Underreported stories of 2006 you missed

1. The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006 – from Foreign Policy

You saw the stories that dominated the headlines in 2006: the war in Iraq, North Korea’s nuclear tests, and the U.S. midterm elections. But what about the news that remained under the radar? From the Bush administration’s post-Katrina power grab to a growing arms race in Latin America to the new hackable passports, FP delivers the Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006.

10. Hackable Passports

In October, the U.S. State Department began issuing biometric “ePassports” that contain a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag under the back cover. The tiny chip holds the usual passport data, including a digital photo. The motive behind adding the chips is ostensibly good: to combat counterfeiting and illegal immigration.

But a German hacker quickly found a vulnerability. With a laptop and a chip reader he bought for $200, he was able to steal data from an encrypted RFID tag, potentially allowing him to clone an ePassport. And it’s not just Americans who are at risk. Twenty-seven countries (mostly in Europe) that participate in the U.S. Visa Waiver Program are required by U.S. law to issue the new electronic passports to their citizens. The Dutch and British media have already reported major security flaws in the new IDs.

So, what’s a security conscious citizen to do? Again, the answer may come out of Germany. A group of hackers there recommends that people microwave the new passports to destroy the chips. The State Department may want to go back to relying on a paper trail.

9. What’s Worse Than Bird Flu? The Cure.

In 2006, bird flu didn’t become the killer pandemic everyone feared. In fact, there were no confirmed deaths in developed countries from bird flu. But the alarm, stoked by Western media reports, led to an unexpected—and unfortunate—outcome: A rash of abnormal behavior, hallucinations, and even deaths attributed to Tamiflu, the medicine marketed as a key drug capable of fighting the disease. In November, the Canadian health ministry issued a warning on Tamiflu after 10 Canadians taking the drug had died suspiciously. And the U.S. Food and Drug Administration received more than 100 reports of injury and delirium among Tamiflu takers for a 10-month period in 2005 and 2006. That’s nearly as many cases as were logged over the drug’s five-year trial period. For now, the cure seems worse than the disease.

8. Petro Powers Drop the Dollar

If you thought record oil prices this year were a pain in your wallet, there’s more bad news on the horizon. The latest Bank for International Settlements quarterly report, which tracks the investment trends of oil-producing countries, indicates that Russia and OPEC countries are moving their holdings out of dollars and into euros and yen. OPEC cut its holdings in the dollar by more than $5 billion during the first and second quarter of 2006. And Russia now keeps most of its new deposits in euros instead of dollars.

That decrease is swift and significant—and helps to explain why the dollar recently fell to a 20-month low against the euro and a 14-year low against the British pound. Holding dollars while other currencies gain strength means less profit for oil producers. But if they rapidly divest themselves of dollars, it may weaken the currency and push up inflation in the United States. “This new trend may be bigger trouble for the United States than high oil prices and surging Chinese exports,” says Nouriel Roubini, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. If this year’s move away from the dollar is a sign of future thinking by oil producers, the pain felt at the pump may soon be the least of our worries.

7. The Gender Gap Gets Smaller

It was a good year for women in politics. Female heads of state took office in Chile and Liberia, and Hillary Clinton and Ségolène Royal set tongues wagging in Washington and Paris over their own presidential prospects. But it was also a great year for future female leaders, especially those in poor countries.

A report released in February by the Washington-based Population Reference Bureau found that the gender gap in secondary education is closing or has closed in most developing countries. Particularly in Latin America and Asia, girls are attending school at the same rate—or higher—than boys. In 1990 in China, for example, 75 girls attended secondary school for every 100 boys. Today, that figure is 97. In India, girls’ enrollment shot up from 60 percent to 81 percent. Though sub-Saharan Africa lagged behind the rest of the world, it too saw more girls in the classroom.

The shift isn’t due to an unexpected worldwide surge in favor of gender equality. The more likely explanation is that urbanization and economic development has boosted girls’ likelihood of attending school, as has a number of innovative government and private-sector programs. In India, for example, UNICEF credits basic sanitation and hygiene education programs in Alwar with increasing girls’ enrollment by 78 percent over a five-year period. Given the clear link between girls’ education and a society’s economic success, it’s good news everyone can celebrate.

