Paris, November 13, 2008 – Barack Obama has said that he is not against war, only against stupid wars. One might then reasonably ask if the present war in Afghanistan is not a stupid war?

During the election campaign the president-elect said it was the “right war” (instead of the one in Iraq), and that he would even support opportunistic illegal raids into Pakistan to seize Osama bin Laden, in emulation of that contempt for international law that when displayed by the George W. Bush administration won the United States so much condemnation.

What is this war for? To seize Osama bin Laden and his associates. The American government believes that he and his headquarters are in Pakistan, and presumably has intelligence to support that conclusion -- although it has not been good enough for many months of American air attacks and special forces operations into the badlands of the Pakistani-Afghanistan frontier to succeed in capturing him.

What level of confidence do American officials have that he still is there, despite all the effort to find him? If he is still in Pakistan’s tribal region, and given that he is an intelligent man, why should he stay there, waiting to be bombed or captured? Assuming that he is still alive.

During the Vietnam war, according to Stanley Karnow’s comprehensive history, the American command insisted that there was a large Communist headquarters, COSVN, “Central Office for South Vietnam,” located in the so-called Fishhook region of Cambodia. That was one reason for the Nixon-Kissinger invasion of Cambodia. The combined South Vietnamese and American operation was in part motivated by the goal of finding and destroying this headquarters.

When they found it, according to Karnow, instead of being “the miniature Pentagon imagined by official U.S. spokesmen,” American troops found “a scattering of empty huts, their occupants having fled weeks before.”

What reason is there to think that Osama Bin Laden is less prudent than the Vietnamese? Given six years of warnings that Washington believes he is in the Pakistan tribal territories, and is trying to find him there, would it not be reasonable for him to make other arrangements?

Is it not possible that he and his headquarters would be gone by the time Americans, or their auxiliaries, the reluctant Pakistani army and frontier police, finally arrive? Assuming that they do.

Paris, November 11, 2008 – During a weekend discussion of the world credit crisis by the Trilateral European Group, meeting in Paris, one of a panel of bankers said that the time for recriminations is past; “we all made mistakes, now we must look to the future,” etc. At that, a member who is also a deputy in the French parliament leaped up and demanded the floor. “What am I going to tell the public when in a few months the French unemployment rate has soared, and there are three million people marching in the streets of Paris? That ‘we all made mistakes’? That no one was really responsible?”

The indignation was completely justified. Not only are there guilty men, but many have since compounded their guilt by what they have done with taxpayer money handed over to banks and financial institutions to restore the flow of credit essential to the economy. In the U.S., some have coolly diverted the money to buy up distressed institutions to aggrandize their own organization, profits, and personal perquisites.

In Washington, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson failed to impose conditions on the use of government aid, and only belatedly, under congressional pressure, stipulated that the public should benefit from any eventual profits generated by currently unsalable instruments. Taxpayers should have a share in any turnaround.

When British Prime Minister Gordon Brown introduced his plan to partially nationalize British banks, they were instructed that the money was for business loans to get the economy functioning. The American reluctance to set conditions apparently reflected the assumption that business and financial circles would consider this “socialist” interference with the free markets whose self-inflicted collapse had brought all of this on.

Rigid market ideology is a professional deformation of American bankers and flows through the veins of business itself (hence the furious debate over whether General Motors deserves government rescue from its own managerial incompetence). It also has influenced foreign bankers and business executives who learned their economics according to the doctrines proclaimed by the University of Chicago and Harvard Business School. They went home to attack such heresies as social capitalism and state supervision of finance, so that even Germany today finds some of its banks drowned in the tide of junk financial instruments from America.

Paris, November 6, 2008 – Since the triumph of Barack Obama nearly every medium of news and political comment in the United States and abroad has carried a compendium of “challenges” and dangers facing the new president. Yet when these challenges are examined, they nearly all turn out to be potential opportunities.

So far as they are obstacles, they usually involve efforts by other governments to block the United States from continuing policies of the Bush government meant to manipulate or intimidate them.

The basic Bush policies – defense spending at levels higher than all the rest of the world combined, unilateralism, hostility to the UN and international law, advocacy of “preventive” wars, efforts to dominate the Middle East, constant pressure on Russia and what might be called contingent hostility towards China, opposition to European Union efforts at military cooperation – all have been promoted since the 1990s by nationalist and neo-conservative Republicans acting through the conservative Washington think-tanks.

