Crawling from the Wreckage Read Free

the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
    So Obama gets the presidency—and then what? He will probably be able to depend on solid Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress but he will inherit a ravaged economy and two lost wars, so he has little room for expensive domestic reforms or dramatic initiatives abroad. Also, he will not be able to cut bloated U.S. military spending, so there is no early “peace bonus” waiting for him on the fiscal front.
    Like Bill Clinton before him, Obama will ultimately have the job of repairing the huge budget deficit bequeathed to him by his Republican predecessor, but the only step he can take in the short run is to roll back the huge Bush tax cuts for the rich. So what else can the Democrats do in the meantime that doesn’t cost too much?
    Obama has said very little about this during his campaign (and Hillary Clinton, haunted by her failure to reform health care in her husband’s first term as president, has said even less). But the fact that one-sixth of the American population has no access to high-quality medical care is an astonishing failure in a rich democracy, and Obama has travelled enough to see it for the scandal that it is. He may be unconvincing as a gun-loving, truck-driving, fast-food-addicted son of toil, but he is the candidate of the American poor, even if many of the white poor don’t recognize him as such. No single reform would do as much to improve the lives of poor Americans as a fully comprehensive health-care system that is free at the point of delivery. Obama has given us few clues about his intentions but my money says that this will be his first priority in domestic affairs. He might even succeed.
    Well, I got that right. I just never imagined that it would take up a full year of congressional time, while everything else had to wait. Neither did he. But I’m a much happier camper now. Let nobody tell you that the United States doesn’t matter anymore
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2.
AFGHANISTAN: VIETNAM FOR SLOW LEARNERS
    As expected, I found lots of pieces on Afghanistan when I surveyed the five years’ worth of articles for this book. But there weren’t many I could use, because they all said essentially the same few things. You can do endless colour pieces full of human stories: as a private soldier wrote home from another war half a century ago, “Men are never so loving or so lovable as they are in action.” But that doesn’t change from one war or one army to the next, and it doesn’t change the fact that the war will kill or maim many of those soldiers in the end, so we owe it to them to talk about the politics and strategy of the conflict they find themselves in. Unfortunately, there just isn’t a lot to say about the war in Afghanistan at the political and strategic level, except that it is unwinnable and unnecessary
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July 10, 2006

SAME WAR, DIFFERENT PLAYERS
    1839, 1878, 1979, 2001: four foreign invasions of Afghanistan in less than two hundred years. The first two were British, and unashamedly imperialist. The third was Soviet, and the invaders said they were there to defend socialism and help Afghanistan become a modern, prosperous state. The last was American, and the invaders said they were there to bring democracy and help Afghanistan become a modern, prosperous state. But all four invasions were doomed to fail (although the last one still has some time to run).
    When Britain deployed 3,300 troops to Helmand province early last month, then defence secretary John Reid said: “We hope we will leave Afghanistan without firing a single shot.” But six British soldiers have been killed in combat since then, and the new defence secretary, Des Browne, announced on Monday that the British force is being increased by another nine hundred soldiers to cope with “unexpected” resistance.
    The story is the same across southern Afghanistan. The Canadian army has lost six soldiers killed in action in Kandahar province since late April, and may