Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

[svinayak]

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997
by Piers Brendon (Author)

# Hardcover: 816 pages
# Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (October 28, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0307268292
# ISBN-13: 978-0307268297

Unlike Americans, who never considered themselves imperialists, the British took their imperial duties seriously. The sons and daughters of empire saw themselves as present-day Romans. They were steeped in the classics, they learned the languages of their subject peoples, and they prepared to spend many years abroad in the service of the Crown. Brendon makes the case (as did Niall Ferguson in Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire) that they saw themselves on a civilizing mission, that their empire - unlike Rome's - was a liberal empire. The British Empire would be a caretaker government until the locals were deemed capable of self-government. The conflicting goals of developing self-government and maintaining loyalty to the Crown manifest themselves often during this period in the form of uprisings and rebellions.

The story begins with the surrender of Cornwallis to Washington at Yorktown in 1781 and ends with the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Ironically, the British thought that their empire had started to decline with the loss of the colonies in America, instead their most glorious - or most infamous - days were still ahead of them. After the Napoleonic Wars, the other European powers were greatly weakened. For the British the years from 1815 to 1914 were indeed the British Century. The Empire reached its apex during the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897. It was an Empire on which the sun never set, consisting of a quarter of the world's population and habitable land.

Being an inherently contradictory enterprise, liberal empire naturally had its seamy side. Brendon does not shy away from recounting the exploitation, racism, brutality, and the massacres that occurred. There was the Indian Rebellion, the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the uprising in Ceylon in 1818, to name a few of the most brutal. In other words, Brendon presents enough evidence of violence and tragedy in this book to disabuse anyone of the merits of trying to impose a liberal empire. The question of which side was civilized and which side was savage comes to mind often.

That being said, Brendon paints some memorable portraits of the larger-than-life characters that animated the Empire. He seems especially fond of the Victorians in all their excesses. There were the arch-imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes, Lord Cromer, Kitchener, HM Stanley (and Dr Livingstone, I presume) with their outsized views of themselves. There were also colorful literati such as Rudyard Kipling, Richard Burton, and Joseph Conrad who were great travelers, as well as great writers.

This book is well worth reading as the endgame of the British empire is still unraveling today. Many of ongoing conflicts being played out today in Pakistan, India, Iraq, Isreal, Palestine, etc. were to some degree set in motion when the British forces withdrew from those areas. The British Empire - like the Roman - still casts a long shadow.


Piers Brendon has written a masterpiece on a very important subject, namely:why nations abhor occupation throughout history.To quote Edward Gibbon who said that "there is nothing more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in oppposition to their inclination and interest"-words which also sum up Brendon's argumentations about the British Empire's failure regarding its attempt to subjugate a quarter of the world.
The thesis of the author is simple:from its inception, the Brits were doomed to finish- sooner or later- their brutal occupation on hundreds of millions.True, they were not alone;other countries such as France, Spain, Portugal, Holland have also experimented with oppressing others in the name of white man's (supposed)civilization.The will to force and enforce their mentality upon others is not something new :it had its origins in ancient history via the Roman Empire, which crumbled after a thousand years.
The British thought that by imposing their manners, language, education and culture on other peoples they would succeed where others had failed.They were excruciatingly wrong.Not only were they mocked, spit upon,underestimated,despised,but they were also ridiculed and brought to farcical situations.
Read this wonderful book and will will enjoy each sentence and page of it. Brendon is extremely skilled with words, and his opus has plenty of vignettes ,metaphors, anecdotes and lots of humour.Add all these to his vivid language and well- structured chapters containing depictions of folly and decadence, irony and devastation and will immediately want to re-read this superb piece of history.
Brendon is describing the atrocities perpetrated by the British in many instances, such as the Amritsar butchery- all this in the name of progress and Western ideals.His twenty-two chapters are treated both chronologically and are divided thematically by the respective countries where the British had ruled.
It is a pity that the editor did not include some maps showing the inexperienced reader where many exotic places are to be found.
The only conclusion the reader comes after reading this book is that occupation of others is a crime against humanity-no matter where, when and how.The human race has always aspired for freedom and there was not, is not,and will never be a force in history to alter this.
In short: this book will be the ultimate reference source, the alpha and omega of the decline and fall of the British Empire for years to come.
This is a masterpiece with thousands of eccentricities and odd fellows swimming throughout its pages.Enjoy!

