Synopses & Reviews
“Our country has borne a special burden in global affairs. We have spilled American blood in many countries on multiple continents ... Our cause is just, our resolve unwavering. We will go forward with the confidence that right makes might.” —Barack Obama, West Point, December 1, 2009
What has really changed since Bush left the White House? Very little, argues Tariq Ali, apart from the mood music. The hopes aroused during Obama’s election campaign have rapidly receded—the honeymoon has been short. Following the financial crisis, the “reform” president bailed out Wall Street without getting anything in return. With Democratic Party leaders and representatives mired in the corrupt lobbying system, the plans for reforming the healthcare system lie wrecked on the Senate floor. Abroad, the “war on terror” continues: torture on a daily basis in the horror chamber that is Bagram, Iraq occupied indefinitely, Israel permanently appeased, and more troops to Afghanistan and more drone attacks in Pakistan than under Bush. The fact that Obama has proved incapable of shifting the political terrain even a few inches in a reformist direction will pave the way for a Republican surge and triumph in the not too distant future.
Review
The Obama Syndrome will be a powerful boost to Obama dissenters on the left. --Eric Hobsbawm
Review
"Ali is smart as fire." Ian Epstein
Review
Ali remains an outlier and intellectual bomb-thrower; an urbane, Oxford-educated polemicist.The Obama Syndrome will be a powerful boost to Obama dissenters on the left. --Bob Hoover
Review
The Obama Syndrome documents the collapse of the Myth into a thousand pieces. --Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations
Synopsis
A merciless dissection of Obama’s overseas escalation and domestic retreat.
Synopsis
The author mercilessly dissects Obama's overseas escalation and domestic retreat.
About the Author
Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics—including Pirates of the Caribbean, Bush in Babylon, The Clash of Fundamentalisms and The Obama Syndrome—as well as five novels in his Islam Quintet series and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of the New Left Review and lives in London.