A week after the mid-term congressional and senatorial elections in the United States, a considerable party in the media and the political class is intent on minimising, even distorting, the result. Whatever happened in particular races in particular states, the national opinion polls make it clear that the unpopularity of the war in Iraq was a major factor in the Republicans' defeat. It is true that the entire event was more of a Republican defeat than a Democratic victory -- but the old American adage, "You can't beat somebody with nobody" still applied.
Where Democratic congressional and senatorial candidates took seats away from the Republicans, they were usually quite outspoken in their opposition to the war and to president George W Bush's policies of redistribution upward. Instead of dwelling on this, our priestly caste, installed in the news media's temples, is determined to absolve the electorate of two sins: repugnance for empire, however hesitant, and a rejection of the class system, however unsystematic.
One understands the theological anxiety so evident on the television screens and in print. If what the voters did and said were to be named, an entire structure of political dogma would collapse. Instead of being a "centrist" polity, the US would be divided into something like the blocs found in those backward places where the citizenries are not quite able to accept 21st-century realities: a global market policed by the US.
The entire ideological recasting of the Republican defeat is intended to convert it into its opposite. Had I 100 euros for every reference to the imperative necessity for "bipartisanship" (allowing a repudiated president to set the national agenda) or "moderation" (ignoring the voters and continuing as before), I could certainly make a sizeable down-payment on an apartment on the Seine or a house in London's Hampstead or on Rome's Gianicolo.
Norman Birnbaum is university professor emeritus, Georgetown University Law Center. Among his books is After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2001)
Also by Norman Birnbaum in openDemocracy:
Remember Solidarity! Polands journey to democracy
(26 August 2005)
Election and empire (17 October 2006)
There are cases in which history does not wait for slower contemporaries to quicken their pace. This is one of them. Even the president has partly grasped this: he was clearly planning to dismiss his secretary of state, Donald Rumsfeld, before the electoral debacle (which he was stupid enough not to anticipate). As disintegration continues in Iraq; as a hapless Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, arrives in Washington to declare that Israel will not attack Iran unless it decides otherwise; as the rest of the world makes clear its pleasure with the election, the imperial realists have gone to work.
The Iraq Study Group -- headed by former secretary of state (and Bush family retainer) James A Baker 3d and former Democratic congressman Lee H. Hamilton -- has just met with the president and had a video conversation with British prime minister Tony Blair. True, the president cannot stop blustering. Appearing with Olmert, he instructed Iran and Syria on their duties to the US. The imperial realists proceed unconcerned. Baker will produce, clearly, some sort of proposal he has already described as prescribing a course between total withdrawal and remaining indefinitely. He has also suggested direct talks with Iran and Syria, and -- to the apprehension of the Israel lobby -- renewed attention to the question of Palestine. Israel's American supporters recall that Baker, as secretary of state, did not hesitate to issue orders to the country's unruly client state.
The members of the group are elder statesmen (and one stateswoman). Hamilton as a congressman was on good terms with all segments of his divided party and the Republicans, too: he had no political sharp edges. Robert Gates, a former CIA director, was a member until he resigned after being chosen to succeed Rumsfeld as defense secretary.
What I find striking is the absence of any member with close ties to the Israel lobby, although the African-American Washington insider, Vernon E. Jordan Jr, serves as the Clinton representative on the group. The panel bears the hopes of those in the armed forces and the foreign-policy bureaucracy who have been increasingly discountenanced and finally appalled at Bush's serial misadventures. It remains to be seen if the group can provide a plan for a rapid retreat from Iraq.
For the moment, the unilateralists (led by Bush) have been reduced to absurdity: compulsive repetition of the assertion that rapid US departure would leave Iraq in chaos. What condition do they think it is in now? Some of them are more honest when they speak of the necessity of avoiding "defeat". They are a bit late, but presumably heard the supreme Iranian religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, congratulate the Democrats and the American people on the election.
The congressional conflicts that one would expect to erupt in the new senate and house of representatives, which take office in January 2007, have already begun. The majority of the Democrats will demand a timetable for an early reduction of the American presence in Iraq. In the logic of the situation, they would also oblige the White House to talk with Iran and Syria -- and demand of Israel that it negotiate in good faith with Palestine, while initiating (in the meantime) a minimum of decency and restraint in its treatment of the Arabs.
The White House, and the unilateralists, and the Israel lobby, are clinging to the hope that the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran will frighten an American majority into allowing the president to decide alone on the next steps. The Democrats' capacity to stop him, given their narrow majorities, depends upon their inducing some Republicans to join them. That possibility is greatly strengthened by the putative backing for Baker from the armed services and the foreign-policy apparatus. Well-timed leaks of information which governments wish to keep secret are the American equivalent of resignations on principle.
The prospective chairs of the judiciary and government reform committees in the house of representatives - the lower chamber of congress -- are John Conyers Jr and Henry Waxman, who have no ideological inclination to spare the White House and the Republicans embarrassment in any investigations they may conduct.
However, the first test of the incoming speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, lies ahead. She is backing the anti-war congressman John Murtha for the post of Democratic majority leader, rather than the all-too-supple congressman Steny Hoyer. Should Murtha win, the White House will have yet another reason to be anxious.
In the senate, the prospective chair of homeland security and government affairs is the "independent Democrat" Joseph Lieberman, re-elected thanks to Republican votes. He has undertaken to join the Democrats who, with him, will have a bare majority of 51. Lieberman is the favourite Democrat of the Bush White House, an unreconstructed supporter of the Iraq war, and smart and unscrupulous enough to do the Democrats a large amount of damage from within. He has just announced that he will form a bipartisan grouping to consider a solution to the Iraq problem, an obvious challenge to the Baker panel.
To complicate matters, the presidential campaign of 2008 has commenced. The leading Republican candidate, senator John McCain, says that more troops should be sent to Iraq. The leading Democratic one, senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, has begun to equivocate on the war. Her career as first lady and senator has developed her consummate ability to adjust her opinions to the prevailing winds. Her ability to survive in the political hurricane produced by imperial defeat in the middle east is open to doubt.
The problem is not hers alone: the entire US political system and freedoms are at risk. If we were reduced to relying on Hillary Clinton to save us, we would be in terrible straits, indeed. The electorate (or the 40% of it that troubled to vote) has shown that a sizeable minority of citizens are prepared to defy the patronising arrogance of the elites. What follows is very uncertain.
