Repudiation is called for.
Militarism in Afghanistan won't work, nor will pretensions that economic elites, financiers on Wall Street, are well-intentioned actors.
Speak the truth boldly.
See Krugman today in the Times:
Simon Johnson. In an article in the current issue of The Atlantic, Mr. Johnson, who served as the chief economist at the I.M.F. and is now a professor at M.I.T., declares that America’s current difficulties are 'shockingly reminiscent' of crises in places like Russia and Argentina — including the key role played by crony capitalists.
In America as in the third world, he writes, 'elite business interests — financiers, in the case of the U.S. — played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of
reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive.'
And Juan Cole in Salon:
Obama's dark vision of the overthrow of the Afghanistan government by al-Qaida-linked Taliban or the 'killing' of Pakistan by small tribal groups differs little from the equally apocalyptic and implausible warnings issued by John McCain and Dick Cheney about an 'al-Qaida' victory in Iraq. Ominously, the president's views are contradicted by those of his own secretary of defense. Pashtun tribes in northwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have a long history of dissidence, feuding and rebellion, which is now being branded Talibanism and configured as a dire menace to the Western way of life. Obama has added yet another domino theory to the history of Washington's justifications for massive military interventions in Asia. When a policymaker gets the rationale for action wrong, he is at particular risk of falling into mission creep and stubborn commitment to a doomed and unnecessary enterprise.
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