The message of Piers Brendon's magnificent history of the British Empire is that its fall was inevitable and that that is the fate of all other empires, past and future. Because empires are founded on brutality and illegitimacy, says Brendon, their fault lines in the end prove too great. Brendon starts his account of the British Empire's fall with defeat at Yorktown in the American War of Independence - more than a century before the Empire reached its geographical apogee - because it was in America that the trust between Britain and its colonial peoples was first undermined. He carries on through the watershed of the 1857 Indian Mutiny and the 19th-century colonisation of Africa. The First World War badly shook the edifice, the Second World War sent it crashing down: in the two decades following 1945 Britain went from an empire of 700m people to one with very few subjects indeed. Something of Brendon's ambition can be seen in his Gibbon-echoing title and it's not hubris: this is a wonderful piece of narrative history.


Somewhere in the celestial academy where such matters are decreed, it was long since decided that the Roman Empire was the model for all its Western successors. Russia's czars borrowed their title from the Caesars and designated Moscow as a Third Rome (Constantinople being the second). Germany's kaisers donned the same robes, as 19th-century Berlin evolved into a facsimile of classical Rome. The Roman shadow is even more pervasive in Washington, with its many-pillared temples and equestrian warriors, its senators on Capitol Hill reciting sonorous Latinisms (quorum, sine die, casus belli, to the point that weary auditors sometimes murmur ad nauseam). Yet nobody has surpassed the British in their fixation with the empire to which their island was once a barbarous lesser appendage. Their monarchs are profiled on coins as if they were Caesars, and for generations the image of Britannia, armed with spear, defended the copper penny. Small wonder their fascination with Edward Gibbon's magisterial History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Among the merits of Piers Brendon's splendid work -- which the author stresses is not meant to rival its forebear -- is its persuasive demonstration that Britons have repeatedly searched for omens in the pages of Gibbon. Was it only chance, pessimists wondered, that the first volume of Decline and Fall appeared in the revolutionary year 1776, and that the fifth and final one reached readers in 1787, heralding the imminent and ignoble British surrender at Yorktown? Humiliated by ragged American rebels, some "almost barefoot," British officers behaved there like "whipped schoolboys" (as Brendon relates), while their commander, Gen. Charles Cornwallis, abjectly pleaded illness to avoid showing up. As former colonials watched in stony silence, a British military band played a dirge titled "The World Turned Upside Down." To be sure, in succeeding decades the world turned right side up for Great Britain. By conquest and/or cash, the East India Company devoured much of India (partly under Cornwallis as governor-general). British forces reached deep into the Pacific to humble the Chinese, seize Australia and New Zealand, and subdue Malaya. In the Mediterranean, having crucially secured Gilbraltar, Britain absorbed Malta, Corfu and Cyprus. Imperial strategists wisely heeded the lessons of Yorktown and pragmatically conceded substantial self-rule to Canada and other white-settler dominions. In an 1875 coup, the British acquired control of the French-built Suez Canal and, to protect it, invaded and occupied Egypt in 1882 -- the prelude to a thrust deep into Africa that inspired dreams of British dominance from Cape to Cairo. By the time Queen Victoria celebrated her diamond jubilee in 1897, her overseas realm was the largest known to history, encompassing nearly a fourth of the world's population and its habitable lands. In a final spurt after World War I, much of the Middle East (and its oil) also fell to Britain, as did entire slabs of formerly German-ruled Africa; thus at its territorial peak, the empire was seven times bigger than Rome's. And yet . . . and yet, in half a century, a mere wink in historical time, the great empire was but a memory, as foreshadowed by Gibbon. Once India attained its independence in 1947, nearly every other colony that mattered followed suit. Such is the story graphically narrated by Brendon, a Cambridge University scholar and former keeper of the Churchill archives. His book is in no sense an apologia; it is history with the nasty bits left in. Not one massacre, civil war, famine, racist outrage, covert trick or egregious human-rights abuse is passed over. His chronicle thus serves as a useful counterpoint to the generally upbeat accounts of Britain's imperial era, notably Harvard professor Niall Ferguson's well-written yet almost nostalgic encomiums. Brendon supplements but does not supplant Jan Morris's irresistibly readable Pax Britannica trilogy, published in the 1970s, the critical yet fair-minded standard by which new entries should be judged. This Decline And Fall is strongest in its details; the author seemingly has scoured every available memoir for devastating quips, nicknames, anecdotes, rumors and shrewd assessments. Consider his description of Prime Minister Anthony Eden, prime mover of the 1956 Suez fiasco: "The son of a half-mad baronet and an exceedingly beautiful woman, Eden was said to be a bit of both. He veered between consuming vanity and crippling self-doubt. . . . After succeeding the octogenarian Churchill in April 1955, he writhed at charges that he was inclined to dither and scuttle, that he was incapable of administering the smack of firm government. One journalist wrote that when he made the emphatic gesture of punching his fist into the palm of his hand, no sound was heard. Another said that his words of command had all the dynamism of a radio 'talk on the place of the potato in British folklore.' " One wishes that Brendon had more clearly spelled out the implications of the empire's fall for Americans. As he stresses, it was not simply a war-weakened economy that sped the empire's demise after 1945: "At its heart was a betrayal of the civilized values which the British claimed to espouse," an increasing reliance on coercion even as the empire's paladins extolled rule of law and fair play. This has an obvious resonance for Americans who believe they are on a providential mission to lead and reform an incorrigible world. The British, too, were convinced of their exceptional gift of governance, with a hint of divine approbation. And, as detailed in these pages, there were indeed mitigating benefits for the ruled. But white dominions aside, the final exit was commonly messy and often tragic. In India/Pakistan, Malaya, Ceylon, Singapore, Burma, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Cyprus, Aden, Kenya, Uganda, Rhodesia, Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria and Ireland, the end of British rule proved a prelude to civil strife, violent partition, military coups, autocracy and virulent racism. This happened to an imperial power whose sons and daughters willingly settled overseas, learned local languages and endured disease on behalf of a shared creed. Brendon's account, especially of the Middle East, provides a cautionary text for a new administration that will inherit autocratic allies, penal colonies, reliance on coercive air power, and pervasive cynicism about America's declared global aims.

