Bush may yet fall victim to the electors' revenge

The growing doubts over the Iraq war threaten the president

Hugo Young in Vermont
Tuesday August 26, 2003
The Guardian

There have been a good few wars in our time, but none like Iraq War Two. Most, in the finish, have been quite clean-cut. Even Bosnia ended. They've all, naturally, been messy. The Falklands, simplest of all, had its perilous moments. But few have had enduring, possibly lethal, political consequences for the main good-guy combatants, which is to say the US and the UK.

The battles finish (two months or so has often been the span), the warriors return to base and the politics are mostly over. But Iraq is quite different. The formal war is over, but the afterburn sears into the body politic of both aggressor powers. The politics are nowhere near over. There has been no catharsis of moral or strategic rectitude. Nothing has been simplified by the so-called victory. In this respect, the situation in Iraq, and probably the region, is as bad as those who opposed war foresaw. The leaders, of course, deny that. But their problems are getting deeper. Four months after President Bush declared the war was over, they face electorates that worry away, as never before, at both the causes and the consequences of an event that should, by normal reckoning, already be docketed as an historic victory. After all, we won, didn't we? snip

Bush is another matter. Despite the macho confidence, he looks vulnerable. He has no answer to what's happening in Iraq, and after another year, the American people may be asking what this is all about. That depends on a few variables, chief among them the presence of a Democrat who doesn't flinch from asking the question himself. General Wesley Clark, anti-war and once Nato's leader in the Balkans, could soon be turning things upside down. Much will turn on the economy, where Bush has seen more jobs disappear than any president since Herbert Hoover, but which now shows signs of perking up.

The big thing, though, is this: Iraq is a war Americans bought into on grounds that turn out to be false. So far there are no WMD, and the Middle East gets rougher not smoother. Terrorism multiplies. The prophets of doom are, unfortunately, looking correct. After another year, the agent of world triumph, dressing in and out of his fake bomber jacket, could look ready for the electors' revenge.

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