Being single and a hopeless insomniac I often spend the time, which would have been better spent actually sleeping, listening to audiobooks. More often than not it will be recorded lectures on this and that. And a couple of hours of the history of the Indo-European languages will put even me to sleep.

But once in a while you just feel for something with a bit more of a pulse. So last night I decided to dig out and replay one of the old classics, the 1973 BBC radio play based on Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy (later expanded with further, ever less satisfying, volumes), complete with ancient printer sounds, theremins and old school sci-fi beeps and bops.

Waking up, the story of the fall of the Galactic Empire fresh on my mind, and reading the day's papers, something struck me afresh.

The plot of the Foundation saga is premised on a briliant mathematician, Hari Seldon, living in a galactic empire thousands of years in the future, making a breakthrough in a new branch of statistical science, called Psycho-history, by means of which one can calculate the actions of humans, not as individuals, but as a mass, and thus chart the future course of history.

His equations show that the empire is inevitably headed towards decline, and will eventually fall, ushering in a new dark age lasting thousands of years. No single person can turn the tide, not even a great number of people. The most they can hope for is to sow the seeds of a new order, to shorten the age of barbarism to come.

One can argue how valid Asimov's determinism is, or whether a single person, or a small group of people, at the right place and time, can change the course of history. I'd posit that they can. Though most "great" leaders, rather than creating the tides and waves of society and history, as it might have seemed at the time, were simply riding the crest of that wave towards shore. But what does this have to do with today's papers?

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Democrats and progressives in the US, and just about every member of species Homo Sapiens anywhere else in the world, have breathed a sigh of relief following the US mid-term elections, where the Democratic Party trounced the Republican Party, and by extension the Bush administration.

Most pundits and members of the public interpreted the results to mean that the American public are tired of the slow bleeding sore of the Iraq war, and the never ending loss of men, materials and treasure for, seemingly, little real gain. A strong case could be made that the Democratic majority of the 110th Congress received a mandate, and the commandment, to end the war.

One of the principal figures responsible for putting the war on the electoral agenda, and thus the Democratic victory, was Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania. The decorated former Marine Corps officer, with strong ties to the serving officer class, opened the floor to debate on the war last year, when he said that the goals set for the occupation of Iraq were not achievable with the resources at hand. Few Democrats dared come out in clear opposition to the war effort, for fear of being branded as defeatist. But voters still turned out for the Democrats, in the hope that they would extract the armed forces from the Iraqi quagmire.

Following the victory in the November elections, Murtha made a run for the position of majority leader of the House of Representatives. But today, even with the support of the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, he lost the contest, by a vote of 149 to 86, to Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who has advocated a far more "centrist" and cautious approach to ending American involvement in Iraq.

The point is, the Democratic Party majority in Congress could end the war in Iraq at any time they chose to do so after the turn of the year, by simply cutting off the funding for it, as Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) recently suggested. But, that might be construed as being soft on terror, weak on defense, cutting and running, so of course they won't.

Chances are that the Democratic victory in the mid-term elections won't change the timing of the American pull-out of Iraq by as much as one hour. The troops will leave when their presence there becomes untenable, mainly for economic reasons, and not one second before.

The war in Iraq will drag on. Further conflicts and interventions will be deemed necessary, some of them even justifiably so. Deficits and debts will grow, undermining the economic base, which supports the structure of power. And history will, by and large, stay its course.