These reflect the long-term ambitions for economic and military hegemony which animated Bush administration foreign policy. Many of the same people and their followers will try to introduce the same ideas into the foreign policy of the new Obama government. The newly-elected president is a foreign policy novice and will find himself under great pressure to follow Middle Eastern and China and Russia policies inherited from George Bush, even though these are what Barack Obama was elected to change or terminate.

Paris, November 4, 2008 – I write on election day, but because of the transatlantic time difference I do so at about the hour most American polling places on the East Coast have just opened, with the other time zones to follow. Thus the great question of who becomes the 44th American president is known to you reading this, but not to me until early morning tomorrow. The evidence says Barack Obama, but other outcomes remain possible, above all the one that many in the Obama camp have kept raising, that of vote or voting machine tampering in certain swing states.

After the enormous number of new voter registrations, and the unprecedented numbers of early voters during the weekend and when polls opened Tuesday, generally presumed signs of Obama support, serious evidence of voting machine manipulation or vote count fraud would stir loud protest and possible street demonstrations by Obama voters -- no doubt welcomed by Republican militants and Bush administration officials anxious to discredit or if possible reverse as revolutionary an Obama victory.

The striking thing about the campaign platforms of the two candidates has been their totally unrevolutionary spirit. To judge from them, very little tangible change would come from victory by either side. Even a mountainous Democratic victory that gave Obama a filibuster-proof Congressional majority seems likely to give birth only to political mice.

The campaigns have made much noise over issues open to dramatic legislative change. Financing expanded health care generates much heat, but neither Republicans nor Democrats would dream of so daring a step as to take the private insurance companies and their profitable bureaucracies out of the system and go to a single-payer government program, as in Britain and Canada, or the highly successful government plus mutual insurance system in France (considered by the World Health Organization the most successful in the world). By some calculations this could save as much as $350 billion a year to an American health system that at present is simultaneously the most expensive and least effective in the advanced industrial world.

On the environment, Obama offered 80% reduction in harmful emissions by 2050 (over the 1990 level). McCain said 60% reduction between now and 2050, and $300 million to invent a new battery for hybrid or electrical cars, plus oil rigs in the prohibited areas of Alaska. Obama counters with $150 billion for new energy sources and maybe (or maybe not) offshore drillings in Alaska. On immigration, both want “stricter controls.”

Ho Hum! Nothing much in this to set the tumbrels rolling. One issue on which people are passionate is the politics of future supreme court appointments, which formerly was a boring matter of established judicial eminence, but now is totally ideological.

Paris, October 30, 2008 – Henry Kissinger has just published [IHT Oct.29] a curious and revealing review of a new book on the Vietnam war, written by the man who was the research associate for McGeorge Bundy’s projected account of his period in the 1960s as National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Bundy did not live to write his planned book. His research collaborator, Gordon M. Goldstein, has now collected fragments of Bundy’s draft materials and other writings, together with the documentary research he had assembled for their joint book, and turned it into an new account of the Vietnam war as reflected in the papers that crossed the desk of the National Security advisor and the other documents with which Bundy worked. The book is called "Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam” (to be published November 11).

Kissinger’s review is unexpected in its implied sympathy for Goldstein’s work, despite the fact that he describes it as unremittingly hostile to Bundy’s decisions in office. This was the crucial period when the ground was prepared for the eventually huge U.S. military intervention in Indochina that followed, but it deals with events preceding Richard Nixon’s election to the presidency in 1968, when Kissinger became National Security Advisor.

Kissinger draws policy lessons from the book that seem at odds with the policy followed by himself and Richard Nixon in Vietnam, but more to the point today is that they conflict with the policy followed by George W. Bush in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the currently enlarged NATO war in Afghanistan.

In talking about Bundy, Kissinger notes that Bundy was a man of the second world war and had uncritically transferred his convictions, and worse, his strategic conceptions about Communism’s “containment” and the Soviet military threat from the European cold war theater to Southeast Asia, where there were no firm military or political front lines, and where the challenge was to the legitimacy of governments, which was not determined by military power.