The results of Tuesday's mid-term elections in the United States suggest that American voters have, by and large, arrived at a place where most of the rest of the world has long been. There is a deep unease with, if not distrust of, the Bush administration.

So, the election - which gave the Democrats the House of Representatives, placed them within a hair's breath of taking the Senate and will, in Nancy Pelosi, deliver to Americans their first female Speaker of the House - was not primarily a vote on community and domestic issues. Rather, it was a referendum on the Bush presidency. And nothing has defined the Bush administration as has the war in Iraq.

It is not surprising, therefore, that among the early casualties of this blitzkrieg by the American vote is Mr. Bush's Secretary of Defence, Donald 'stuff happens' Rumsfeld. Mr. Rumsfeld is seen as the architect of the military strategy in Iraq and as much as Mr. Bush, the face of the war - and its failures.

The cold, hard fact is that the United States faces a dearth of winnable options in Iraq. With nearly 3,000 troops already killed and over 20,000 injured in that war, the casualty figures are slowly, but with certainty, becoming unpalatable to the American public, which is already unhappy with having to pay US$3 billion a day for a war it doesn't want when their social security and health care systems are under stress.

And there is little to show in Iraq for all the cash and loss of American lives, except for an exponentially greater loss of Iraqi lives and a divided country, wracked by sectarian strife and an unacknowledged civil war. Iraq is a broken country, if not a failed Anglo-American project.

Perhaps Americans would have been willing to accept a slow, difficult and even bloody process in Iraq if they believed that they had been led honestly into that conflict, that the war was being waged with competence, and that their country and the world were safer places because of the demise of Saddam Hussein. But claims of the imminent danger posed by Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction morphed, in their absence, into taking on the terrorists on their soil so that they wouldn't have to be engaged in America. But the terrorists, it is being proved, were spawned by the war, rather than the other way around. So Americans believe that they were led into an ideological war, rather than one based on high principles and morality.

Worse, there is a sense that the Iraqi resistance will not be easily defeated and the conflict will hardly be influenced by the execution, when it happens, of Saddam Hussein, for crimes against humanity. Mr. Bush faces extremely difficult circumstances - much of it of his own making - in Iraq, for which voters have punished him.

Ms. Pelosi and other leading Democrats have challenged Mr. Bush for a change of direction in Iraq. The Democratic leadership should, however, be aware that fixing Iraq won't be easy. Indeed, there are many who feel the Americans, having broken it, own it.

There is perhaps an opportunity. With a chastened Mr. Bush and in the absence of Mr. Rumsfeld there is a greater possibility of Americans working cohesively for a solution - and building a global coalition to help.