which was still the subject of bitter wrangling. I also know that on our home front here I was once chased out of a Free State home by an enraged homeowner, to whom I was selling something, because I mentioned the name 'Jan Smuts'. The man exploded into rage. So incensed was he that he shivered with instant apoplexy, ordered me summarily from the house, and when, in shock, I didn't move fast enough went for a .303 rifle that I'd earlier seen standing in a corner of the room. I broke the world record for the mile by about three and a half minutes, with the sound of gunfire blasting around the neighbourhood in pursuit of me.

I have a sense the George Bush junior is about to get himself into the history books for the wrong reasons and that there will be many-republicans specifically, who will want to reach for the old Winchester when the name George Bush comes up in conversation in the future. Very few people seem to know what George Bush studied when he was on his path to glory but apparently history was not part of his curriculum.

He could well be remembered as a strutting rooster: the self styled revolutionary in an ill fitting suit, with a silly smirk always teasing the corners of his lips; and who failed the country when he was most needed by providing less than competent leadership completely proving that the whole point about form and substance is that the insubstantial should never be sorely tested.

A successful alternate energy revolution, which I believe to be well under way now, massked by the noise made by Iraq, will eventually be spun to justify his journey, which like Caesar's before him was ended when he was stabbed in the back, in his case by the Iraq quagmire, and by a litany of self serving underlings. But it may be thirty years before the full significance of Bush's revolution can be assessed. After all it took about that long for us to get used to the demonetisations of gold in 1971.

Then of course the voters may see something completely different: and endorse him again-overwhelmingly: for no better reason than that the alternative seems too ghastly to contemplate.