The 2004 US presidential election caused hearts to sink everywhere in the world. Time will tell if this is to be another American century, as the Vulcans in Washington intend, or a Chinese century, as some are already predicting, but in the short term at least the re-election of Bush is discouraging for those with hopes that it might be a World or Multilateral century, to say the least. The bloody insurgency in Iraq only strengthened the position of the ‘War President’, who rallied the electorate to ‘stay the course in Iraq’, giving him greater licence to continue his campaign of terror there and by implication elsewhere. At the time of the election the death toll of US soldiers was nearing a thousand with the number injured seven times that. To which toll one must add the haunting fact that of the 500,000 plus US servicemen and women who served in the First Gulf War some 325,000 are now on disability pensions suffering a variety of acute maladies generally attributed to the toxic cocktail of radiation from depleted uranium munitions and other pollutant chemicals from the hundreds of oil fires they were exposed to during their tour of duty. Those who fight in Iraq today can scarcely look forward to a healthier future given that it is effectively twice as irradiated now as it was in 1991.