I think this in the next four years…
International First:
OBL won’t be caught, or if he is he will be executed immediately by whoever catches him (likely Pakistani troops, as our leaders don’t seem to give much of a damn) to prevent him from talking.
Saddam will be tried and executed by an Iraqi court, and become a martyr to the Fundamentalist Cause. (I do love irony, sometimes).
Iraq will continue to be a quagmire, with more and more soliders dying every day. We will gradually phase out our involvement there until around 2007, when the next Republican candidate (Jeb?) is running for President, after which we will ramp up again. Elections will happen in Iraq, but will be a farce as the most popular candidates will be religious extremists whom the US won’t allow to take power.
Our allies, especially the UK, will think long and hard before following us anywhere anymore, and NATO will be effectively destroyed since most of the NATO signatories wouldn’t follow us into a puddle.
Iran will attempt to gain nuclear weapons, and the US will launch some sort of airborne attack against that site. This will come very close to, but narrowly avoid, becoming a war which will only be averted at the last minute by intervention by the UN.
In the US:
There will be a large attack in the US from foreign terrorists connected with Al-Qaeda. It will likely involve a seaport and a large ‘dirty’ bomb, and render that seaport uninhabitable and unusable for quite a long time and do significant economic damage to the area, but result in few outright casualties. The perpetrators of this bombing will be either Iraqi or Saudi in origin, with support from Indonesia and the Phillipines and Islamic fundamentalists in the US. All seaports are wide open to exactly this sort of attack due to this Administration choosing to spend billions on the war in Iraq and not to fund basic seaport security measures proposed by Congress. The Administration will use this as an excuse to gut more civil liberties and spend more money on a useless Missile Shield to protect the US at the cost of allies such as England and Japan from an enemy that doesn’t use missiles.
There not be a draft. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Reserve units will be activated into full-time active duty units, and all current military personnel in both active duty and reserve formations will be subject to stop-loss orders. The inactive reserve will be called up and put into active duty as well.
The deficit will continue to escalate, but not as dramatically as in the first four years if the Republican Congress makes any effort to live up to anything like fiscal conservatism. Other areas of fiscal mismanagement and scandal amongst the Republican Party will cause a backlash against them, and the Democratic Party will attempt to re-create itself as the party of real values and real benefit to the people and likely succeed. The Democratic party will also make overtures to divest itself of the lunatic fringe it has long tried to include. War profiteering scandals will come to light, including Halliburton, and will result in further lost confidence in the Repulican leadership and massive backlash against them.
Gay Marriage amentment will be proposed but not pass. It’s not like the mandate for Bush and Co is strong enough for that, and without coattails to ride on most Congressmen will hesitate to propose something so fundamental as a Constitutional Amendment banning anything.
The environment will take a terrible beating, and many more environmental protection laws will be either gutted or overturned to better provide a sop to heavy industry.
Offshoring wherever possible will become the norm for big businesses, and many more jobs will be lost. The IT and telecomms sector will be particularly hard hit, with many US jobs going overseas to India and China. A further 2 million jobs will be lost, or be recreated in the service industry.
Bush will nominate highly conservative Judges to the SCOTUS, who will not be approved due to the narrow margin of support from the popular mandate of the President. Instead, slightly conservative Justices will be approved instead. Roe v. Wade stays the same, but parental approval is required before abortions, Federal aid money is barred for any nation, state, or program allowing abortion.
Anti-obscenity and family values laws will be passed in record numbers throughout the Red States, later to be overturned by the SCOTUS for Unconstitutionality. But a lot of people will spend time in jail as a result of them. Anti-sodomy laws will come back in many Red states, but again, lots of people will spend time in jail to fight these type of laws.
There will be the same mismangement under Bush’s Executive for the next four years as in the first four, and with the addition of a rubber-stamp Congress for most things, many bad, unenforceable, and objectionable laws (Patriot 3, anyone?) will be passed. This will further alienate the 49% of the populace who didn’t vote for him, and will potentially move many centrists left in response.
The Democrats will win as big in 2008 and 2010 as the Republicans did in 2004, due to backlash for poor management and poor leadership. 2006 will be somewhere in the middle, with limited change.
I also think this for four years - thank God I won’t have to live through as much of it, as I plan on living in England for at least 3 more years, then move to Australia.
