Shock and awe

The American people have decided to vote for four more years of the Bush regime. Only 1,460 days to go.

Incredible as it may seem, the people of the United States of America – or rather, just over half, have decided to go for broke: four more years of a Bush regime which has chalked up a 200 billion dollar bill to pay for its disaster in Iraq, four more years of a Bush regime which has been responsible for mass murder on a scale unseen since the Vietnam War, for breaking the UN Charter and the Geneva Convention and for divorcing the international community.

Yet the citizens of the United States of America, through a free and democratic process, have given their collective nod to more of the same, if indeed the process was fair.

In so doing, the citizens of the USA have taken upon themselves a collective responsibility for the consequences of what they have done. Four years ago, it could have been argued that nobody knew that the Bush regime would stand for lies, blackmail, forgery, murder, skullduggery, insulting the international community, launching a murderous act of butchery, slaughtering innocent civilians in their tens of thousands, dropping cluster bombs in civilian areas. Mudering women. Murdering kids.

Four years on, after the whole and horrific truth as to what the Bush regime was responsible for, nobody can claim that they were misled or that they did not know what they were voting for. Therefore, collectively, the people of the United States of America, or just over half of them, in voting for Bush have condoned his act of mass murder in Iraq, have condoned the shocking acts of torture in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, have condoned the existence of the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, have condoned the deployment of military hardware against civilians, have condoned the acts of butchery in which US military personnel blasted the limbs of three-year-old boys and girls, have condoned the war crimes, have condoned the targeting of civilian structures with military hardware and have given the nod to the super-rich clique of corporate elitists which gravitate around the White House becoming richer and fatter by the minute as they dictate Washington's policy.

Four years on, the people of America have just bought, and put on, a collective cloak of responsibility which they will have to wear for four long years, and for which they will be held fully accountable by the rest of mankind.

Four years on, the citizens of America have voted for isolation, have voted against the collective wishes of the rest of humanity, which looks on in horror and disbelief at the results of an election in which George Bush would have received less than a third of the votes in 99% of the other members of the international community.

Four years on, the people who voted the Bush regime back into power have no excuses. They voted for lies, for mass murder, they voted for a person and a regime which turned its back on the rest of the world.

There are 300 million US citizens. There are six billion people in the international community. If the people of America have voted for a divorce, so be it. The rest of the world can get along fine. The tragedy is that just under half of the  population, the good, clear-thinking Americans who saw through the Bush farce for what it is, will have to pay the consequences of the political blindness demonstrated by the other half. The result of November 2nd is a country divided between those who have any idea as to what they are doing and those who are apparently so easily fooled, an America divided between those who wanted to marry the international community and those who wished to divorce it.

The international community will never again allow the Bush regime to commit any further acts of butchery, therefore the influence of this election on world affairs is relative. The question is, whether the rest of the world will have anything to do with Washington now that the people have stubbornly given Bush a mandate.

The people of America have voted for more of the same. They made the bed they will lie in for the next 1,460 days.