URUGUAY is one of the smallest countries in Latin American but, historically, one of its most stable economies. More recently, and thanks to the economic chaos in Argentina and the latter's integration into the global neo-liberal order, Uruguay's own economy, closely tied to Argentina's, went into a slump. On October 31, the Uruguayan people reacted by electing the first socialist President in 170 years, into a government that will include even the former Tupamaros guerillas. The next day, those same voters approved a plebiscite, by two-thirds majority which would give exclusive rights over the water resources of the nation to the state and would make supply of clean drinking water and modern sanitation facilities a constitutionally guaranteed fundamental right for all the people. Can we imagine clean drinking water and countrywide sanitation as a constitutional right in India, even in these days of the Common Minimum Programme? With these elections, Uruguay joins the gigantic continental shift of Latin America towards the Left, which includes the governments of Cuba and Venezuela, the armed struggle in Colombia, the landless peasants' movement in Brazil, the mass uprisings of Bolivia and Ecuador and much else. No wonder the global media did not pay attention to the Uruguayan elections.
The nauseating events in North America stand in sharp contrast, and four days after the Uruguayans had made their choice, the United States electorate dutifully went to the polls to exercise its non-choice between two right-wing men so cynical and bellicose that it was difficult to tell which of them had the more extreme position on Iraq, Palestine, Iran, North Korea and the infinite expansion of U.S. military power, on land and in space. The media event that passes for the U.S. elections, with the help of $4 billion raised by John Kerry and George W. Bush from private donors, had been staged on such a spectacular scale that the television-watching pundits of this world had declared it a "global election", with all the predictable chatter of a "cliff-hanger", "too close to call", "America divided", "polarised" and so on. It is a sign of deep moral decline and political malaise in American public culture, and in the America-induced media punditry around the world, that a choice between Bush and Kerry could be presented in the manner of a thriller. The actual spectacle was simply obscene.
The U.S. had systematically destroyed and occupied Iraq for over a year, in violation of all international law, but the war never actually became a serious issue because the positions of the two contenders were much too close, except for some hair-splitting, which could hardly be the basis of an electoral choice. Kerry, in fact, promised to send 40,000 more troops to Iraq, expand the U.S. standing army substantially, spend $6 billion more on armament for ground combat and take tougher positions against North Korea, Syria and Iran. His main charge against Bush was that he was not tough enough. The scandal of the extensive torture in Abu Ghraib prison, on the model of the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, surfaced in April and more and more gruesome details were revealed over the next several months as the presidential campaign rolled on, but Kerry never made it an issue that the rest of the world had come to view the U.S. as a nation of torturers. A week before the actual polling, a prestigious team of scientists from Johns Hopkins University published a report in a British scientific journal showing that a year of U.S. war on Iraq had led to the deaths of 100,000 civilians there, most of them women and children, but Kerry did not go to the electorate to say that the world, including many people in the U.S. itself, saw the U.S. as a nation of murderers and war criminals. We can multiply the examples. The plain fact is that the Iraq war may have been an issue on the minds of the U.S. electorate but it was a non-issue in the elections as such.
Kerry said, as Bush and Bill Clinton had said, that the U.S. has the right to use military force unilaterally, wherever and whenever it perceives any danger to its interests, without being answerable to either the United Nations or the International Court of Justice. Time and again Kerry has said that he would have supported the invasion of Iraq even if he knew that Saddam Hussein had neither weapons of mass destruction nor a programme for making nuclear weapons. He and his vice-presidential running mate, John Edwards, voted for the Patriot Act and Kerry co-sponsored the Syria Accountability Act, which gave Bush the authority to impose sanctions on Syria. Susan Rice, a senior foreign policy adviser to Kerry's presidential campaign, has accused Bush of "standing on the sidelines while Iran's nuclear programme has been advanced", even though the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission has said that it has found no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons programme.
