Trouble was, the events of 9/11 were so devastating to the America psyche that some folks were bound to get it. So how about two easy targets, Afghanistan and Iraq? Far better than tangling with any of your mates in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, for example – a country with proven links to the terrorists who caused 9/11 – where only about 14% of the people can vote and women can’t drive cars or vote or fly kites.

The idea that you could bomb people into democracy was a masterstroke of devilishy clever proportions, as was the vote-winning notion that the perfect response to Saddam killing and torturing his own people was to kill and torture more of them! But then Saddam had, they wrongly hoped, a pile of WMDs, the finding of which would justify killing people who had nothing to do with Saddam or his weapons. Never mind the fact that the only nation in history to have actually used WMDs is the USA, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese, (they don’t really count as they’re not white and don’t have oil).
So, with the connivance of their cowardly media, the unfortunate American electorate were duped into thinking that Saddam was a real threat and that getting rid of him would solve all problems forever. Recent events suggest otherwise. Meanwhile Americans were kept in their panic rooms by spurious alerts of varying colours – Yellow! Orange! Red! – and stunts like the diverting of a plane because the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens was on it. Muslims became the new blacks, to be arrested and detained with no evidence of wrongdoing and in breach of all the hooey Americans spew out about democracy and the land of the free.
Thus George Bush was able to portray himself as the nation’s hero and saviour instead of a lunatic and a mass murderer, and he nosed out John Kerry to continue being the biggest threat to world peace for another four years.
Oh well. Maybe in 2005 life will imitate art in the shape of Leonard Cohen’s biting song lyric “democracy is coming to the USA”. Let’s hope it gets at least as far as Guantanamo Bay anyway. But no one around here is going to bet on it.