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 Vol. 31 No. 13 · 9 July 2009The Irresistible IllusionRory Stewart: Why Are We in Afghanistan?Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion. [ read more . . . ] Communiste et RastignacChristopher Caldwell: Bernard Kouchner
It is Kouchner, more than anyone, who has eroded the distinction between philanthropy and combat. As a young gastroenterologist and self-described ‘mercenary of emergency medicine’, he helped launch Médecins sans frontières in the early 1970s. He broadcast the plight of the Vietnamese boat people in the late 1970s, advised Mitterrand in the 1980s, roused public indignation over events in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and served as interim governor of Kosovo after Nato’s attack on Serbia . . . Kouchner may not have invented the concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’, but he has been its symbol for decades. [ read more . . . ] DiaryClancy Martin: My Life as a DrunkOn 1 January this year, at about 11 o’clock in the evening, my wife found me, feet kicking, dangling from an improvised rope – a twisted yellow sheet – about a metre off the ground in our bedroom closet. Our two-year-old daughter was in the bed, sleeping, just a few feet away . . . I was at the end of a binge. I was also at the end of three years of secret drinking, of hiding bottles and sneaking away to bars while my wife thought I was living as I had promised her, as a sober man. [ read more . . . ] PlusAt the MoviesMichael Wood on ‘North by Northwest’Short CutsDaniel Finn: Tax HavensLetters from Frank Grace, Nora Crook, Chris Weeks, Mike Mosher, Robert Lumley, Moshé Machover, Nigel Gould-Davies, Peter Green, Harry StopesRegistered subscribers to the print edition of the LRB can also read the following: Tim Parks: Silone and Silone
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