Four more years. How did it happen? Why was the election race even close? Of course Kerry was a dour, unimaginative character, with little stage presence, but there was something more important that he had for American voters to vote him into office. He wasn't George Bush.

I wouldn't dream, like others have, attack Bush for ignoring the signals and warnings about 9/11, hindsight can indeed be a convenient luxury.

But let's look at what's happened since. Bush has alienated the US from virtually the entire world, who stood shoulder to shoulder with her people in the aftermath of 9/11. The world over, people kept silence for those that lost their lives on that dreadful day.The world wept for America, with sincerity, compassion and a resolve to bring the perpetrators to book. With such a resolve, NATO, the French included, despatched troops to Afghanistan to root out and eliminate Al-Qaeda and the Taleban that was harbouring this vile organisation.

Today, America is largely despised and ridiculed the world over. Since Bush came to power, he has ignored international opinion, ignored international law, broken the Geneva convention (a Supreme Court judge today overturned Bush's dictatorial decree that suspects at Guatanamo had no rights under the Geneva convention presided over torture and murder of innocent people under US custody and alienated powerful allies that could have helped in the so called war against terrorism.

Young Islamic idealists the world over are flocking to joing nefarious terrorist organisations, their sole objective is revenge against the brutal and murderous Americans. And while the Bush ignored every solid piece of evidence that showed Saddam was no clear and present danger to the US and clutched at every snapping straw in his messianic eagerness to destroy Saddam and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis in his wake, Iran and North Korea, happily expanded their programs to acquire nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

In 2000, the US was nearing the end of the longest economic expansion in her history, with forecasts of large budget surpluses, so the profilgate Bush promised large tax cuts on the back of these forecasts. Now the US is facing a defecit crisis, with the largest budget defecit in her history, and the dollar plummeting on world markets because nobody really believes that she can pay back the money she owes to the rest of the world.

Domestically, he has divided the country in a way never seen before. He has deliberately misled the public over the reasons for going to war in Iraq, he continues to decieve the country over the actual state of affairs in Iraq and the amount of blood and money that it will need to suck up before mission really is accomplished. Immediately after the elections he said that no more troops would be needed, last week, by extending a tour of duty, 6,000 extra troops are now in Iraq and a further 30,000 are being planned over the next 3 months. Bush claimed that thte war was going well and that progress was being made, yet two days after the election Allawai declared a state of emergency, an assault of Fallujah was underway, and 3 members of Allawis family are kidnapped in broad daylight.

He was floored in each of the 3 presidential debates by Kerry, and shown to be someone out of touch with reality, and cocooned in a padded-cell managed by yes-men and more sinsiterly motivated manipulators.

And yet he was returned to office.

One of the startling figures to emerge in the exit polls was that 75% of Americans still believe that Saddam played an active role in 9/11 and that it was right to invade Iraq. The reason that I focus on this statistic in particular is its enormous significance. Let's think about this for a moment. There were no WMDs, Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, and he was no clear and present danger even to his neighbours with his rag-tag army.

Yet 75% of the US electorate believe otherwise. I've criticised the US media before, and they certainly must shoulder the blame for being insufficiently critical of the Bush administration. Yet the Bush administration itself has never sought to repeal this lie. They just let it stay in the public domain, conferring a legitimacy on the fiction that they created without any basis in fact.

Let's dig a little deeper. One of Bush's aides recently said,

'We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality'

There's an old saying,

'if you repeat a lie often enough' it becomes reality'

 This sums up perfectly wha the Bush administration was all about - creating a fantasy world and selling it to a largely ignorant American majority (though its a small majority) as the truth. And it worked, 51% of Americans bought it hook line and sinker. But other commentators have pointed out that 'values' played a large part in the outcome of the election. Of course it did, and I'll address that in a further post-election article.

The crux of the matter here is Iraq, which Kerry and Bush focused on so heavily, really wasn't the issue to most Americans, it was on the back-burner, why? Because Bush had successfully fooled a majority of Americans into thinking that by attacking Saddam he was avenging in no small part the atrocity of 9/11. If Saddam had played any part in 9/11, there would have been no question in the world community that military action was appropriate. He didn't and it wasn't.

But 75% of deluded Americans believe otherwise. And so it was relegated in terms of importance beneath such burning issues such as same-sex marriages, guns, stem-cell research and an exasperating belief that the economy is doing well despite the fact that the US is all but insolvent and heading steadily towards bankruptcy.

It is abundantly clear that the US public have abandoned reason and objectivity, and instead embraced a messianc zealot that has lead his country into a moral, financial and military quagmire much to the horror of her former friends and partners and almost half of her citizens. It's an unenviable an untenable position to be in, and while the dumbfounded Democrats shake their heads in disbelief at the result, they make take some small comfort in this simple question. Would they really have wanted their candidate to try and sort out the dangerous mess that Bush and his administration has bequeathed to both America and the rest of the world?

The problems that this new administration faces are seemingly intractable, created by a Bush administration who's basic election message was

'We got you into this mess - we're the best one's to get you out of it'

Perhaps the Democrats should be relieved to bide their time once more, for Bush and his incompetent administration over the last four years have created a bitterly and particularly poisonous chalice that no sane person would want to inherit.

In the next article I will examine the main challenges that the new Bush administration faces, and they certainly aren't pretty.

yechydda,