Slava Bogu! Slava Demokratia!

It is amazing how only 24 hours after a democratic revolution, such as the one that occured across the U.S. last night, the fallout, including the President's contrite news conference and dumping of Rumsfeld already has the feel of inevitability. The country was clearly sick to death of the Bush-Cheney-Rove extreme right agenda that had so clearly blighted hopes for a decent future and thanks to the quirky, highly imperfect, seemingly anachronistic mechanism called democratic elections, finally got a chance to speak its mind and deal the extremists a hard blow. In the wake of that head banging wake up call, even much of the GOP is acknowledging they needed a mid-course correction toward the center, and Bush the great polarizer, is talking as though all he wanted all along was just to bring us together.

The humbling of the extreme right crew, together with their puerile, well funded cheerleaders on right-wing talk radio and Fox News, was deeply satisfying, as was the Democrats' last minute, seemingly impossible capturing of the Senate. What now? Pelosi et al, are correct to be conciliatory, but she and the Democratic leadership will have to be very astute not to get sucked into playing the enabling role for a continued U.S. occupation of Iraq. The invasion was an ill-conceived disaster from the start and needs to end as quickly as possible so as to cease to serve as an incitement causing more and more Muslims to turn to the fundamentalists as the only answer. Bush says failure in Iraq is not an option. But the policy has already failed and chasing illusory victory for years more, killing many thousands more in the process, will only make things very much worse.

For its part, the American Jewish community, which voted overwhelmingly Democrat, should absorb the lessons of the Iraq debacle and break with the predominantly Jewish neo-con crowd; the Wolfowitzs', Pereles, Feiths, etc, who were convinced they could use U.S. power to reorder the Islamic world and ensure an ongoing U.S. hegemony that, incidentally, would be good for Israel and the Jews. Most American Jews now understand that the neocon agenda and the Bush agenda is bad for the Jews--a fundamentalist and zealous Christian America is an unhealthy place in which to raise Jewish kids and acts like the invasion of Iraq only serve to strengthen Iran and other radical Muslim states and increase the threat against Israel. The best hope for Israel is a policy accenting reconciliation and striving to find a path to peace with the Palestinians. Its excrutiatingly hard, but the alternative policy of confrontation that Bush and Sharon=Olmert have followed since 9-11, only leads to more hatred, more killing and more young Muslims becoming suicide bombers.

One hopes that in the coming weeks and months more Russian Jews in the U.S. and Israel will begin to shake the illusion that the existential threat to Israel can best be resolved with a healthy dose of silnaya ruka. The war of civilizations leads only to mutual destruction. I'll continue to do what I can to make that case in the Russian community, and hopefully, America's full-throated repudiation of Bush will cause more and more Russian Jews to begin to rethink the premise that the best thing for the Jews is to make alliance with the extreme right.
Slava demokratia!