By Tom Engelhardt, taken from The Asia Times

On the day that Americans turned out in near record numbers to vote, another record was being set halfway around the world. In Afghanistan, a US Air Force strike wiped out about 40 people in a wedding party. This represented at least the sixth wedding party eradicated by American air power in Afghanistan and Iraq since December 2001.

American planes have, in fact, taken out two brides in the past seven months. And don't try to bury your dead or mark their deaths ceremonially either, because funerals have been hit as well. Mind you, the planes, which have conducted 31% more air strikes in Afghanistan in support of US troops this year, and the missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) now making
almost daily strikes across the border in Pakistan, remain part of George W Bush's air force, but only until January 21, 2009. Then, they - and all the brides and grooms of Afghanistan and in the Pakistani borderlands who care to have something more than the smallest of private weddings - officially become the property of president Barack Obama.

That's a sobering thought. He is, in fact, inheriting from the Bush administration a widening war in the region, as well as an exceedingly tenuous situation in devastated, still thoroughly factionalized, sectarian and increasingly Iranian-influenced Iraq. There, the US is, in actuality, increasingly friendless and less powerful than ever. The last allies from the infamous "coalition of the willing" are now rushing for the door. The South Koreans, Hungarians and Bulgarians - I'll bet you didn't even know the latter two had a few troops left in Iraq - are going home this year; the rump British force in the south will probably be out by next summer.

The Iraqis are beginning to truly go their own way (or, more accurately, ways); and yet, in January, when Obama enters office, there will still be more American troops in Iraq than there were in April 2003 when Baghdad fell. Winning an election with an anti-war label, Obama has promised - kinda - to end the American war there and bring the troops - sorta, mostly - home. But even after his planned 16-month withdrawal of US "combat brigades", which may not be welcomed by his commanders in the field, including former Iraq commander, now Central Command head General David Petraeus, there are still plenty of combative non-combat forces, which will be labeled "residual" and left behind to fight "al-Qaeda".

Then, there are all those "advisors" still there to train Iraqi forces, the guards for the giant bases the Bush administration built in the country, the many thousands of armed private security contractors from companies like Blackwater, and of course, the 1,000 "diplomats" who are to staff the newly opened US Embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone, possibly the largest embassy on the planet. Hmmmm.

And while the new president turns to domestic matters, it's quite possible that significant parts of his foreign policy could be left to the oversight of future vice president Joe Biden who, in case anyone has forgotten, proposed a plan for Iraq back in 2007 so filled with imperial hubris that it still startles. In a Caesarian moment, he recommended that the US - not Iraqis - functionally divide the country into three parts. Although he preferred to call it a "federal system", it was, for all intents and purposes, a de facto partition plan.

If Iraq remains a sorry tale of American destruction and dysfunction without, as yet, a discernable end in sight, Afghanistan may prove Iraq squared. And there, candidate Obama expressed no desire to wind the war down and withdraw American troops. Quite the opposite, during the election campaign he plunked hard for escalation, something the US's North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies are sure not to be too enthusiastic about. According to the Obama plan, many more American troops (if available, itself an open question) are to be poured into the country in what would essentially be a massive "surge" strategy by yet another occupant of the Oval Office. Assumedly, the new Afghan policy would be aided and abetted by those Central Intelligence Agency-run UAVs directed toward Pakistan to hunt down al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and pals, while undoubtedly further destabilizing a shaky ally.

When it comes to rising civilian casualties from US air strikes in their countries, both Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari have already used their congratulatory phone calls to president-elect Obama to plead for an end to the attacks, which produce both a profusion of dead bodies and a profusion of live, vengeful enemies. Both have done the same with the Bush administration, Karzai to the point of tears.

The US military argues that the use of air power is necessary in the face of a spreading, ever-more dangerous Taliban insurgency largely because there are too few boots on the ground. "If we got more boots on the ground, we would not have to rely as much on airstrikes", was the way army Brigadier General Michael Tucker, deputy commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, put it. But rest assured, as the boots multiply on increasingly hostile ground, the military will discover it needs more, not less, air power to back more troops in more trouble.

So, after January 20, expect Obama to take possession of Bush's disastrous Afghan war; and unless he is far more skilled than Alexander the Great, British empire builders and the Russians, his war, too, will continue to rage without ever becoming a raging success.

Finally, president-elect Obama accepted the overall framework of a global "war on terror" during his presidential campaign. This "war" lies at the heart of the Bush administration's fantasy world of war that has set all-too-real expanses of the planet aflame. Its dangers were further highlighted this week by the New York Times, which revealed that secret orders in the spring of 2004 gave the US military "new authority to attack the [al-]Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States".

At least 12 such attacks have been carried out since then by special operations forces on Pakistan, Somalia, most recently Syria, and other unnamed countries. Signed off by former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Bush, and built on recently by current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, these secret orders enshrine the Pentagon's right to ignore international boundaries, or the sovereignty of nations, in an endless global "war" of choice against small, scattered bands of terrorists.

As Inter Press Service reporter Jim Lobe pointed out recently, a "series of interlocking grand bargains" in what the neo-conservatives used to call "the Greater Middle East" or the "arc of instability" might be available to an Obama administration capable of genuinely new thinking (see Two, three, many 'grand bargains'?, Asia Times Online, Nov 3). These, he wrote, would be "backed by the relevant regional players as well as major global powers - aimed at pacifying Afghanistan; integrating Iran into a new regional security structure; promoting reconciliation in Iraq; and launching a credible process to negotiate a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab world".

If, however, Obama accepts a "war on terror" framework, as he already seems to have, as well as those "residual" forces in Iraq, while pumping up the war in Afghanistan, he may quickly find himself playing by Rumsfeld rules, whether or not he revokes those specific orders. In fact, left alone in Washington, backed by the normal national security types, he may soon find himself locked into all sorts of unpalatable situations, as once happened to another Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who opted to escalate an inherited war in Vietnam when what he most wanted to do was focus on domestic policy.

Previews for a political zombie movie
Domestically, it's clear enough that we are about to leave the age of Bush - in tone and policy - but what that leave-taking will consist of is still an open question. This is especially so given a cratering economy and the pot-holed road ahead. It is a moment when Obama has, not surprisingly, begun to emphasize continuity and reassurance alongside his campaign theme of "change we can believe in".

All you had to do was look at that array of former US president Bill Clinton-era economic types and chief executive officers behind Obama at his first news conference to think: been there, done that. The full photo of his economic team that day offered a striking profile of pre-Bush Washington and the Washington Consensus, and so a hint of the Democratic world the new president will walk into on January 20, 2009.

How about former Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, those kings of 1990s globalization, or even the towering former Fed chief from the first Bush era, Paul Volcker? Didn't that have the look of previews for a political zombie movie, a lineup of the undead? As head of the New America Foundation Steve Clemons has been writing recently, the economic team looks suspiciously as if it were preparing for a "Clinton 3.0" moment.

You could scan that gathering and not see a genuine rogue thinker in sight; no off-the-reservation figures who might represent a breath of fresh air and fresh thinking (other than, being hopeful, the president-elect himself). Clemons offers an interesting list of just some obvious names left off stage: "Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, James Galbraith, Leo Hindery, Clyde

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