Keith Hudson, Editorial

With an intellectually inadequate President, a ruthless Vice-president and some very nasty senior operatives in the White House who invented evidence to justify Bush taking the country into a war with no ending in sight, today could be an important day. Because, in about eight hours' time, the Grand Jury in Washington might be handing out prosecution indictments to two of the White House staff, Rove and Libby, the one who sustains the President's political activites, the other, who is a fixer to the real American leader, Cheney.

On the other hand, America might lose this opportunity to reform its political life and the rot continues until yet another crisis is reached. This could anything from inflation (in order to pay off its budget debts), to yet more thousands of deaths of civilians in Iraq, to a Middle East finally bursting with hate against America and the West, or to a world-wide recession triggered off by America which now cannot invent or export sufficient consumer goods to maintain a sensible value of the dollar.

If the most powerful nation-state in the world doesn't reform then it might signify the end of the nation-state as a relevant institution for modern times. The whole world -- environmentally, politically, economically -- is being increasingly realised to be one interdependent system in which new forms of governance must evolve in due course.