And, no one can outdo Kerry in his limitless support for Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon when it comes to the question of Palestine. In February 2004, just as he started his presidential campaign, he declared: "Yasser Arafat's support for terrorism has already rendered him unfit as a partner for peace... . Israel has a right and a duty to defend its citizens. The fence only exists in response to the wave of terror attacks against Israel." By June, another of his press releases declared: "I support Prime Minister Sharon's plan for Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip... . The plan is a courageous move that will enhance Israel's security." On August 26, Kerry wrote in a Zionist publication Forward: "Across the Middle East, the United States and Israel are facing a range of crucial security challenges. We are not secure while Saudi donors fund terror, while Iran pursues a nuclear weapons programme and while Syria sponsors terrorist operations... . I believe we must stand with Israel, supporting our ally's right to build a security fence and to allow its own Supreme Court - and not the International Court of Justice - to address the issue of the route of the fence."
Now, part of the sub-text of this pronouncement is that the International Court has in fact ruled against the building of the fence by Israel as a violation of international law, and the ruling thus requires the so-called "international community" - the U.S., the U.N., the European Union - to ensure that the fence is not built. As for the withdrawal from Gaza, Dov Weisglass, a senior adviser of Sharon, was quoted in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as saying: "The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the border and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with presidential blessing and ratification of both houses of Congress." Again, Kerry's position on this most fundamental issue in the entire politics of West Asia, is exactly the same as that of Bush.
So much for the global aspect of the policies of the Democratic contender in this so-called "global election".
What about domestic policies? According to a recent survey by the Congressional Budget Office, Bush's tax policies mean that in 2004 the 1 per cent Americans who earn more than $1.2 million a year will be, on average, $78,460 better off. The 20 per cent of Americans earning merely $16,620 a year will gain on average only $250 from tax cuts. Instead of campaigning for drastic revision of this tax structure, Kerry promised, as Bush had promised, that he would not raise taxes for the rich. On social issues, he dusted up the health plan that Hillary Clinton had once worked on and presented a version of it as his own, which includes such a bonanza for the corporations that he himself said, according the Wall Street Journal of May 3, that "I would think American businesses would jump up and down and welcome what I am offering." As for matters of fiscal policy, one of his close advisers who had once been a Deputy Treasury Secretary for Clinton, Roger C. Altman, was to croak: "It is a credible, enforceable pledge that will position Kerry to the right of Bush on fiscal policy." The anti-people policies that have wrecked public life in the U.S. over the past several years had presented Kerry with a whole range of issues that he could have foreground but he did not. The U.S. now has the world's largest prison population per head, California spends more on its prisons than on its universities, and 40 States are now planning to charge inmates for the time they spend in prison. Registration fees in state universities has risen by a total of 25 per cent during the past two years. Minimum wage, stagnant since 1996, is now in purchasing power terms as low as it was in 1955. Kerry foregrounded none of these issues.
In short, the remarkably early choice of Kerry by the Democratic party establishment as their favourite for the presidential nomination had already indicated that he would run from the middle of that party, as a replica of Clinton and Al Gore, in no significant way different from Bush, so as to maintain the consensus with which Clinton and Bush have respectively ruled, issues such as abortion and same-sex marriages notwithstanding. Democrats and Republicans were to act, as if by agreement, more as two factions of a single party than as two distinct parties, with their own distinctive policies and projects. And Kerry suffered, as Gore had suffered four years earlier, from the fact that by the time Clinton managed to leave the White House without getting impeached for a sexual misdemeanour, he also left behind him a Democratic Party in a shambles, rudderless, spineless, and in a minority in both houses of Congress and in the States.
THUS it came to pass, logically, that the elections of 2004, far from being a scintillating contest of any global dimensions, turned out to be mere re-play of the 2000 elections, to a degree so remarkable that few people have realised the scope of the repetition. Forty-eight of the 51 Electoral College contests (the 50 States and the District of Columbia) witnessed a pattern of voting for and against Bush exactly on the pattern that had held for Bush in 2000. Among the rest, a shift of merely 35,000 of the counted votes in Iowa and New Mexico (Bush's narrowest wins in 2004; Gore's closest wins in 2000) and New Hampshire (Kerry's closest win in 2004 and Gore's closest win in 2000) would have resulted in all 51 going the same way in the two elections.
