The September 11th attacks occurred in 2001. Four years ago now. In World War II, America mobilised after the Pearl Harbor attacks, and in four years was the leading force in defeating two powerful world powers in Japan and Germany. In four years America went from an isolationist nation with a relatively small military by European standards, to the world's dominant superpower. In the last four years, rather than the advancing of a great nation, we have seen the limits of the policy of empire. Michael Hirsch compares Roosevelt and Bush in the article; "9/11 -- and Counting Four Years In, No Clear Plan" .

Hirsch sees the biggest difference as Bush's lack of planning and ad-hoc manner of pursuing his foreign policy and military aims. From the article;

What Bush failed to note was that it took FDR and Truman precisely 1,347 days, from Dec. 7, 1941, to the surrender of Japan on Aug. 15, 1945, to win WWII, pacify the enemy and largely secure the peace that followed. By comparison, 1,461 days have now passed since that terrible day in 2001. And even now there is no end in sight to the "global war on terror." What is perhaps more unsettling, there is no detailed strategy for winning this war.

Hirsch notes that this war is different to WWII. There were concrete state actors in Germany and Japan in WWII. In this war however, the US has fought two nation-states in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were quick military successes. But this has not translated into secure, stable, democratic nation-states. Iraq seems to be in a constant state of insurgency.

Hirsch also argues that the US policy of reasserting its strength, through unilateralism, or what Keating called American exceptionalism; has become the US projecting weakness. The military has reached its limits in Iraq; American allies are wary of US intentions; the rises in oil prices make the US even more bound to Saudi Arabia; and the US continues to borrow from Asia and Europe to fund its private and public debts.

From the article;

Most disturbing of all, the man who once called himself a "war president" has not formulated a well-thought-out plan for winning this war, either in public or privately within his administration. In place of a strategy, Bush mainly repeats his vague pledge to spread democracy "with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," ....

The Bush Administration and American Republicans are exceptionally focused on politics. They have successfully marginalised the American Democrats by changing how politics is conducted in the US. This has led to American Republican victories in the House, the Senate, the Presidency and ultimately, any wider political appointment including the Supreme Court.

Despite this political and electoral success, there has not been any competence in governance. The constant seeking of political outcomes has destroyed their ability to govern.

Many parties choose the rhetoric of "values" and "Morals" over policy. This is because values and morals are harder to attack, and refute, in the media than concrete policy. This means that political parties now operate in an amorphous political state. Constantly meeting populist political demands, instead of governing from a stance of rigorous, or empirical policy.

This totally disrupts a party's or government's ability to govern well. Even worse, this lack of policy foundation, is often substituted with absolutist ideology. Rather than the ideology informing policy, and then being empirically tested with outcomes, we get the ideology being adhered to despite constant and overwhelming failure.

This has been a description of the Bush Administration in a nutshell. They have thrust poor governance on the US because they see public policy formulation as damaging to their political dominance. Instead they use inflexible ideology as policy, which invariably leads them to inferior outcomes that exacerbates the existing poor governance.

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After the Revolutionary War and the establishment of Congress and President in the United States, party lines hardened between Hamilton's and Adams' Federalists and Jefferson's and Madison's Republicans. In 1801 Thomas Jefferson became the President of the United States, this was to start a twenty-four year Virginian presidential dynasty that ultimately defined the US Republic.

The electors in 1800 were locked in votes between Jefferson and New Yorker, Aaron Burr. Ultimately Alexander Hamilton and John Adams feared, or detested, Burr more than Jefferson and convinced the electoral college to support Jefferson. This became known as the "Bloodless Revolution". There was much partisan antipathy at the time.

At ten in the morning on the fourth of March, 1801 Jefferson declined a coach and instead walked from his boarding house to Capitol hill to be inaugurated. This humbleness was to become a hallmark of the Jeffersonian presidency. He met ministers from Britain in his slippers, he refused to put guests of honour at his tables, prefering more egalitarian adhoc dinner placements.

Fast forward to today. Politicians are surrounded by retinues of Secret Servicemen, bodyguards and excessive security regimes. When minor officials visit areas of the US, security becomes crushing. Already gridlocked New Yorkers and Washingtonians complain heavily when government officials close down whole blocks of the city. Often politicians jam up parts of the city, not for reasons of state, but for fund raisers and other partisan pursuits. Aircraft get delayed at airports, roads are shut down - commerce interrupted.

My wife is currently in Alabama on business. She is sharing a hotel with Condaleeza Rice and Jack Straw. Her taxi could not stop infront of the hotel, and my wife had to enter the hotel from the rear. Security was everywhere. Rice was recently pilloried in the media for being on a shoe shopping spree in New York while Hurricane Katrina lashed at New Orleans. What is the chance the Rice will meet Straw in her slippers, let alone an ordinary citizen like my wife?

Buckleys and none.

Governor of Virginia , Mark Warner, has granted clemency to what would have been the US's one thousandth execution since 1976, when capital punishment was reinstated. Several different Governor's in America have been making odd political decisions in the last year, as attempts to establish them in the public eye, and with their base. Warner will undoubtedly run in the Presidential primaries.