6. Iran and Israel Hold Secret Talks

While Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spent the better part of 2006 denying the Holocaust and threatening to destroy Israel, his country was sitting down with Israeli representatives to settle old debts. The clandestine talks, first reported by Israeli daily Haaretz this month, concern hundreds of millions of dollars allegedly owed to Iran for oil it supplied to Israel before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when Iran severed the two countries’ economic ties dating back to the 1950s. According to the report, negotiations over the debt have been on-again and off-again for nearly two decades, and the two sides met recently in Geneva in an attempt to reach an agreement.

It’s unclear why Israeli and Swiss officials are now willing to confirm that the talks are taking place. However, there is one leading theory: The leak was timed to embarrass Iran by publicizing its cooperation with a country it refuses to recognize. And the strategy may have worked. Iran swiftly and vehemently denied it’s secretly talking to the Jewish state. It just goes to show, money talks.

5. United States Funds the Taliban

The Taliban’s resurgence brought the ongoing war in Afghanistan back onto the front pages in 2006. From record opium production to suicide bombings, the outlook has only grown dimmer in the past 12 months. What you probably didn’t hear is that some of the money the United States is spending to combat the resurgence of the Taliban is winding up in the hands of . . . the Taliban.

As recently as November, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting revealed that villagers in Afghanistan’s war-torn south were handing over U.S. cash meant for reconstruction projects to Taliban fighters, who then use the money to purchase weapons, cell phones, and explosives. As part of an effort to stimulate economic development in the country, the United States had committed $43.5 million for reconstruction as of September. One Canadian officer charged with helping to distribute cash said that “millions” has already gone missing in the five years since coalition troops arrived. Why? According to the report, local mullahs have urged residents to fight the foreign occupation and hand over the money in the hopes of gaining back the security they’ve lost. Others say it’s simple extortion from Taliban thugs. Either way, the United States may inadvertently be aiding the enemy in a fight that will almost certainly become more costly in the year ahead.

4. Russia Fuels Latin American Arms Race

When Costa Rican President Oscar Arias spoke at a September conference sponsored by the Miami Herald , one sentence stood out: “Latin America has begun a new arms race.” He was referring to the sudden uptick in major arms deals in the region, largely between Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and their newest patron, Russia. The deals have left the region flush with shiny new tanks, fighter jets, and custom-built presidential helicopters.

The Latin arms trade is as much about politics as it is weapons. Not long after Brazil announced a deal to purchase roughly $300 million in Russian military equipment, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he would back Brazil’s bid for a seat in the U.N. Security Council. It’s not just Brazil’s military that has a hard time saying nyet to Russian firms. Venezuela inked a more than $1 billion deal in July for Russian jets and helicopters. There’s even talk of Moscow relocating Kalashnikov gun and ammo factories to Venezuela, next door to Colombia’s ammunition-strapped FARC rebels. With Venezuela’s populist anti-American president Hugo Chávez seeking to dominate Latin American politics, U.S. officials are concerned, especially given the United States’ sliding popularity in the region. More dangerous, though, is Latin America’s militarization. More guns and less butter is the last thing the troubled region needs.

3. Bush’s Post-Katrina Power Grab

When U.S. President George W. Bush signed the $532 billion federal defense spending bill in October, there were the usual budgetary turf battles on Capitol Hill. But largely overlooked was a revision of a nearly 200-year-old law to restrict the president’s power during major crises. In December, Congressional Quarterly examined the changes, saying that the new law “takes the cuffs off” federal restraint during emergencies. Rather than limiting the circumstances under which a president may deploy troops to “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy,” the 2006 revision expands them to include “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident.” In other words, it’s now easier for the federal government to send in troops without a governor’s invitation.

Ostensibly, the move aims to streamline bureaucratic inefficiencies that left thousands of New Orleanians stranded last summer. Yet the Insurrection Act that existed when Katrina struck didn’t actually hinder the president’s ability to send federal troops. He simply chose not to.

Critics have called the changes an opening for martial law. Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, one of the few to raise the issue in congress, says that “Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.” Is martial law more likely than before? Perhaps not. But the fact that the revisions were slipped into a defense bill without a national debate gives ammunition to those who argue the administration is still trampling on civil liberties five years after 9/11.

