But in terms of with regard to afghanistan today, with the laws of the Embassy Compound to have to be escorted income the they set ground rules your ability to rub elbows it is limited but it also means well understand much less for the good and for the bad. If i could have a beer at the embassy bar in kabul that i have to sneak into now, if i could go there regularly, i would have as many shopping details of dysfunction or interesting stories that turn out to be what the government would consider to be a good news story. But that interaction is so limited we dont get much of either one. We are all poor for it. Journalists cover these wars and it is the unfortunate development not just america fatigued but the real economic constraints of the newspaper industry and the media as whole. So it is much more difficult to convey a. That is a good point if i hear psittacine journalist dai here psittacine orthopedic surgeon. This is not a job for a mitschers people understand the context but a
Rajiv has the rare gift of being able to folk coast on shop palm details. He paints a broad pictures. He listens more than he takes. He speaks to generals frankly, but so do the grunts and the other minor characters who drive the plot of any major story. This month marks the tenth anniversary of george w. Bushs invasion of iraq. Nothing written or said better explains the resulting folly than rajivs book, life in the emrad city, the green zone. And yesterday again, rajiv, gives us detail, the new book, Little America. Right now these days, a shortterm sequester to find 80 billion, but over the next decade we have to scrape up three to five trillion, which is just about what we managed to squander on an iraq war that left so many dead and so many more people who hate us. So lets start there. In the front piece of imperial city, he quotes t. E. Lawrence who advised his british superiors in 1917, do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the arabs do it tolerably than you do i