http://www.sundayherald.com/43704<snip>
There are many things to cheer about John Kerry’s confident display at last week’s Democratic Convention in Boston. His success signals the beginning of a robust challenge to President Bush’s ideology and hegemony and the start of what looks increasingly like the Democrats’ best chance to win back the White House, only lost thanks to those votes fixed by Bush’s brother in Florida.
Kerry and his deputy John Edwards both gave thoughtful speeches which prove that they will mount a strong and coherent challenge. In foreign policy terms, there is now also a real alternative to the Bush doctrine that says the US can act alone and pre-emptively whenever and wherever it wants in the world’s affairs. Who knows – if the Democrats get back into the White House their success might even lance the nasty boil of anti-Americanism which erupted after Bush defied world opinion and mounted his possibly illegal attack on Iraq. Yet the fact is that there is still a long way to go before the November poll and the result is still far from certain.
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Those listening to him cannot have doubted his message. It spoke of fairness and decency and a change from what is being offered up by the present occupant of the White House. One wonders what resonance those words had with our own commander-in-chief, Tony Blair, who is on holiday in the Caribbean at Sir Cliff Richard’s villa. What would he have made of the speech? Less than a decade ago the Democrats and New Labour were the best of friends, their third-way message was sung in perfect transatlantic harmony and the Clinton and Blair show looked to run and run. Both parties saw themselves as mirror images and when Clinton, by then no longer President, turned up at the Labour Party conference in 2002, he could have metamorphosed himself into the Prime Minister’s shoes. He received a huge ovation after addressing the conference, not least because he admitted that Britain would persuade the US to act through the UN before mounting any attack on Iraq. He told Labour: “As a citizen of the US and the world, I am glad that Tony Blair will be weighing the risks and making the calls.”
Except, of course, Blair did no such thing. He gave whole-hearted support to Bush and he colluded in the presentation of irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. So convinced was he about the rightness of his position that he became almost as hawkish as the neo-cons in Bush’s cabinet. It was almost as if he had never enjoyed a close relationship with the Democrats and had emerged as a born-again Republican intent on supporting the US view of hegemony over the world’s affairs. With his chameleon like ability to be all things to all people, Blair threw in his lot with the Bush warmongers – even though millions of his people disagreed with the policy and events were to prove that he might just have been wrong.
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