FOUR MORE YEARS!

I wish I could be happy about the results of the just completed national election, but I cannot. Today has been one of the most depressing days of my life. President Bush has won re-election and, apparently with some degree of correctness, now considers that he has a "mandate". I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but I genuinely fear for our country, if, as our President has indicated in his acceptance speech today, the next four years will be more of the same - particularly as regards the war in Iraq.

Like, perhaps, half the citizens of this country, I have been opposed to this war from the start. I believe that this mis-guided attempt to establish a democracy by force is bound to fail - unless we kill far more Iraqi's than Saddam Hussein himself did.

As far as I'm concerned, we are sowing the seeds of our own destruction. There is a Christian saying, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church". In much the same way the blood of the Arabs we kill in Iraq can only spawn a huge angry response in the Arab world. To think that it will promote democracy seems to me ludicrous. How long, how many decades, how many centuries will the Arab world hold us responsible for our slaughter of Arabs in Iraq? And it is a slaughter. There's no real contest. Our military has never doubted that. For every American who dies, Iraqi's die by the dozens, even hundreds.

I have little hope that history will prove me wrong. I think it is far more likely that the "terror" in this world has only begun.