2. China Runs up African Debt

The debt-relief deal struck at last year’s Group of Eight (G8) summit, where rich countries promised to forgive about $40 billion in debts owed by poor countries, was supposed to be a turning point in Africa’s development, a chance to wipe its economic slate clean. Then came China. The rapidly industrializing country has emerged as a top lender to poor African countries, and that has many international development organizations worried that years of campaigning for debt relief will be set back by a new wave of bad loans.

The World Bank estimates that Chinese loans for African infrastructure already total more than $12.5 billion. In November, Chinese President Hu Jintao promised to provide another $5 billion in loans to Africa by 2009. Many of these deals are believed to be similar to commercial loans rather than the low-interest, long-term credits extended by multilateral development banks. It’s hard to know the full extent of the risk because China usually refuses to divulge the terms of the deals. Development experts now fear that aggressive lending by Chinese banks will land Africa back where it started—in the red.

1. India Helps Iran Build the Bomb, While the White House Looks the Other Way

The U.S. government usually takes a hard line against countries that assist Iran with its nuclear program. In 2006 alone, Washington sanctioned firms in Cuba, North Korea, and Russia for making it a little easier for Iran to develop weapons of mass destruction. But, when the proliferator is a close American ally, the United States seems to take a different approach.

Just after the U.S. House of Representatives voted in July to support a plan to provide India with nuclear technology, the Bush administration quietly imposed sanctions on two Indian firms for supplying Tehran with missile parts. Nor was the White House forthcoming with congress about other blots on India’s proliferation record: In the past two years, two other Indian companies have been penalized for allegedly passing chemical weapons information to Iran, and two Indian scientists who ran the state-run nuclear utility were barred from doing business with the U.S. government after they allegedly passed heavy-water nuclear technology to Tehran. Far from scuttling India’s nuclear deal, the United States seems to have rewarded the country by overturning 30 years of nonproliferation policy in its favor.


2. The 2006 You Didn't Hear About -- by Rebecca Solnit/AlterNet

While many of the big stories in 2006 were bad news, there were hundreds of activist successes in 2006 that permanently changed the world.

The big news is usually the bad news, and this year the biggest stories weren't even news -- climate change and the war in Iraq were trouble that had begun well before 2006. But dozens of small stories set another tone -- the tone of that graffiti in Seattle during the shutdown of the World Trade Organization there in 1999: "We are winning" -- not the same as "we have won" and can stop; "we are winning" is a call to action. Activists won dozens of small and not-so-small victories for human rights and the environment in 2006. The fabric of the world is woven out of small gestures; the large ones mostly just rend it and leave more to mend. And the small gestures continue. Here are some of them.

On December 31, 2005, Black Mesa Coal shut down its mine on indigenous land in Arizona because that mine fed all its coal -- as water-depleting slurry pumped 300 miles across the desert -- to the Mojave Power Station that cranked out obscene quantities of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and all manner of other nasty things during the decades of its operation. The mainstream media played it as a jobs story; the alternative media mostly missed what had a decade earlier been a big environmental cause.

In February indigenous leaders, forest activists and logging companies reached a historic deal that protected five million acres outright and limited logging on another 10 million acres of the Great Bear Wilderness in north-coast British Columbia. That's an area more than twice the size of Yellowstone National Park wholly preserved with another four or so Yellowstones protected -- and not just set aside as national parks are, but put under the joint jurisdiction of the First Nations people from the region and of the provincial government.

Indigenous peoples won victories all over the world in 2006, perhaps beginning with the inauguration of labor leader Evo Morales as president of Bolivia on January 22nd, the first indigenous president of the largely indigenous nation since the Spanish invasion almost five centuries before. He made good on his campaign promises to nationalize energy resources and negotiated contracts giving the impoverished nation far higher percentages of profits from natural-gas extraction. In November, the Achuar people of the Peru-Ecuador rainforest blockaded a major oil producer and forced it and the Peruvian government to implement environmental reforms.

Similarly, on July 20th, the Nigerian courts ordered Shell Corporation to pay $1.5 billion to the Ijaw people of the Niger Delta, who had been fighting the oil company for compensation for environmental devastation since 2000. In December, in Botswana, the San people -- sometimes called the Bushmen -- won the court case over their eviction from their homeland. The decision restored their right to live, hunt, and travel on their ancestral lands.