Even that arithmetic is based on the aggregate results as announced and accepted by both parties. However, it is best to recall that in the 2000 elections, exit polls in Florida had shown that Al Gore was going to win the State by some 50,000 votes, hence the presidency as well, but Bush started emerging as the winner as the vote count proceeded, until a surprising discrepancy then forced a recount and it was found that a very large number of votes, mostly by the African-Americans who tend to solidly vote for Democrats, had not been counted for technical reasons. A court battle ensued and the recount was still in progress when the Supreme Court intervened, stopped the recount and in effect awarded the presidency to Bush in a decision that looked like a constitutionally valid coup d'etat. Well, even a larger disenfranchisement and electoral fraud seems to have happened in 2004, especially in the States of Ohio and New Mexico, so as to again award the presidency to Bush, even though the Democrats decided this time to concede without fighting to the finish, even as counting was still going on. Remarkably enough, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, John Edwards, said on the night of November 4, publicly and on television, that "every vote counts and every vote shall be counted" but Kerry conceded soon thereafter, without waiting for even the count to end.
But what about the votes that did not get counted? Greg Palast, a former columnist for the Guardian who is now a contributing editor for Harper's magazine and covered the electoral manipulation for BBC's Newsnight, has posted a detailed article on the matter (which can be easily accessed on ZNET). The gist of the matter is that exit polls in Ohio had shown that 53 per cent of the women and 51 per cent of the men had voted for Kerry, which clearly means that he would have won Ohio handsomely just as Al Gore would have won Florida if there were no electoral fraud, but, surprisingly, Bush was declared the winner by a margin of 136,483 votes. What seemed to have motivated Palast to investigate the matter was the report in an Ohio newspaper Cleveland Plain Dealer that a total of 247,672 votes in the State had gone uncounted. His detailed analysis of the pattern in Ohio and New Mexico makes a convincing case that the pattern of Florida was repeated this year as well, and it is possible that Kerry might have carried those two States if Republicans were not in charge of the State administration. Palast's surmise as to why the Democrats did not insist on a recount is also plausible. The Attorney-General of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, is a seasoned Far-right Republican and knows how to fix things, but the recount itself depends very much on his honest cooperation, which is unlikely to be forthcoming, and the experience with the Supreme Court in the case of Florida 2000, was hardly encouraging. The Democrats seem to have decided to lick their wounds privately, not disturb the rightwing consensus, which they share with the Republicans, and hope for better days and a second coming, perhaps with Hillary Clinton in 2008.
The deep complicity of Kerry et al on the questions of Iraq and Empire has a whole history behind it. As regards the imperial enterprise, Republicans do speak the language of the right-wing and Democrats always try to present themselves as liberal and responsible imperialists. However, it is best to recall that most of America's wars over the past half century have been launched by liberal Democratic presidents - Harry Truman in Korea, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in Vietnam and Jimmy Carter in Afghanistan. The fictitious "missile gap" was invented by Kennedy's liberal New Frontiersmen as a rationale for keeping the Cold War going. In 1964, a Democrat-dominated Congress gave to Johnson the authority to attack Vietnam, with the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Just as the Bush crowd invented a threat from Iraq on the basis of non-existent weapons of mass destruction and a fictitious link between Osama bin Laden and the Saddam regime, the justification in the case of Vietnam was a non-existent "incident" in which, it was said, two North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked a U.S. warship. Three million Indochinese people died because liberal Democrats convinced Americans that those two patrol boats were a mere tip of a vast communist conspiracy against the American way of life. And, lest we forget, about a million Iraqis died owing to sanctions and bombardments during the eight years of Clinton's Democratic establishment before the Republicans took over from him and took Clinton's Iraq policy to its logical conclusion.
Most of the world would have been relieved to see Bush go down in elections and out of history altogether. Few men of power, however, have had the courage to say so in public and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's rather abject letter of congratulations to Bush was typical. Some grumbling has come from Europe, however. Michel Barnier, the French Foreign Minister, said that four more years of a unilateralist administration in Washington required Europe to develop its own diplomatic and defence machinery, and added: "Our world needs several powers. We are in the process of gathering the pieces and the will to become another power." Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik said the outcome of the U.S. election made it more likely his country would join the E.U. after holding out for 30 years, because the unilateralist policies of the Bush administration were driving Europe and the U.S. apart, making it harder for Norway to straddle the two blocs. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the Greens in the European Parliament, said that Bush's victory made "Europe's role as a counterweight to the U.S. evermore important". Goran Persson, the Swedish Prime Minister, said it was inevitable that European politicians would continue to criticise Bush and then added: "But I do not believe he will be more willing to listen." These are among the more sane voices of Europe. In real life, however, Europe too shall learn to live with the fact of Bush.