[svinayak]

The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror (Hardcover)


# Hardcover: 416 pages
# Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First Edition first Printing edition (January 28, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 019514824X
# ISBN-13: 978-0195148244

bombing on Wall Street that happened in 1920. I had heard about the bombing at Black Tom Island in New York Harbor in 1916 during World War I but had never heard of a peacetime bombing on Wall Street. The Day Wall Street Exploded taught me not only about the bombing itself but also about terrorism in the United States that occurred in the late 1800's that I never knew existed. It also gave me a great sense of the conflict between unions and capitalists, communists and members of the United States Government and anarchists and every government.

This book is well footnoted so the author clearly has done her homework. This is not a brief look into the subject but an exhaustive look at terrorism before the bombing, the bombing itself, the search for the culprits and the world which allowed the bombing to occur. Living just outside New York City I remember what it was like after the September 11 bombing. I remember the concern that something could happen so near. I remember the added security and the desire to find the masterminds behind the bombing.

The reaction to people to the September 16, 1920 Wall Street bombing was no different. An appendix at the end of the book lists the names, ages and occupations of the 38 men and women who died in the bombing. Despite its' much smaller scale innocents were killed (including students and secretaries and messengers and grocery clerks), people were amazed a bombing could occur on Wall Street and kill people for no real reason. People wanted to find those who were responsible.

The search was not perfect and some investigators had their own agenda in identifying the culprits. Some politicians used the bombing for political gain. Others were only interested in finding the culprits and were true patriots. America survived the bombing, people were not afraid and the nation became even stronger. Some things never change.

The author takes on a lot in this book. She is writing about a complex investigation that occurred some 90 years ago and attempting to give the reader a sense of the times, which is not easy considering the period in American history. She succeeds. While the author gets into some pretty specific details the books flows well. It took me a number of days to read because to the amount of information she includes and the detailed footnoting but I would not have wanted her to do otherwise. The information is necessary to tell the whole story.

If you are interested in this time period this is a great book. If you want to see that people have not changed much in 80 years when it comes to reacting to terrorism read this book.

For me the names, occupations and ages of people killed by terrorism some 90-year's ago looks much the same as it does today. After reading the book and reading the names I felt sorry for those killed by terrorists so long ago. The next time I visit Wall Street I will pay my respects to those who died as senselessly as those who died on September 11.

