"Barbed and Brilliant"—Tariq Ali's The Obama Syndrome
Two book reviews in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion contrast the style and substance of Tariq Ali's The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad to veteran US journalist Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars. While Woodward "mumbles, in cotton mouthed grammar" about imperial ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ali
pronounces the US-and-European-installed puppet government in Afghanistan a "bogus construct [that] never had the slightest legitimacy in the country, lacking even a modicum of the narrow but dedicated base the Taliban had enjoyed."
Woodward focuses on the struggles between those walking the corridors of power, while Ali places Obama within the historical trajectory of the imperial presidency, suggesting that "Obama has acted as just another steward of the American empire."
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