While the Navajo still fight an attempt to site a new power plant on their reservation, there were other victories against the environmental destructiveness of energy production when Congress banned all new oil, gas, and mineral drilling leases on the Rocky Mountain Front region of Montana, one portion of the west chewed up by the Bush-era extraction stampede.

There were domestic victories on other fronts. One major U.S. citizen achievement was the October defeat of attempts to privatize and jack up usage fees on the Internet, despite $200 million in corporate spending on the issue. A new grassroots movement defeated the telecom industry's attempt to take over this major new zone of global communication for its own profit. A minor but sweet victory for independent thinking and bold opposition was Stephen Colbert's April dressing down of the Bush Administration, to the president's face, at the White House Press Corps dinner. The mainstream media, also excoriated by the bold Colbert, ignored the spectacular verbal attack until the alternative media made the story impossible to ignore. Such trajectories -- major stories investigated, exposed and explained by the alternative media until the mainstream can no longer ignore the news -- are one of the reasons why net neutrality matters.

Another grassroots groundswell that mattered was the immigrants' rights marches of last spring, which were launched with the surprising turnout in Los Angeles -- not the easiest city for walking and marching -- of more than a million Latinos and others defiant of crackdowns against immigrants. Similarly huge and passionate demonstrations, many organized by text messaging, Spanish-language radio, and other means, swept the nation. They demonstrated that immigrants were not going to be so easy to bully; the force of their numbers and passion left Republican plans to repress and to demonize immigrants, undocumented and otherwise, in disarray. The marches were jubilant and powerful, one of those no-going-back moments when a group decides never to be a silent victim again. The culminating marches on May Day were the first time in many decades that the U.S. had adequately joined the rest of the world in commemorating this worker's holiday that commemorates the anniversary of the Chicago labor march and rally in 1886.

Mexicans rose up in 2006, and the country seems to be on the brink of revolution, if citizen discontent is any measure. The city of Oaxaca was seized by its citizens and for many months functioned as an autonomous zone akin to the Paris Commune of 1871, until violent repression in November. After the stolen presidential election in the summer, millions of Mexicans took up residence in the streets of the capital to protest the corruption and model an alternative -- the huge occupation of the central zocalo (or plaza) and surrounding area experimented with mass democracy meetings in the open air, while Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the Mexico-City mayor who probably actually won the election, set up a shadow government. The Zapatistas, a dozen years after their appearance on the world stage, continued to play a role in Mexican politics.

The Bush Administration continued its slide into ignominy as even the craven politicians who had waved flags and followed orders during the long patriotic nightmare after 9/11 found it safe and useful to attack the administration. Many Republican candidates declined to appear with the president, and Cheney made his mark this year largely by shooting a major campaign contributor in the face while attempting to shoot birds just released from cages for the purpose -- perhaps an allegory for the voting public. Though some good candidates won election and Congress and the Senate went to the Democrats, the Democrats as a whole will at best endorse victories won elsewhere, which is why the grassroots matter so much.

It was a lousy year to be a Republican president, though not nearly as bad as being a U.S. soldier or an Iraqi citizen. A number of highly visible defections from the war in Iraq made a difference in 2006, notably that of Lieutenant Ehren Watada, a Japanese-American officer from Hawaii who refused to serve in what he called "an illegal and immoral war." Recruiting kids to serve in the military became harder than ever, and recruiters fought back with ever-lowering standards, ballooning bonuses and, according to many sources, packs of lies.

Five central Asian nations -- Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan -- signed a treaty foreswearing nuclear weapons anywhere on their considerable territory in September, further upsetting the Bush Administration which hoped to reserve the option of siting a few nukes there. Donald Rumsfeld was obliged to resign after the 2006 elections, and he may join Henry Kissinger as thugs who don't like to travel abroad -- the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit against the former Secretary of Defense in Germany, on behalf of torture victims from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. This picked up where the lawsuits against Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet -- hounded by justice the last eight years of his life, until his death earlier this month -- left off.