"As it grew, New York had become not a melting pot but a city of extremes: the capital of capitalism and of radicalism, of wealth and poverty, of high-minded reform and pragmatic enterprise, of the war effort and the antiwar crusade. Its very success as a magnet for the rich as well as the poor, for left as well as right, made it a city of frequent discord, a place where the conflicts of the rest of the nation--indeed of much of the world--were compressed into a few square miles." This quotation, lifted from page 21 of Beverly Gage's compelling new book "The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America In Its First Age of Terror" seems to capture precisely what was happening in New York City in the year 1920. On September 16th of that year an explosion took place at high noon in the heart of Wall Street right across the street from the Morgan Bank. The results were devasting. Thirty nine people were killed that day and hundreds more injured. The tiny 100 bed hospital that served the area was ill-prepared for the casualties. Prior to the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995 it was the deadliest terrorist attack in American history and yet very few Americans have ever even heard of it. "The Day Wall Street Exploded" explores what was taking place in our country at that juncture in our history and attempts to determine who might have been responsible for this heinous act. It is compelling reading.
Now in order to help her readers to fully comprehend the environment in which these events took place Beverly Gage opens "The Day Wall Street Exploded" with an extensive history of radical thought in America. You will meet many of the prominent radical activists of the day including Big Bill Hayward, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Eugene Debs and Luigi Galleani to name but a few. Not all radicals were advocating the same ideas. There were socialists, communists and anarchists. They had come to America from countries like Germany, Italy, Russia and France. What they all shared in common was a hatred for industrialists and for the money men on Wall Street. Given the tenor of the times it is remarkable that a lot more violence did not occur during this extremely volatile period. But make no mistake, there had been violence. The famous Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886 had started out as a rally in support of striking workers. Someone threw a bomb into the crowd and eight policemen and an undetermined number of civilians were killed. Beverly Gage also discusses other significant terrorist incidents including the McNamara Affair and the May Day bomb conspiracy which had targeted Jack Morgan and dozens of other businessmen and politicians. Finally, based on thousands of pages of Bureau of Investigation reports "The Day Wall Street Exploded" traces our governments four year hunt for the perpetrators of Wall Street bombing. You will be introduced to the public officials who led the investigation and learn of some of the highly questionable tactics they employed to try to get a break in the case.
I found "The Day That Wall Street Exploded" to be an exceptionally well written book. Meticulously documented, Beverly Gage leaves no stone unturned in her effort to figure out just what went down on that long ago September afternoon. While this is a "must read" for history buffs it is also a book that general audiences should enjoy as well. Highly recommended!

Just after noon on September 16, 1920, as hundreds of workers poured onto Wall Street for their lunchtime break, a horse-drawn cart packed with dynamite exploded in a spray of metal and fire, turning the busiest corner of the financial center into a war zone. Thirty-nine people died and hundreds more lay wounded, making the Wall Street explosion the worst terrorist attack to that point in U.S. history. In The Day Wall Street Exploded, Beverly Gage tells the story of that once infamous but now largely forgotten event.

[svinayak]

The Corporation: Russia and the KGB in the Age of President Putin
by Yuri Felshtinsky (Author), Vladimir Pribylovsky (Author)


# Hardcover: 537 pages
# Publisher: Encounter Books; 1 edition (February 25, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1594032467
# ISBN-13: 978-1594032462

Felshtinsky's, The Corporation, brings forth the truths of Putin's reign and the team of FSB agents that serve him loyally. This book illustrates Putin as representing a completely new phenomenon, never before encountered by mankind. Suspected of numerous murders throughout his life, including Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya, Vladimir Putin has continually kept himself untouched by authorities. And even now as he leaves office, his strong hold on Russia continues on to the Prime Minister's seat.

Putin's role was that of a time-serving nonentity. In Soviet times, he was pushing papers around in KGB offices and conducting surveillance of dissidents. Then he stayed in East Germany, not as a spy, but as an emissary of the secret police in that part of the Soviet empire, where 'he oversaw the conduct of Soviet students in East Germany' and 'investigated anti-communist acts of protest'.

He was called back to the USSR and assigned to keep an eye on the then mayor of St Petersburg. As deputy mayor, he was deeply involved in organised crime, including the international drug trade. Then, a lucky pawn in the games of KGB clans, he was transferred to Moscow and became a convenient candidate as Yeltsin's successor. It was pure coincidence that the KGB assignment to pose as 'Russia's strongman' went to him.

