Now that the dust has settled from the 2006 U.S. mid-term election, the results show the American people remain politically as much divided as they were in the 2000 presidential vote.
That election was so evenly split that the issue of the disputed Florida vote count, which decided the presidential election in George Bush’s favour, was settled by a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.
DIVIDED ELECTORATE
But an evenly divided electorate is not unusual in American politics.
It is consistent with the design of the republican system bequeathed by the founding fathers—a system of checks and balances in government that rules out the likelihood of any party or individual subverting democracy, or obtaining unchecked power for any period of time.
American democracy is unlike any other. Its strength and virtue are buried in the fractiousness of American politics.
Even with a deeply divided electorate, the freedom of Americans is defended because the people are sovereign.
This is why the world beyond America has difficulty understanding the outcomes of American politics.
Republican President Richard Nixon was driven from the White House in 1974 by the Watergate scandal, when America appeared to be a hapless giant defeated in the jungles of Vietnam.
Yet within one election cycle, Americans returned the Republicans to the White House under Ronald Reagan in 1980, and that so-called hapless giant went on to engineer the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Similarly, as fascists and militarists took to their barbaric posturing in the 1930s, a majority of Americans turned inward, wanting to ignore the world beyond its oceans.
American isolationism was read in Berlin and Tokyo as a permanent condition of a decadent American democracy.
German Nazis and Japanese militarists saw this as a signal for launching their wars for world domination.
But when an isolationist America was awakened after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, it pushed aside all doubts about its commitment to freedom and took the war to its just conclusion against the modern barbarians in Europe and Asia.
The main question after the mid-term election in the U.S. is where Americans, as a divided people, stand in the war on terror precipitated by radical Islamists and their fellow-travellers.
The obvious answer is that they are almost evenly divided on the issue.
That is, whether to remain in Iraq until the new government in Baghdad is on a sounder footing or to begin bringing American soldiers home before that mission is accomplished.
BURDEN OF WAR
This will be debated with much rancour during the life of the 110th Congress when it convenes in January, 2007, as well as during the presidential election in November 2008.
In the meantime, Americans will ask themselves why they alone should carry the burden of the war against radical Islamists when it is global in nature.
Following 9/11, a divided America rallied behind Bush and gave him its support—validated in the 2004 presidential election—in demolishing the Taliban hold on Afghanistan, as well as bringing about regime change in Iraq.
The Americans have secured their homeland from a repeat of 9/11, thus far, by the war Bush unleashed against the contemporary barbarians from the Arab-Muslim world.
This has come with a price, however—much unwarranted criticism of Americans by those in Europe and elsewhere, who remain most exposed and proximate to these barbarians raging against the modern world.
Hence, if there is a message to be squeezed out of the U.S. mid-term election, it might well be that a divided America is no longer willing to assume the sole responsibility for defending the West against today’s barbarians, if Europeans (and Canadians) are going to be merely reluctant allies and shrill critics.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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