The Revenge of History
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Seumas Milne. The Revenge of History
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THE REVENGE OF HISTORY
THE BATTLE FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
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Even as the scale of failure became clear in Iraq, Bush and Blair intensified the military campaign in Afghanistan, now hailed as ‘the good war’ and even a ‘war for civilisation’. When British troops were sent to Helmand in 2006, the defence secretary John Reid told parliament he hoped they would leave ‘without a single shot being fired’. Four million rounds later, they were being killed at a faster rate than in Iraq, while Afghan civilians were dying in their thousands from Nato air attacks and the mushrooming conflict with the Taliban. As he wound down the Iraq occupation, Barack Obama would further escalate the Afghan war, spreading it to Pakistan with unrelenting drone attacks that left thousands dead. The war on terror continued to fuel terrorism across the Muslim world and in the states that waged it, while at the same time nurturing Islamophobia in Europe and North America. Afghanistan had become nothing more than a war to save Nato’s credibility.42
By then the crash of 2008 had engulfed the main occupying states, deepening popular pressure for withdrawal from exorbitant and unwinnable wars. The economic crisis not only cut the ground from under the market orthodoxy that had shaped politics for a generation, but rehabilitated state intervention overnight. By the scale of their bailouts to save the banking system, nationalisations and boosts in demand, governments gave an object lesson in what could in fact be done. After decades in which the market had been unchallenged, Keynes and Marx were back in fashion and the political and corporate elites destabilised.43
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