Dawn Ritch, Contributor
THERE IS wonderful hope for the safety of the world. George W. Bush has been re-elected President of the United States in a sweeping victory over his opponent. The first American president to call for a Palestinian state, he is also the first to have created a Cabinet of such high rank in international knowledge and experience. That was his first term.
The American media ridiculed him for swotting for the presidency like an examination out on his ranch. And then for having grey beards in his Cabinet. George W. Bush has always made perfect sense to me. He may not speak French like Senator John Kerry, but he still knows how to get up the nose of the French. France has steadfastly maintained that the solution to the Middle East crisis is the settlement of the long-running Israeli Palestinian crisis. She has long been the counterpoint in the Third World to Britain and the U.S.A. Guilt perhaps over her colonial administration of Algiers, and well-deserved. Or perhaps because the French are the font of Western philosophy, even though not all of it makes sense, not even to themselves.
Regardless of who won the U.S. presidential elections, France has said that she will not send troops to Iraq. Now that a Palestinian state is at last a real possibility with the re-election of George Bush, perhaps the French will shoulder their peace-keeping responsibilities where duty calls. Instead of continuing to get in a snit because the world speaks English and not French. Argentine soldiers, part of the U.S. peacekeeping force in Haiti, gave Haitian looters a swift kick to the backside, and I hope the French will rise to the occasion there and elsewhere.
DEMOCRACY
Hopefully too, American media, and Jamaican as well, will no longer see every skirmish in every little pocket of the world as a freedom fight. And call for reasonable state institutions, including democracy, which will allow people everywhere a little peace and quiet. Instead of all of us hoping to hire a Washington lobbyist, a legion of lawyers, and an expensive P.R. firm. The youngish wife of Yassar Arafat, who was hugged by Hilary Clinton, has lived in a luxury flat in Paris for the last several years. Not with her husband in the compound at Ramallah. For the first time last week a suicide bomber of only 16 years blew himself up inside a crowded Israeli open-air market in the morning. His mother wept inconsolably on camera, that any organisation could use so foully someone as young as that.
George W. Bush is responsible neither directly nor indirectly for any of this. But a now dovish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, unilaterally withdrawing from some of the occupied territory, can look forward to an American administration capable of helping him.
Bush's first term was marred by an aura of illegitimacy be-cause it was a court decision which ultimately decided the outcome. In this election, he has a clear majority of the popular vote. This is a mandate to both govern the U.S. and promote its interests worldwide according to the precepts he already established in his first term. The most hawkish president in 60 years is not likely to become a dove overnight. Not with the largest percentage turnout of American voters in 40 years. Nor with Osama bin Laden brazenly taunting the American people on television just a few days before the election. And if anybody's counting the largest number of popular votes in the history of American presidential elections.
We can count on George W. Bush therefore to do what's right and necessary, even when it isn't popular with the press, the United Nations or the opinion-makers. His past judgement has been vindicated by the American voters. Oprah Winfrey did not triumph, nor did Whoopie Goldberg. Perhaps CNN will stop asking soldiers how it feels to lose a leg, and families how it feels to lose a child to a serial child molester/murderer. A steady diet of that will turn anybody into a bag of nerves. That Americans lined up for blocks and days to vote shows they have not been eviscerated by doubt, and that mainstream American media is seriously out of step with conservative society.
COWBOY SWAGGER
Media pundits said Bush was a clutz for choking on his own pretzel at a ballgame, for mangling his words and walking with a cowboy swagger. Not a soul said it was remarkable that a politician could say so much with so few words. Indeed that he didn't even seem to need words. They said he showed more affection for his dog 'Barney' in public than for his wife, as though that were inappropriate. They said his wife was so quiet and self-effacing that Teresa Heinz Kerry, one of the richest women in the world and his opponent's wife, forgot that Laura Bush had a job as a librarian for 10 years. Neither Mrs. Kerry (who did apologise) nor the leftist American press seem to consider being a librarian a job worth remembering. But the rest of American society seems to have found it perfectly respectable. Which means there's hope for them despite the odds.
Now all the international scene needs is for the British voters to dump Tony Blair at the next general election. He has too much of Bill Clinton about him. A smooth talker, Blair has presided over the collapse of British rail, schools and Buckingham Palace has been broken into three times on his watch. Conservative John Howard is his opponent, and it helps that he's a Jew of émigré parents. People like that understand that in the final analysis government has to make sense. It is not just a photo-opportunity. Would that such sanity could prevail here.