[svinayak]

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
by Niall Ferguson (Author)

# Hardcover: 432 pages
# Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The; 1 edition (November 13, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1594201927
# ISBN-13: 978-1594201929

Big money is intoxicating. During the great bubble of the late 1990s, I escorted one of the newly really rich to be interviewed at CNN, where I headed the financial network. "I just made $400 million today," he boomed, taking the stairs two at a time. The air around him seemed charged with electric good fortune. Several years later, I saw him again. He was several billion dollars less wealthy. He seemed kind, more thoughtful, a touch fragile. (There are none of us so weak we cannot bear our friends' misfortunes, as the acerbic French epigrammist has it.) The Really Rich man had become merely rich, and his pain seemed palpable. What would it be like, I wondered, to wake up thinking: I just lost $400 million yesterday? The curses and the blessings, the seductions and the traps of money give Niall Ferguson the most redolent of subjects for The Ascent of Money, his excellent, just-in-time guide to the history of finance and financial crisis. A lively writer (author of Empire and The War of the World), a professor of history at Harvard and a master of anecdote and aphorism, Ferguson says he took Jacob Bronowski's hymn to human invention, "The Ascent of Man," as a model. Just as Bronowski's 1973 BBC documentaries traced the beneficial impact of science and art, Ferguson shows how promises and paper have lifted humans from subsistence farmers in Babylon to Masters of the Universe on Wall Street. Among his core arguments is that "poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institutions, with the absence of banks, not their presence." Money, he contends, is essential to human progress; it is "trust inscribed" on paper or metal, and without that trust we would all be poorer. But now, right now in the dark autumn of 2008, comes the shadow of mistrust.

From that day on, Ferguson writes, all bubbles have followed five stages:
1) Displacement, as economic change brings a chance for extraordinary profits;
2) Euphoria, as investors take advantage of the opportunity,
3) Mania, as novices, crowds and swindlers rush in;
4) Distress, as insiders see their prospects for profit declining because of the mania and start selling; and
5) Revulsion, as all stampede for the exits.

Ferguson provides a more flattering portrayal of Nathan Rothschild, patriarch of the banking family and mastermind of empires. Nineteenth-century states needed to issue bonds to finance wars; Rothschild was at the ready. When Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, Rothschild made huge and risky bets on British bonds and secured his family's dominance of the London market for half a century. When the Rothschilds turned down a plea to back the confederacy's bonds, the fate of the Southern rebellion darkened irreversibly. "Money is the god of our time," declared the German poet Heinrich Heine in 1841, "and Rothschild is his prophet." From recent times, Ferguson gives deft summaries of the lives of Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian champion of property rights for the poor; Milton Friedman, the apostle of monetarism, who saw the supply of money as the key to the economy; and George Soros, the hedge fund philosopher and financier of liberal causes. I found myself understanding Soros's theory of reflexivity for the first time. (Market prices, Ferguson explains, are "reflections of the ignorance and biases, often irrational, of millions of investors . . . [which] affect market outcomes, which in turn change investors' biases, which again affect market outcomes" -- in short, reflexivity.)

If you are like me, the recent financial crisis has forced you to rethink what money is, how it works, and how global economic trends affect when and how currency moves about. This timely book explains the origin and growth of money, banks, stock markets.

Ferguson shows us that the typical Wall Street logic of looking back the twenty or thirty years only the most experienced investors lived through is not enough to improve our current position. Ferguson says the only way to solve our financial crisis is to put the origin of money and financial strain in its proper historical context. It is far too late to be discussing expensive houses and cheap credit. We need to look way way back to understand the wreckage of banks, brokers and hedge funds that litters the markets. He shows us that looking back is the way to know what to do next. Otherwise, it'll be another new bubble down the road that leaves us scratching our heads after it pops.

Read Ferguson's book and you'll better understand the possibilities for disaster inherent in the loose credit and securitization of bad debt from which so much money was made before the crisis unfolded. His grasp of history vindicates his profession and brings an understated beauty to money.

The other book I read this week that I also recommend very strongly is The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book. Let's just say it makes it a little easier for me to watch the market, and in a little better mood around my husband when I come home from work

Niall Ferguson has written an easily accessible and very entertaining history of finance, ranging from the clay tokens of Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago to the hedge funds of today. The title of this book has apparently been modelled on Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man," and like that book it will be made into a television series. Being a television celebrity is not something that wins the admiration of one's peers in the history profession, to say the least. But those little rebukes are relatively mild compared to the scorn he received for his political views in Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power and Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. In those works he argued that empire was beneficial not only to the mother country but the dominated countries as well. In this work he chronicles not only the history of money but also makes a case for liberalized finance.

Ferguson examines the financial subplot behind some of the major historical powers such as the role of money in ancient Mesopotamia, the denarius in Roman society, and gold and silver in the civilization of the Incas. He is very good in his descriptions of financial families like the Medicis and the Rothchilds, and how they became banking dynasties. Another memorable episode was the rise of Amsterdam as the world's financial center and the center's subsequent shift to London.

