Who Wins if Bush Loses?

An excellent opinion piece by George Moore today in the Telegraph on several levels. Moore points out one of the big problems critics have is Bush's relationship with God and how it is unjustly equated with the 'godly' fanatacism of the radical islamo-facists:

One of the criticisms thrown at George W Bush is that he is a menace because he believes that God is telling him what to do. A moral equivalence is set up, in which Osama bin Laden and Bush are presented as two sides of a fundamentalist coin. On Wednesday, a television programme tried to equate the Muslim Brotherhood, which advocates the violent destruction of all societies that do not conform to sharia law, with the American neo-conservative intellectuals who taught that people should revive their interest in Plato and the civilisation of the ancient Greeks. This is about as accurate as saying that the Nazi party and the Labour Party are the same, because both arose from the discontents of the working classes.

What's going on in people's minds that they have this 'moral equivalance' of terrorists and President Bush? Is that rational?

Moore goes on to delineate the winners of a Bush defeat:

But some rather more fearsome people gain too, such as the man who said of Americans in a document discovered earlier this year "…these are the biggest cowards of the lot, and we ask God to allow us to kill, and detain them, so that we can exchange them with our arrested sheikhs and brothers". He is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and it is probably he who killed Ken Bigley. Such men believe they have already changed the government in Spain; they will claim at once that they have done the same in the United States. They will be right.

So if Bush loses, who else stands to lose:

And who loses? Iraqis about to have real elections of their own for the first time, Afghans who have already voted with more than expected success, Iranians trying to assert their own democracy against its clerical corruptions. And us. What one can see in each twist of the Iraq story - don't send the US Marines into Fallujah, don't send the Black Watch to help the Americans, do give in to Ken Bigley's kidnappers - is exactly what is meant by defeatism, an actual longing to lose. Whatever you think of the war, why would you want that?

Is this a war we can afford to lose by electing John Kerry? If there is one thing Sen. Kerry has not flip-flopped on, it's the way in which he would conduct this war. He will give the UN unprecedented authority to fight our battles; which would spell a sure defeat for America and a sure victory for international terrorism.

Moore concludes his piece:

John Howard, who joined in the war, won again in Australia this month. I think that Tony Blair will do the same. And I suspect, though it is close, that George W Bush will win, too. Like them or not, all three have put themselves on the right side of a battle that has to be won.