There is a public perception that Governors make better Presidents, and former Senators have a pretty poor success rate when running for President. For some reason, the American Democrats seem to think that southern Democratic Governors are more palatable to both North-Eastern and Southern voters. Warner certainly fits that perception.

Another thing going in Warner's favour is that he is the Democratic Governor, while the House of Delegates and Senate are controlled by the American Republican Party. Warner has managed to get his budget proposals and legislative agenda through the Assembly largely with the co-operation of the Republicans. This is a similar situation any Democratic President will face at the federal level.

Virginia, being the state of Jefferson, is odd in the Governor, Lieutenant-Governor and Attorney-General are all prohibited from running consecutive terms. As a consequence, Mark Warner will be out of a political job in January 2006. But he can run for Governor of Virginia again in 2010 if he wants to. It is more likely a Presidential run is in the offing.

In the early years of American politics it was the Federalists who held power in the new American executive and Congress. The Federalists feared the inflow of new immigrants into America were placing them at a political disadvantage. Since most new immigrants were European and had fled tyrannical governments their politics were Republican.

At the time US Citizenship only had a two year residency requirement. The Federalists in response to this nature of immigration extended the residency requirement to five years and then in 1798 to fourteen years.

Two statutes followed those citizenship changes to halt the enemy within. The Alien Enemies Act and the Alien Friends Act. Under the enemies act citizens of a nation the US was at war at could be locked up or deported. The Friends Act enabled the President to lock up or deport any non-citizen deemed dangerous to the United States.

Stone writes:

Under this legislation, the individual had no right to a hearing, to be informed of the charges against him, or to present evidence on his behalf. The act vested absolute power over such persons in the president.

Those two acts were prior to the Sedition Act of 1798 which is a well known historical piece of legislative tyranny.

It is remarkable that we keep fighting these same battles over and over. The Australian Migration Act vested absolute power in the executive through the Minister - which we saw used in the Haneef instance.

Government keeps granting itself these powers under the auspices of an alien enemy within and then abuses that absolute authority almost immediately. This is why a Bill of Rights and explicit Constitutionalism to enforce limited government are so necessary.

Government quite simply cannot be granted or trusted with those powers in a liberal democracy.

The Sedition Act allowed the government to fine or imprison someone based upon writings that have been against the government in a 'false, scandalous, and malicious' manner. Which is pretty broad. It also required that it be done with the intent of bringing the government into 'contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them ... the hatred of the ... people'.

It was intended as a war time act to protect the nation from internal sabotage but it was quickly used by the Federalists as a political weapon in an election year. Four of the five most prominent Republican newspapers were shut down and their main agitators tried and imprisoned.

Geoffrey R. Stone argues that to understand the Federalist and Republican arguments over the Sedition Act the English law construct of Seditious Libel has to be understood.

Federalist busts from loojie's photostream.

Seditious libel dates back to 1275 and English law. Originally it was intended to stop falsehoods against the King, but by the seventeenth century English judicial practice had extended that to truths about the King as well. Effectively it was illegal to criticize the King in a manner which would bring his rule into disrepute. Laws of this nature end up being enforced arbitrarily at best, selectively at worst and usually for political reasons.

English judicial practice extended the protections from criticism wider than just the King. Stone writes:

Seventeeth-century judges punished as seditious libel any criticism of 'any public man' or of any public 'law or institution whatever'.

This was exceptionally effective of restricting the presses and media of the day.

James Madison refuted this view of seditious libel; arguing that since Republican government was responsible to their constituents it is a right for individuals to be able to freely criticize their government and representatives in public.

Madison believed the sedition action, and seditious liberal, violated the First Amendment. Stone writes:

... because it [sedition act] undermined 'the responsibility of public servants and public measures to the people' and embraced the 'exploded doctrine that the administrators of the Government are masters, and not the servants, of the people'.

Where was the Australian James Madison in the 19thC? Madison would have to be the foremost political scientist of the enlightenment. I cannot think of any that have supplanted him since.

It appears that General Petreaus has pacified Iraq enough that it is dropping of the US political radar. There are other political pressures in America largely related to poor governance, inflation and wages not rising since the 1970s. America has survived bad Presidents before, it will again this time, but some of the external pressures are going to be harder to treat politically.

Global markets have meant that China and India, specifically, but numerous other nations too, are rising out of poverty and have increasing per capita wealth. This has had to be balanced by the loss of sharing in the global wealth by western middle classes. This is not a new process. Since the 1970s wages have been flat and families have adjusted by becoming two income, and more recently cashing out on the equity of their houses to make up for that loss in wage/salary increases.

There is an anxiety as to what the future will bring domestically. Internationally the US is not leaving Iraq anytime soon. Despite Bush's protestations of freedom and democracy the Iraqi Government is a colonial one. The power in Iraq is with the US military. There is not much in the way of national sovereignty there which was not the intent anyway. The US now sits on top of one of the largest oil reserves and in amongst all the other oil pumping countries of the Middle East. It now has a geographic as well as economic and political stake in Middle Eastern oil.