It wasn't such a great year to be a free-trade advocate, either. The United States's most fervent advocate, Thomas Friedman, was outed by independent journalist Norman Solomon as a person so insanely rich -- through marriage into one of the wealthiest families in the country -- that his opinions are deeply contaminated by membership in the ultra-elite that prospers by policies that bankrupt the rest of us. The Free Trade Area of the Americas was already sabotaged by left-wing leaders in South America in 2005; in 2006, Ecuador canceled a contract with Occidental Petroleum, so annoying the Bush Administration that it broke off trade talks with the country. The World Trade Organization continued to falter -- some activists pronounced the once-fearsome organization dead this summer, when the long-floundering Doha round of negotiations fell apart.

Though binational trade agreements -- such as the U.S.-Peru agreement signed earlier this month -- continue to threaten local power, labor and the environment, the failure of the WTO to become the world's economic superpower is evidence of the power of resistance. Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian revolution continued to evolve, most notably with the early December meeting at which South American leaders looked at forming an economic bloc along the lines of the European Union -- an alternative not just to corporate "free trade," but to the colonialism that has long drained the wealth of the region.

Wal-Mart too met with major setbacks, starting with an ever-increasing bad image around the world, thanks to activist exposes. Domestic sales slumped in the US by November; South Korean sales were so dismal that Wal-Mart sold its 16 stores to a Koran discount chain; the world's largest corporation also announced last July that it would pull out of Germany. In January, Maryland legislators overrode the corporation's pressure and their own Republican governor to force Wal-Mart to spend more on healthcare for workers in the state.

Halliburton was so besieged by citizen-opponents in Texas that it held its annual shareholder's meeting in Duncan, Oklahoma, and was even there surrounded by people chanting "shame!" Bechtel, driven to move its headquarters out of San Francisco by frequent protest, withdrew from Iraq in ignominy this year, its contracts canceled and its reputation sullied. The children's hospital in Basra that Bechtel was supposed to build and Laura Bush loudly championed as evidence of American virtue was put "on hold" in July far behind schedule and far over budget.

Late this year, even the European Union struck a blow against the reign of the corporations when it adapted the Reach Regulation, a set of laws that essentially implements the precautionary principle: corporations will have to prove that their chemicals are safe, rather than requiring government agencies to prove they are dangerous. Austria banned Monsanto's genetically engineered canola and genetically modified corn; Romania banned genetically modified soy.

Meanwhile, in the United States, cities, regions, and states continue their withdrawal from the federal scheme of things. The Supreme Court is still out on whether the Environmental Protection Agency can and must, as Massachusetts argues, regulate greenhouse gases, but the September passage of the Global Warming Solutions Act in California is a landmark in states doing what the federales refuse to do: address the obscenely disproportionate American contribution to climate change.

And forest activists didn't just protect the Great Bear Wilderness in British Columbia. They won a huge Canada-based victory over Victoria's Secret, which this month caved in after a long campaign and agreed to use recycled and sustainable paper in its 350 million catalogues per year. The catalogues had been produced from paper made from trees logged in Canada's endangered boreal forests; the activist group ForestEthics led the campaign.

What all these victories add up to is a message that the grim superpowers of militaries and corporations can be resisted, and that the power of small activist groups, of workers, of citizens, of indigenous tribes, of people of conscience matters. 2007 will be a very interesting year.

(Rebecca Solnit is the author of 'Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities')


3. Review of the year: Bush's America
A lame duck, presiding over a lost cause
By Rupert Cornwell/The Independent UK

Three years ago the US brought regime change in Iraq. Now Iraq has returned the favour. George W Bush, to the dismay of much of the world, could remain President of the United States until 20 January 2009. But in last month's mid-term elections, his Republican Party surrendered control of both House and Senate to the Democrats for the first time in a dozen years - the term "lame duck" does scant justice to the extent to which Bush has been diminished. In each case the prime reason was the President's disastrous war.

It was no ordinary defeat on 7 November. In the House, where the Democrats made a net gain of 29 seats, the losses were limited by a decade of redrawing (more politely, gerrymandering) of congressional districts that has greatly increased the number of rock-safe seats for both parties. But psychologically it was a landslide to match 1994, when the Republicans captured a net 52 House seats to sweep the Democrats from power. In the Senate the outcome was even more stunning - the Democrats made a net gain of six seats, larger than even most partisans had dared hope, lifting the party to a 51-49 majority. The elections had been a perfect storm, where domestic incompetence, the stain of corruption and foreign policy failure collided to change the face of US politics, perhaps for many years. First and foremost among the reasons was Iraq.