Bush has won. What, now, are the prospects? Tens of thousands of dedicated volunteers did a very impressive job of mobilising votes for Kerry on election day, but phalanxes of the Christian Right did even a better job of galvanising their constituency, so that overall voter turnout was far greater than is usual in U.S. elections but, also, Bush got more votes than any President in history. In the process, more of the ultra-Right politicians of the God-talking variety made into the two houses of Congress. Without the Evangelical Christianity on Bush's side, Kerry might have won convincingly. This fact is well-known to Bush as well as his born-again cohorts, and the latter will demand and get, from a more than willing Bush, their own pounds of flesh in the shape of a whole cascade of rabidly perverse legislation. The slide of the U.S. into one of the world's most rightwing societies is likely to continue. On other fronts, the picture is not so encouraging for Bush and his ilk.
In a minor irritant, Hungary announced two days before the election that it was going to pull its troops out of Iraq by March 2005 at the latest, thus increasing the number of rats jumping the ship of the `coalition of the willing'. But two events of November 6, two days after the election, were more significant. On the economic front, the euro has been gaining in value at the expense of the dollar for some six months now, and on that day the euro registered its highest exchange rate against the dollar since the currency was floated. On the same day, as the U.S. forces in Iraq gathered momentum for their much-awaited post-election assault on Falluja, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan took the extraordinary step of writing a letter to Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair requesting them not to undertake any major military offensive in Iraq which, he said, would undermine the prospects of any elections in Iraq that are scheduled for January 2005. All kinds of "experts" were immediately paraded on CNN to argue that Annan had overstepped his mandate as an international civil servant by trying to influence national policies of the U.S. and the U.K., but Annan too had acted under pressure from his own secretariat. Let us look at this particular fact before returning to the two larger questions of the U.S. economy, as indicated the declining fortunes of the dollar, and the situation in Iraq, as raised by Annan's letter.
The plain fact is that no election in Iraq will have a shred - even pretence - of legitimacy if it is held under American guns but not under clear U.N. authority. However, the memory of U.N.-mandated sanctions in Iraq, which destroyed that country and took countless lives while siphoning off billions of dollars of Iraqi money, is so recent that the U.N. personnel is widely detested and cannot operate in that country without risking their lives. If they are protected by the U.S.-U.K. alliance, the whole thing comes full circle, they are seen as stooges of the U.S. and, therefore, legitimate target for the resistance. So, Annan must find others to protect his personnel in Iraq, but no country has come forward to contribute troops to a security force for the U.N. personnel in Iraq because (i) the U.S. insists that all troops on Iraqi soil must be under the U.S.-U.K. command; (ii) military involvement in Iraq is a hugely unpopular enterprise in most countries of the world who have effective and well-trained troops to contribute; and (iii) the insurgency is so successful and sending so many coffins to the U.S. itself that no self-respecting army is willing to put its troops in the line of fire there. So, the U.N. is already in a fix. It has appointed a high-ranking envoy there, the hapless Ashraf Jehangir Qazi who had previously served as Pakistan's High Commissioner to India and then went to Iraq straight from his appointment as Pakistan's Ambassador in Washington. But Qazi is a prisoner of his own high rank and the past misdeeds of the U.N. that he represents in a country that has been the U.N.'s victim.
Annan is trying desperately to save the U.N.'s face - and to ensure that the so-called elections do take place with some degree of credibility, to save the face of the U.S. itself. He knows that the U.S. can win in Falluja, in strictly military terms, but an assault of that kind on a major Iraqi city shall serve to unite the Iraqi Arabs behind the resistance and would also make it impossible for any Arab - or Muslim - country to offer any military troops for Iraq in any foreseeable future. (Saudi Arabia recently put together a plan to assemble a contingent of troops from diverse Muslim countries to serve as a security force for the U.N. in Iraq, provided that the contingent would be under the U.N. and not the U.S.-U.K. alliance, and Annan had accepted the plan but the U.S. rejected it.) A sign of the times to come is that a group of 30 Saudi ulema have issued a religious edict calling upon Iraqis to resist foreign occupation forces with weapons. Conversely, Annan knows that the U.S. shall not support his re-hiring for the job at the U.N. when his present term ends and he, therefore, has nothing to lose by confronting the U.S. on its Iraq policies; indeed, Annan's son was so deeply mired in the corruptions surrounding the U.N. management of Iraqi funds during the sanctions that the father is desperate to regain some of his lost prestige. Yet another clash between the U.S. and the U.N. over Iraq is perhaps in the offing.
