Whom will everyone blame when George W. Bush is gone?

Gerard Baker has an interesting column in the London Times wondering whom everyone would blame if a Democrat would be elected president in 2008. Blaming Bush for everything going wrong in the world has been an easy path for Europeans in the past six years. What will they do when they don't have Bush to kick around anymore?

When one group of Muslims explodes bombs underneath the school buses of another group of Muslims in Baghdad or cuts the heads off humanitarian workers in Anbar, blame George Bush. When Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, denounces an imbalanced world and growls about the unpleasantness of democracy in eastern Europe, blame George Bush. When the Earth’s atmosphere gets a little more clogged with the output of power plants in China, India and elsewhere, blame George Bush.

Some day soon, though, this escapism will run into the dead end of reality. In fact, the most compelling case for the American people to elect a Democrat as president next year is that, in the US, leadership in a time of war requires the inclusion of both political parties, and in the rest of the world, people will have to start thinking about what is really the cause of all our woes.

Baker uses the flagging interest among European countries for aiding the war in Afghanistan, the supposedly "good war" to demonstrate that a Democratic president wouldn't get any more support than the despised President Bush.

Does anyone really think the election of President Hillary Clinton will be greeted with a sudden surge of German and French troops to Kabul and Helmand, routing al-Qaeda militants in the name of multilateralism?

President Barack Obama will find that when he wants to make good on his promise to win the war in Afghanistan, EU leaders will be much happier explaining how their new constitution will enlighten the world.

President John Edwards will discover, when he seeks a united front to tackle an enemy that would happily incinerate every European city and its inhabitants tomorrow, that the Europeans would much rather take urgent action to address the risk that global warming will produce a possible 18cm increase in sea levels by 2100.

Whom will everyone blame then?