Edward Seaga, Contributor

It happened to Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam; It happened to Jimmy Carter in Iran; and now it has happened to George Bush in Iraq.

All three American presidents saw their electoral base wither away from wars and confrontations they could not win in the East.

In all cases, the American public decided that their efforts were futile and called for their governments to find another course. In all cases, there was great embarrassment to the most powerful nation on earth instigated by minor powers.

The embarrassing reprimand given by the American people to their President, George Bush, in the mid-term Congressional elections this past week, has only served to publicly demonstrate a weakening of resolve by the American people to continue a futile war. In American baseball, three times and you are out, meaning no further chances.

This in turn will no doubt encourage Iran and North Korea to rattle their nuclear swords without fear of American retaliation. Whether this could lead to a dangerous escalation or even a demonstration of nuclear power by these two renegade nations is hard to tell. But what is certain, is that the United States has no more pre-emptive cards to play as the American people have now decisively drawn a line. Some other major powers more capable of credible diplomatic action will have to fill the breach, if the dialogue is to continue.

A super power on which the world depends for stabilisation, cannot afford to lose credibility and authority. Weakening its own hand is an invitation to nuclear proliferation by those countries seeking to establish mutual deterrence against prospective threats to their sovereignty. Therein lies the danger of a careless or reckless foreign policy.

Gridlock

The major fallout of the mid-term Congressional election is not only the embarrassment for President George Bush who, having lost control of the House of Representatives and the Senate to the Democrats, must now face the obstacle course of trying to govern the country with "gridlock'.

The American system works on the basis of a structured set of checks and balances in which the Congress cannot pass any laws without approval of the president and the president cannot spend one dollar without the approval of the Congress.

If the presidency and the Congress are controlled by different political parties, 'gridlock' follows when the Congress blocks the President or the President blocks the Congress so that legislation or funding is stalemated. This is now the bleak prospect of the American Government. But presidents in the past have had to face this situation. President Clinton, a democrat, had repeatedly agreed to a path of compromise in dealing with the Newt Gingrich-led Republican Congress in 1994. So too will George Bush, which although humbling for him, is not a bad situation for the American people, as compromises are necessary to deter continuation on a reckless path.

The other major embarrassment of the Bush administration in pursuing the Iraq war is the loss by resignation of the warlord strategist himself, Donald Rumsfeld, who resigned his position as Secretary of Defense after misleading his cabinet colleagues into jumping into the pool without first checking if there was water.

His insistence that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq led to an unnecessary war, unless this was merely a smoke screen to hide the intent to replace Saddam Hussein with a compliant government which would allow Iraq oil to be under control elsewhere. It is strange that nobody has tested this hypothesis to determine whether it turned out that oil was the prime objective.

Maybe a greater lesson can be learned from this. Certain types of wars cannot be successful no matter how sophisticated the weaponry, as long as the enemy is an unseen guerilla, or an unknown saboteur or an unexpected suicide squad.

Big nations, even if they have smart bombs that can accurately pinpoint and knock a cigarette from the lips of a man 1,000 miles away, cannot cope with unconventional warfare.

Even if they flattened suspect city blocks or used agent orange to defoliate entire hills of hideouts, they cannot cope with the disruptive forces of resistance of a determined people. The lesson to be learned is a new awakening: Might is not always right; it may win the battle but not the war.

Edward Seaga is a former Prime Minister. He is now a Distinguished Fellow at the University of the West Indies. Email: odf@uwimona.edu.jm.