The big prize the re-opening of the road to the Kajaki dam to refurbish its power station remains elusive.The British army had hoped to redeem itself after the fiasco of the unpopular war in Iraq by taking on the "good" fight in Afghanistan.
But, since the conferring of the Nobel, and since the fiasco of the current Iraq war has borne out some of Pinter's dire warnings, the tabloid teasing has diminished, though not Pinter's attitude toward it.
But Shenker has traced those fault-lines much farther back in history, to the uprising of Colonel Urabi in 1881, when the British invaded to keep the Egyptian viceroy in place, and to the fiasco of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, after which Nasser insisted that citizens should allow the state to know best.
There is still time to show that we've learned something from the fiasco of pre-Iraq war journalism, when a lack of aggressive reporting and a kowtowing to authority made us a co-conspirator in one major step into the abyss, when we launched a "pre-emptive war" against a nation not capable of attacking us.
Fiasco said that the war had been misguided since it had strayed from its original aims.
But so long as the left is deemed a credible interpreter of the war and other Bush fiascos, its opposition to Clinton has resonance beyond the confines of "progressive" politics and the blogosphere.
The sections of this book dealing with 9/11, the war in Iraq and the prosecution of the war on terror retrace a lot of ground covered by the important work of other journalists, most notably Thomas Ricks, author of the book "Fiasco"; Bob Woodward of The Washington Post; and Jane Mayer, Seymour M. Hersh and George Packer of The New Yorker.
Some Australian commanders draw comparisons with the fiasco of the British-led assault (and later retreat) at Gallipoli in the first world war.
