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As World War

As World War  I was ending, having destroyed much of Europe, the  Spanish Flu was killing at least as many people as died in that conflict. In the U.S., President Woodrow Wilson, immobilized by a stroke, refused to recognize the pandemic. His wife, Edith, and adviser Edward House were running the country. Worse, the country was being terrorized by a combination of the red scare and 24 letter bombs that killed two people. Panic was far worse than after the 9/11 attacks, exacerbated by the Sedition and Espionage Acts, which suspended due process and habeas corpus and made it a crime to criticize the government. Tens of thousands of Americans were illegally  detained and many were deported. And the economy was battered by the 1920-21 depression. Comparisons a century apart are imperfect . But clearly, the U.S. Was in a bad way then, probably worse than today. Then what happened?
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The second case Basrur examines is India’s intervention

  The second case Basrur examines is India’s intervention in the Sri Lankan civil war under the auspices of the 1987 Indo-Sri Lankan Accord—and the fiasco that followed. Then-Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi got involved in the conflict, which began in earnest in 1983, in part because India was concerned about Sri Lanka’s growing closeness to the United States and other external powers. Gandhi hoped to expand New Delhi’s influence. Under the terms of the accord, India sent a peacekeeping force intended to disarm the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who were fighting for an independent Tamil state. Basrur shows that the intervention went awry from the outset. The LTTE only reluctantly disarmed and soon after returned to the battlefield, with disastrous consequences for India’s peacekeeping forces. Once again, the policy drift stemmed from Indian domestic politics. The government in Tamil Nadu, an Indian state home to some 60 million Tamils, had misgivings about ...
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