THE U.S. economy is likely to be the Achilles' heel during the forthcoming four-year term of Bush and his zealots. The decline of the dollar vis-a-vis the euro, mentioned earlier, is merely the tip of the iceberg. Robert Reich, Clinton's former economic adviser, told the Global Business Forum in Banff recently that the dollar is fast reaching a point at which foreign investors are likely to abandon it altogether and send it into a free fall. This situation is owed to high budget and trade deficits as well as the enormous size of personal debt. The U.S. already requires a daily infusion of $1.2 billion in foreign investment just to keep the dollar decline under control. Between 2001 and 2004, the years of Bush's first presidency, the federal budget plunged from a surplus of $100 billion to a deficit of $514 billion, and the likelihood is that the balance of payments deficit in 2004 may be reaching a figure of $514 billion, which amounts to over 5 per cent of the U.S. gross national product. This situation is inherently unstable and the dollar may be fast approaching a point in its decline when East Asian banks, which are trying to prop it up, begin to look at their efforts as a losing investment, and the Chinese government, which holds $172 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds, has already begun to diversify and buy more Euro-denominated assets. In fact, more and more international investors are now conducting their business in euros instead of dollars. Also, indications throughout 2004, especially in July and August, were that foreign governments and individuals, who hold $3.7 trillion in outstanding U.S. Treasury bonds, were buying fewer and fewer of those and selling substantial amounts. The combined purchase of stocks, corporate bonds and government debt, overall capital flows into the U.S. fell in August for the sixth straight month.
The endemic deficit financing, which has been so much the hallmark of the contemporary U.S. state and its militarisation of foreign ventures and domestic policies alike, has relied crucially on the status of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world as well as the unique currency for world trade, especially in such strategic arenas as oil trade. Any definitive decline in this status of the dollar, and the concomitant rise of the euro as a competing world currency - which even the yen could not even remotely become in the heyday of Japanese prosperity - would greatly limit the U.S. capacity for international borrowing, hence for the deficit financing upon which the U.S. economy so crucially relies. Indeed, in such a situation, there is the possibility of foreign investors - states and corporations alike - rushing in to convert their dollar assets into a different currency, forcing further decline of the dollar and the U.S. economy. Conversely, of course, most national economies and the global investment structure is already so tied into the dollar and the U.S. economy that they all have a vested interest in propping up that currency and that economy. Chinese exports, for example, rely so much on the ebullience of the U.S. consumer market that any prospect of major shrinkage in that economy, hence in the purchasing power of U.S. consumers, produces in Beijing not waves of pleasure but chills and nightmares. The process of U.S. decline is, therefore, going to be not sudden or immediate but slow and measured. But is it going to be definitive? The Vietnam War led to a situation where the U.S. decided to abandon key aspects of the Bretton Woods architecture. Will the new global war, initiated by the Bush administration, lead to a situation where the dollar declines sufficiently to allow a competing currency to emerge as an alternate reserve and trading currency of the world? Will the second Bush administration exacerbate these trends? Only time will tell.
What, then, about Iraq and the new global order of imperialist militarisation? The situation in Iraq seems to have reached a critical turning point.