History is also filled with financial disasters of which we are well aware today. Ferguson tells the story of John Law and how he became France's head of finance. He engineered a financial bubble that took them several generations to overcome. Making matters worse, it occurred at the same time as the British South Sea Bubble.

Also instructive is the history of the first great globalization (1870-1914). (For this period also read Jeffrey Frieden's Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century.) The world had become so economically interdependent that the pundits believed the possibility of war between great powers had been eliminated. This sentiment was famously expressed in "The Great Illusion" by Norman Angell.

Although this book was written before the current economic crisis, the last chapter is very prescient. "From Empire to Chimerica" tells of the symbiotic relationship between China and America. The combined country "accounts for just over a 10th of the world's land surface, a quarter of its population, and a third of its economic output, and more than half of the global economic growth of the last eight years". This relationship, in which China saves and America spends, and in which China's savings is used to enable America to spend even more, is clearly unsustainable. Ferguson sees this savings glut as the cause of the current subprime crisis. That, in my humble opinion, was one of the causes; there were many bad actors involved in this catastrophe, citizen-borrowers included.

Although it is not obvious to everyone in the midst of a crisis, Ferguson correctly points out that financial engineering is one of the great forces behind human progress. The history of finance is a process of creative destruction. Financial risk-taking is necessary for economic expansion and human development, and Ferguson does a good job in making the case. Too bad it reads like a script made for the History Channel.

[svinayak]

Engaging the Muslim World
by Juan Cole (Author)



* Hardcover: 288 pages
* Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (March 17, 2009)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0230607543
* ISBN-13: 978-0230607545

University of Michigan history professor and blogger Cole (Sacred Space and Holy War) takes aim at the Bush administration's Islamophobic discourse, highlighting that some of the very people who promulgated the phobia (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld) once sang a different tune. He calls instead for evenhanded and pragmatic policy changes, not least a reckoning with the heterogeneity of the Muslim world. Yet for all his expertise, Cole fails to source some of his harshest accusations; moreover, for a scholar championing greater subtlety of thought, he too often discards nuance himself. To the extent that Cole argues against painting the Middle East with overly broad strokes, he brings a constructive addition to public discourse; his failure to be consistent is a lost opportunity. (Mar.)

According to Dr. Cole's book, US interest in Middle East oil has been motivated by a desire to ensure a stable supply of it to Western Europe and Japan. On the other hand, it is widely believed in the Middle East that American and British oil companies have made huge profits out of Middle Eastern oil while the people of the region, at best, obtain small benefit from it. . When puppet dictators that ensure the flow of oil and petrodollars to western corporations are overthrown, the Americans get very worried. Cole discusses the US overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 and the Kennedy administration's "blowtorch Bob" Komer's worries about the threat to American oil companies posed by the Kassem regime in Iraq. Cole notes that Komer was very happy when the Ba'ath party launched its successful coup against Kassem in 1963; the Ba'ath minister of interior later said that the coup was backed by the CIA.

The best part of the book is Cole's attack on American military policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Take his analysis of US Iraq policy. What mainstream debate about the "surge" has ignored but which Cole discusses in this book, is that large scale ethnic cleansing is largely responsible for the alleged "success" of the surge. For example, Shiite death squads allied with the Iraqi government cleansed Sunnis out of Baghdad during the surge. Cole writes that Baghdad, in 2003 was 50 percent Sunni; at the end of the surge in 2008, it was 75 percent Shiite. Obviously the elimination of rival ethnic groups from Iraqi neighborhoods has reduced the justification for violence by ethnic militias. The surge dramatically increased the number of internally displaced refugees in Iraq, most of whom live in squalor: the total went from about 1.8 million in January 2007 to 2.7 million in the summer of 2008. Meanwhile about 200,000 Iraqi refugees live in misery in Jordan and another million live in Syria. Cole describes how he discovered, from his own visit to refugee camps and other sources in the region, that many Sunni refugees are afraid to go back to Iraq because they have been threatened with violent retribution from Shiite militias if they try to return to their old homes. Cole's analysis makes clear that the "surge" has not offered any long-term solutions to Iraq's most serious problems.

