Madam, - The US Republican Party is now deservedly watching its mistakes come home to roost as it faces a loss of seats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in mid-term elections on November 7th.
Republican strategists now believe a loss of anything up to 25 seats in the House of Representatives is possible, with half of that figure virtually definite. In the Senate too, under Republican control for 11 out of the past 12 years, this hegemony is likely to be lost. All of this has left even Republicans themselves critical of their leader's strategy on the war in Iraq, which is spiralling out of control.
Bush himself recently conceded a comparison between the current situation in Iraq and the Vietnam Tet offensive of 1968. In other words, the Iraq situation, the one defining episode of the Bush administration, has now been proven, to all but the most myopic and dishonest died-in-the-wool neo-conservative, to be a resounding failure.
This is hardly surprising, though, when your party elects a "leader" whose whole life prior to his presidency has been proven to be an unmitigated failure. A former alcoholic, all of whose businesses either failed or had to be bailed out by his exceedingly wealthy and influential family, is hardly likely to prove inspirational. An even cursory perusal of State of Denial, Bush at War, Bob Woodward's recent book, and a succinct appraisal of the Iraq fiasco, shows very little leadership at play here. The book reveals a man of limited intelligence, sensibility and foresight relying on a cabal of people like Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bolton, who are equally discredited and compromised. Woodward conveys the impression of a "devil may care" foreign policy conducted on a "suck it and see" basis.
Since the aftermath of the events of September 11th, 2001, we have witnessed one of the most shameful periods of imperial, unilateral foreign policy implemented by two of the major world powers - the US and its lackey Britain. In September 2000, precisely a year before the events of 9/11 and two months before Bush was elected President, in dubious circumstances, the " Project for the New American Century", a neo-con think tank with links to the Bush dynasty, issued a document entitled: "Rebuilding America's Defences". This called for greater military spending to preserve US "global pre-eminence" and added ominously that such a programme would not be viable politically unless there was a "catastrophic and catalysing event, like a new Pearl Harbour".
In the aftermath of the Twin Towers tragedy, Vice-President Dick Cheney declared that this new "war on terrorism. . .may never end. . .at least not in our lifetime" - a somewhat puzzling pronouncement, as an integral feature of any war is the expectation that some sort of victory is possible and expected. It is also illogical, in that war on an ideology, which is what is involved here, is well nigh impossible.
In the years since then, the Bush administration has set out to fix facts to accommodate its "intelligence" to manipulate and distort the truth and finally to jettison established legal precepts to allow its unilateral imperial manoeuvrings full rein. Human rights have been placed on the back burner as prisoners are seized and summarily transferred by the rather Orwellian "extraordinary rendition" to Guantanamo Bay and other secret facilities throughout the world. All of this has occurred without trial and, as we have witnessed, to facilitate torture.
Lila Rajiva, in her book The Language of Empire, describes the sickening abuse meted out in the now notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and the evidence illustrates that this abuse was not the work of a few maverick jailers and interrogators, but rather a system approved at the top.
During his presidency, Bush has sullied and compromised the standing and reputation of his nation and damaged the goodwill of the rest of the world to the US. His sidekick Blair has hardly fared any better. It is not an exaggeration to say that Bush's disreputable government has been an affront to democracy. All right -thinking people can only hope the expected just desserts for the Republicans in the upcoming elections are a prelude to complete failure in the 2008 presidential elections.
As failure has been the one theme running consistently through this whole sorry mess, it will be a fitting end for this dishonourable administration headed by one of the most unpopular, divisive and widely reviled heads of state in the past century. - Yours, etc,
DAVID MARLBOROUGH, Kenilworth Park, Dublin 6w.