With the first anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq behind us and with the start of what is likely to be the most intense U.S. election campaign in a generation, the matter of how we in Canada — and the rest of the world, as far as that goes — should or should not relate to the United States becomes a prickly bag of tricks.

Beneath the all-consuming sponsorship scandal, the question is eating at the Paul Martin government as it tries to decide whether to go to the polls this spring, when any cosying up to President George Bush is apt to cost some votes it can ill afford.

With Jean Chrétien gone, the Bush administration hoped to find a new friend in Martin, something it desperately needs on the international stage. Martin is eager to please, but like Britain’s Tony Blair, he’s finding that warming up to Bush has its hazards. One of those was underlined last month with the visit of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Without mentioning any names, Annan knocked “unilateralism” as a way of doing things in the world and got a hearty round of applause from Liberal MPs.

The real hazard, however, is from Canadian voters, where the antipathy is obvious. Even people I always considered hawks on questions like Iraq seem to consider Bush a phony warrior, a little cowboy with a too-big hat trying to pick fights. As Maclean’s magazine pointed out in its “Hope you lose, eh?” issue, only 15 per cent of Canadians would vote for Bush if they had the chance.

The White House is apparently annoyed that Martin took awhile to decide whether to make a trip there his next big international move. Some Liberals worried that this would just make Martin look like he’s “sucking up” and maybe bring attention to the wrong thing — like Canadian involvement in the controversial anti-missile system.

The Martin cabinet is split on this. Some want to cosy up and risk the bad “optics” in the cause of improving relations. Others, the wiser ones I would say, want to do what the rest of the world is doing: keep their mouths shut and not do anything until the votes are counted in the U.S. election next November.

I’ve been wondering for some time how the issue of what the world thinks would make its way to the U.S. campaign. It jumped in right away, with Democratic contender John Kerry saying foreign leaders have been telling him they’d like to see Bush out, and Bush hissing at Kerry’s “foreign friends.”

“Foreign friends” are not the only problem for Bush, however. The latest polls show him trailing Kerry.

When the Iraq war broke out, my belief was that Bush could never be re-elected on that basis alone. Going to war is a serious business. Going to war under false pretenses, with soldiers coming home dead in a cause that could have been avoided, even moreso. The U.S. media, which bought the propaganda about “weapons of mass destruction” for the first nine months — God knows why — are now furious at being lied to, and so are increasing numbers of U.S. citizens.

Whatever incidental benefits there are for invading Iraq (getting rid of Saddam, Libya renouncing nuclear weapons), the situation there is deteriorating and will only get worse if the Americans pull back. But that’s only one powder keg. There’s the half-trillion-dollar deficit, the tax cuts to the rich, the increasing oil prices that will likely accentuate the administration’s retrograde policies on the environment, growing anger over the price of medical care, the excesses of the Patriot Act and — perhaps the nail in the coffin, depending on whether it has really turned around — the “jobless recovery.” Plus, of course, little things like the panel of scientists, including some with Republican party links, who denounced the Bush administration for packing regulatory agencies, like those dealing with food safety, with its corporate friends.

So, I have some advice. For the usual critics: Spare me the accusation that disapproving of George Bush amounts to anti-Americanism and “feeling smug.” And for Paul Martin: If you absolutely have to go to Washington, while there, just mumble platitudes and don’t sign anything before the verdict is in on George W. Bush.