Cole is also great when he argues against the Islamophobic currents in western societies. He argues that the principles of mainstream Islamic thought going back to the medieval ages are anathema to the ideas of Sayd Qatb, the Egyptian fundamentalist executed by the Nasser regime in 1966 and a leading inspiration for Al Qaeda type ideologies. He argues that it is inaccurate to describe the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a fascist movement. He cites a number of polls to show that all but a very small number of Muslims in the Middle East have any sympathy with Al Qaeda. He warns that the extremely brutal "search and destroy" operations by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan can only increase support for violent anti-American Islamists among the affected populations. Meanwhile peasants in southern Afghanistan have had their only source of livelihood, poppy crops, destroyed by US military operations. Cole warns that such actions can only increase sympathy for the Taliban as the US pumps weapons and troops into Afghanistan but disburses only paltry sums for economic reconstruction and alternative crops to wean peasant farmers off the poppy crop.

Cole was one of the first Middle East experts to point out that the allegation that Iranian president Ahmadinejad threatened to wipe Israel off the map was based on a very misleading translation. Ahmadinejad may be a stupid ignoramus but it is the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, not Ahmadinejad, who controls the direction of Iran's foreign and military policies. Cole points out that there is strong evidence that Ahmadinejad has a great many opponents in the clerical establishment in Iran. But the Bush administration did its best to strengthen the most hard-line, reactionary segments of Iran's ruling elite, for example, rejecting the very conciliatory proposal for normalization of relations made by Iran through Switzerland in 2003. Cole notes that Obama, as well as McCain, played up the threat of Iranian nukes during the 2008 election, even though the US National Intelligence Estimate of late 2007 stated that Iran had stopped trying to develop a nuclear weapon in 2003. Iran insists that it is developing a nuclear program for civilian energy purposes only, which it is entitled to do as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Cole cites Jimmy Carter's estimate that Israel has 150 nuclear weapons, so even if Iran developed one nuclear bomb .....Cole points out that the US was sympathetic to Iran's original development of a nuclear program back in the 1970's when its puppet dictator, the Shah, was in power. The Ayatollah Khomeini scrapped the Shah's nuclear program and declared that nuclear weapons were anathema to Islam.

Cole notes that genuine anti-Semitic feeling is not high in Iran; Iranian Jews face some modest cultural restrictions but they are far from being at risk for genocide. Iranian Jews have representation in Iran's parliament; no harm came to Iranian Jewish leaders who wrote to Ahmadinejad to criticize him for his unfortunate comments about the holocaust. Cole points out that several years ago Iranian state TV ran a very popular dramatic min-series about a Muslim male of mixed Persian-Palestinian descent who helps rescue a Jewish love interest from Nazi occupied France.

I may disagree with Cole on a few things but I can't dismiss the great pertinacity of this book in these times when discussion about Islam is primarily directed in this country by ignorant demagogues. Cole has actually lived in the Middle East and is learned in its languages unlike so many "experts" on the region. He presents his ideas in this book with impressive clarity.

[svinayak]

Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East
by Rashid Khalidi (Author)

# Hardcover: 308 pages
# Publisher: Beacon Press (February 15, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0807003107
# ISBN-13: 978-0807003107

Starred Review. Khalidi (Resurrecting Empire) provides a compelling history of modern conflict in the Middle East, arguing that current conflicts are by-products of the cold war and the policies, strategies and priorities of the United States and the Soviet Union. The author illustrates how the cold war rivals saw the Middle East—with its vital location and vast oil and gas reserves—as a tool to further their parallel agendas: the Soviets and Americans both subordinated the goal of Arab-Israeli peace and supplied weapons at a profit to both Iraq and Iran during their eight-year war, while the U.S. sought to further its dominance of the region by backing a coup to overthrow democracy in Iran.

Khalidi concludes by charting how George W. Bush's Global War on Terror has allowed for a massive military expansion in the Middle East and resulted in futile and feckless policies that may have increased the actual risk to American citizens and wreaked havoc on the region. Khalidi has written an important book, essential for anyone concerned about the stability of the Middle East. (Mar.)


This is an important book from the well known scholar Rashid Khalidi whose previosu writings have usually focused on the Arab-Israei conflict.(The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood). However he has, of late, expanded his interests to examine the entire Middle East and particularly the 'western' influence and meddling in the region.

In this work he seeks to examine the role of the Cold War in the Middle East. For a long time scholars have spoken of what is called an 'Arab Cold War', the internal struggle between Arab regimes who were allied with the U.S and Russia. Egypt was a lynchpin in this for the Egyptian Nationalist government of Nasser and Sadat flirted with he Soviets for some twenty years. Nasserism also influenced revolutions in Yemen and attempted coups in Jordan and Lebanon, as well as Baghdad. Syria under the Ba'ath and the Asad family was a close ally of the Soviets. So was Iraq under the Ba'ath. On the other side were the Saudis, the Gulf States, Egypt after 1980, Jordan's King Hussein, the Yemenite royalists, Baghdad before 1968 and Turkey. Lebanon was always problematic, torn by chaos after 1976 it had numerous influences. The Palestinians too curried favor with the Soviets, especially the PFLP and George Habash.