In 2004 voters gave Bush the benefit of the doubt. This time, though, their patience ran out - at the incompetence and arrogance of power and its refusal to face facts, its inability to take responsibility for the mistakes it made, or to recognise the damage inflicted on the reputation and moral authority of the US in the wider world.

Americans now understand they have been led into a war apparently without end. The Iraq debacle was best summed up by retired general Anthony Zinni, arguably the sharpest strategic thinker produced by the US military in recent times: "We made a mess in the worst possible place we could have made a mess." Barring a miracle, Iraq will surely go down as one of the greatest, even the greatest, foreign policy blunder in the country's history.

America has been here before. Ronald Reagan in 1986, and Bill Clinton in 1994, were sitting presidents whose parties took a mid-term hammering. Both also suffered huge second-term embarrassments: the Iran-Contra affair in the case of Reagan, the Monica Lewinsky scandal for Clinton. But both recovered and left office amid high popularity.

Bush, however, is in a different position. His approval rating is around 35 per cent, with little prospect of improvement. The US is trapped in the no-man's land that is Antonio Gramsci's definition of a crisis, "When the old is dead and the new cannot be born" (or not until that January inauguration day two years hence).

The president who most closely resembles Bush is Lyndon Johnson, who had his own unpopular and ever more obviously unwinnable war. Vietnam prompted LBJ not to run for office again. Johnson made his announcement on 31 March 1968, and within barely seven months the country had a new president. George W Bush will be in the Oval Office until 2009, facing a hostile Congress and no longer in command of even his own party.

In retrospect, two dates stand out. The first is 7 November. Within 24 hours Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary who had been the lightning rod for the war, was forced to resign. Many Republicans claimed that had he gone a month earlier, the Senate at least could have been saved.

Characteristically, Rumsfeld was unyielding to the last. The air positively crackled in the Oval Office as President Bush stood between the outgoing Pentagon chief and the man chosen to replace him, the former CIA director Robert Gates. The fault was not his, Rumsfeld made clear. It was the American people who had so rebuked him at the ballot box - who had failed to understand what the war was about.

The second date was 6 December. Tony Blair had just arrived for a miserable summit and a press conference at which Bush was asked whether he actually understood what was happening in Iraq. More pertinent were two other events that day. In the morning, the congressionally mandated Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel headed by former secretary of state James Baker, went to the White House to deliver its damning verdict on the Iraq mess. Hours later, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Congress overwhelmingly approved Gates as the new Defense Secretary, by 95 votes to two.

The extent to which Iraq policy will change under Gates is as yet unclear. But the change in style was instant. Gone was the brusque, domineering Rumsfeld, unheeding of advice, ever certain he was right. In had come the crafty Gates, lower key and more cerebral, and like Baker an exponent of the "realist" school of foreign policy associated with President Bush the father. Bush the son, who had used the "war on terror" to greatly expand presidential powers and prerogatives, seemed by the year's end to have lost control of events - even inside his own administration.

For along with the "realists" that Bush junior once despised, leaks too have returned to Washington. For his first five years, Bush ran the tightest presidential ship in memory. But the floodgates have opened, first in a series of books, one of which revealed the existence of a secret programme of government eavesdropping without warrants, introduced in the name of the "war on terror". Then within the space of less than a week, The New York Times chalked up a couple of blockbusters. First it obtained a memo by Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, expressing grave doubts about Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister whom the administration effusively backed in public. Then it published a secret memo on the war from Rumsfeld in his final weeks at the Pentagon, whose dismal tone was utterly at variance with his upbeat public statements. In the US as everywhere, a leaking government is a sinking government.

But the Republican meltdown at the polls is not fully explained by either Iraq or the other inadequacies of a President ranked by some historians as the worst ever. This disaster has been a long time in the making - perhaps from the day the swaggering Newt Gingrich led his troops to victory in the Congressional elections of November 1994. The Republicans won then because Democrats had grown corrupt, lazy and out of touch after 40-odd years of power. It took them barely a decade to fall into the same trap.

