US Presidential elections - The Twisted mind of US democracy
A Rand Corporation report has revealed that 300,000 US veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. A further 320,000 have brain damage of a physical kind. These are startling statistics even in the context of a "major debacle", as the Pentagon's National Defence University calls the Iraq enterprise. A major debacle for the US military, for US foreign policy in the Middle East and for the effort to curtail terrorism; with the cost estimated (by the Noble prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz) to exceed $US3 trillion, a potential economic debacle; and a debacle for Iraq, where somewhere between 100,000 and a million people have died and 2 million have left the country. Rand Corporation did not count how many Iraqis suffer stress disorder or brain damage. We might think that something in the US presidential election would reflect this state of affairs.
The three remaining candidates all claim firm positions on Iraq: John McCain wants to stay, even for 100 years; Hillary Clinton wants to withdraw slowly; Barack Obama wants to start withdrawing brigades at once. Of course, they often mention the war. Yet it would be possible to follow the past month of the campaign and think the war was going tolerably well and that what the candidates thought about it did not matter much.
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