The U.S. has undoubtedly made several gains. Thanks to the U.N. and its despicable but suave envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.S. has succeeded in putting a client regime in place, which has in turn been recognised by the Security Council and the global state system. It is headed by Iyad Allawi, a former Baathist who was then on the Central Intelligence Agency payroll for many years, and the regime consequently commands no popular support in the country. However, it is supported by most of the powerful sections of the emergent ruling class of Iraq: the wealthy expatriates who have returned to make a killing in the new order, the technocrats who are looking for careers in a new government, the black-marketeers and the traders who made a lot of money during the period of the sanctions, a section of the Baathist turncoats, and operators of various kinds, including sections of former Saddam loyalists. The U.S. also commands the allegiance of the various Kurdish parties and their militias. Their prize catch, however, is Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior Shia cleric, who intervened on their behalf in the crucial battle of Najaf and obtained the surrender of Muqtada Al Sadr and his army. Iran has clearly adopted a two-sided policy: to help the U.S. in Iraq by restraining the Iraqi Shia and thus gaining peace for itself with the U.S. for the time being, and preparing for the worst in the meantime. The U.S. now feels that, with the Kurds firmly on their side and the Shia armed resistance neutralised, they have the initiative and must relentlessly press their advantage, whatever the rest of the world says or feels; that is the significance of their gathering assault on Falluja, even as I write these lines. And, indeed, if the battle is truly joined, and if the Shia resistance remains on the sidelines while the Americans devastate that city, they will have achieved one of their key objectives, which is to communalise Iraq, provoke a Shia-Sunni divide and animosity, and themselves eventually emerge as keepers of the peace between these two forces. In the meanwhile, the U.S. believes that if it can devastate Falluja and a couple of other key strongholds of the resistance, at whatever human cost, they can gain the initiative, fragment the resistance, and prove to the angry Iraqi populace that it really has no choice but to accept the new order.
The resistance, on the other hand, has fought back with a tenacity and ingenuity beyond anyone's speculation, let alone expectation. There is now a daily average of more than a hundred attacks, in various corners of the country, though, admittedly, mostly around Baghdad and in what is euphemistically called `the Sunni triangle'. Significantly, the neutralisation of Al Sadr's armies, so well touted in the media, has made little difference to the level of attacks by the resistance, and one is therefore not sure if Al Sadr's men are obeying, or are even meant to obey, the orders to desist from fighting the occupiers. The great international contribution of the Iraqi resistance is that it has engaged the U.S. on such a scale that the U.S.' designs to get rid of Chavez in Venezuela or invade Syria and Iran cannot be pursued; unable to subdue the Iraqis or withdraw any forces from there, the U.S. is hardly in a position to go around and beat up any other country.
The resistance keeps sending American coffins back but the main battle, both sides know, is over the U.S.' design to construct a reliable security and military force comprised of Iraqis themselves, and the American attempt to give a semblance of normalcy in the economic arena under the client regime. In the military arena, Americans go on recruiting, and the resistance forces keep attacking the collaborating recruits; in a parallel development, they also infiltrate the Iraqi forces that the U.S. is trying to build. The resistance is said to be so successful that men loyal to the resistance are said to have risen to some of the highest positions in the security and military structure purportedly loyal to the Americans. One of the U.S. objectives of the impending assault on Falluja is to test the loyalty of the men and the officers they have recruited. In the economic sphere, the American dream of capturing Iraqi oil resources for itself and its Iraqi clients has not been realised, owing to punctual attacks by the resistance forces. As Al-Jazeera reported on November 2, two days before the U.S. election: "Fighters have mounted the biggest attacks yet on Iraq's oil infrastructure, blowing up three pipelines in the north and hitting exports via Turkey... . The attacks on Tuesday, which were hours apart, sharply reduced crude oil supplies to Iraq's biggest refinery at Baiji... . The government is already struggling to build up stocks of refined oil products before winter.... Attacks against oil facilities in north and central Iraq have intensified in the past few weeks as U.S. forces have attacked cities in central Iraq. Imports of refined products have also been disrupted."
As I write these lines, Americans are gathering forces for a massive assault on Falluja. We don't know what kind of fight it will be. Any full-scale invasion or occupation of this major urban centre would have, quite aside from the enormous suffering and bloodshed, the effect of bringing the various factions of the resistance yet closer and of uniting the great majority of the Iraqis behind the resistance. It is also possible that Americans shall be persuaded - by the U.N., Europe, the Arab rulers, or whatever - to back off and to seek further legitimacy by concentrating on the so-called `elections'.
But we are well into November and the `elections' are due in January but no international mechanism to bestow even some remote degree of legitimacy on the exercise is yet within sight. It can be safely predicted, though, that neither the destruction of major Arab cities nor the o-called `elections' can deliver to the Americans what they want. The war will continue.
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