The 109th Congress, which wrapped up its business on 9 December, must rank among the worst ever. The House of Representatives sat for just 102 days in 2006, fewer even than the "do-nothing Congress" of 1948. Though the Republican Party controlled both the White House and Capitol Hill, it failed in its most elementary constitutional duty by passing only two of the 12 bills funding the federal government in the current fiscal year. Much of its time was spent not on matters of concern to ordinary Americans, such as social security or immigration reform, but on symbolic issues such as the sanctity of heterosexual marriage and flag-burning. Unsurprisingly, Congress' approval rating is now even lower than that of the President. Equally unsurprisingly, the Republicans were blamed.

Then there were the scandals: first and foremost the one centred on the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, he of the Indian tribes rip-off and the all-expenses-paid golfing trips to St Andrews for Republican pals on the Hill. In 2005, the Abramoff connection forced the once-mighty House majority leader Tom DeLay to resign. This year Bob Ney, a senior Ohio congressman, pleaded guilty to influence-peddling charges and faces two years or more in jail when he is sentenced next month.

Separately, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a flamboyant Republican congressman from California and born-again Christian, was jailed for eight years in March for taking over $2m in bribes from defence contractors. For many voters the case summed up the hypocrisy of politics as practiced by the type of Republican who wears religion on his sleeve. That impression was only confirmed by the devastating Mark Foley scandal that broke five weeks before the vote.

Foley was a senior Florida Republican who had made his name on Capitol Hill as an opponent of child pornography and as chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. It then emerged that for years Foley had been an exploiter himself, sending sexually explicit e-mails and instant messages to young men he had known when they were teenage congressional pages. It further emerged that the Republican leadership had been given at least some idea of Foley's predatory behaviour as long ago as 2003.

The scandal deeply upset many Christian conservatives, one of the most important Republican constituencies, and may have kept some away from the polls on 7 November. And if that were not enough, a former Bush official wrote a book alleging, inter alia, that White House aides privately mocked the Christian right, even as they made a fuss of them in public.

Last but not least are the deepening ideological divides within Republican ranks. The party has long been a broad church - but now the side walls are so far apart that the roof is falling in.

Iraq, of course, is a part of the problem. The descent into civil war has deepened the rift between the "realists" and the discredited neo-conservatives who have made the foreign-policy running under Bush. It has also emboldened the isolationist, fortress-America wing of the party that loathes all foreign entanglements. The latter has been on one side of the bitterly fought immigration issue, pitting it against pro-business Republicans (among them President Bush) who favour a normalisation of the process and offering a path to citizenship to millions who have come to the US illegally.

Fiscal conservatives - another traditional Republican constituency - are appalled at the huge trade and budget deficits run by this administration. Libertarians who want the government to confine itself to government were horrified by the way in which the leadership and the White House injected themselves into Terry Schiavo's right-to-die legal case, a blatant act of pandering to the religious right. In 2006 Karl Rove, Bush's erstwhile electoral magician, gambled on getting out the Republican base. But he foundered on the question: which base? By the time voting day arrived, all that was required of Democrats was not to be Republicans.

Maybe voters on 7 November registered their dislike of the one-party control of the executive and legislature that had eroded the checks and balances vital to the US system of government - a failure most notable in the oversight of the Iraq war. In fact, Congress may actually have edged rightward last month. Many of the Republicans who lost were moderates, while some newly elected Democrats are little different from those they defeated. America remains conservative, and could return a Republican Congress in 2008, especially if the new Democrats on Capitol Hill fail to deliver. Far short of the veto-overturning majority of two-thirds in either House or Senate, the incoming speaker Nancy Pelosi will have to strike deals with the President if any significant legislation is to pass.

Equally possibly, however, American politics may be undergoing one of its twice- or three-times-in-a-century shifts. A Republican era of dominance that began in the late 1960s may be drawing to an end. The mid-term results may not have been merely a massive vote of no confidence in the President. They suggest that the once "natural majority" party is being penned back to the south and west. The Democrats not only own the two coasts, but are gaining ground in the Midwest and the fast-growing south-west. If so, then Iraq may have precipitated not just regime change in the US, but a quiet generational political revolution as well.