Islamism and its rise among the Brotherhood, Hamas, and particularly in Iran in 1979 placed a third counterbalance to this Cold War reivalry in the region. Herein lies the problem with the Khalidi analysis. Khalidi wants to show that the U.S and Soviet Union 'sowed crises' in the Middle East. This follows in the footsteps of the older idea that the carving up of the region in 1918 by Europeans also 'sowed' the problems of today. But both of these views neglect Arab agency. What of Mumar Qadafi of Libya, Nasser and the Saudis? What of the Shah and the Ayatollah. All of these men used the West and operated within the contexts they needed to and each in their own way also stood up to the West. This is not to mention Saddam Hussein whose 1991 Gulf War actually pitted him against the U.S and the Russians along with others.

Ibn Saud and the rise of Saudi predates both the 1918 carving up of the Ottoman empire and the Cold War. Hardly a tool of U.S policy the Saudis have worked with the U.S and extended their influence. The revolutionary regimes, such as Nasser, also played the West, sometimes using Western money to build the Aswan Dam and inviting Soviet advisors to help them fight the Israelis. Israel too, now seen as a close aly of the U.S, once coveted close relations with the Soviets.

To ascribe all that has happaned in the Middle East to 'the west' and blame it on the Cold War ignored the agency of the Arab, Persian, Turkish, Jewish and other peoples in the region. Far from always being puppets they had great agecny, their own reolutions and movements and they choose when and where to fight their wars, wars that forced the West into the region in many cases. The U.S in fact long ignored the Middle East between 1948 and 1956 until the Suez crises for Ike to take the side of Egypt against the UK, hardly an example of Cold War 'sowing crises'.

This book is important but places too much emphasis on the importance of the West and fails to see the important role that local rulers played in decision making. While the fad is to blame others for the problems of the Middle East this book doesn't give local people credit where credit is due for their innovations and political experiments.

[svinayak]

How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower
by Adrian Goldsworthy (Author)

# Hardcover: 560 pages
# Publisher: Yale University Press (May 12, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0300137192
# ISBN-13: 978-0300137194

In AD 200, the Roman Empire seemed unassailable. Its vast territory accounted for most of the known world. By the end of the fifth century, Roman rule had vanished in western Europe and much of northern Africa, and only a shrunken Eastern Empire remained. What accounts for this improbable decline? Here, Adrian Goldsworthy applies the scholarship, perspective, and narrative skill that defined his monumental Caesar to address perhaps the greatest of all historical questions—how Rome fell.

It was a period of remarkable personalities, from the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius to emperors like Diocletian, who portrayed themselves as tough, even brutal, soldiers. It was a time of revolutionary ideas, especially in religion, as Christianity went from persecuted sect to the religion of state and emperors. Goldsworthy pays particular attention to the willingness of Roman soldiers to fight and kill each other. Ultimately, this is the story of how an empire without a serious rival rotted from within, its rulers and institutions putting short-term ambition and personal survival over the wider good of the state.

How Rome Fell is a brilliant successor to Goldsworthy's "monumental" (The Atlantic) Caesar.
About the Author

Adrian Goldsworthy is the author of many books about the ancient world including Caesar, The Roman Army at War, and In the Name of Rome. He lectures widely and consults on historical documentaries produced by the History Channel, National Geographic, and the BBC. He lives in Wales.


The work is divided into three parts. Part 1 traces the reign of Marcus Aurelius through the Crisis of the Third century to the rise of Diocletian. In many ways the reign of Marcus Aurelius was the height of the empire left by Augustus, but the generations that followed witnessed a painful transformative process. Part II begins with Diocletian's attempts to rebuild from the rubble, reorganizing the empire into a new entity. It ends with the political split of the empire between East and West. Part III then details the sordid legacy of the Western Empire as emperors fought rivals, and barbarian warlords fought Roman generalissimos who were themselves often of barbarian extraction. The West increasingly loses ground until it is a patchwork of barbarian kingdoms loosely carrying on Roman traditions. Part III ends with the rise of the Islamic invaders who in turn dismember the outer realms of the surviving Eastern empire.

Goldsworthy's book is largely in response to the most recent scholars, such as Peter Heather, who paint a picture of a vibrant later empire only torn apart by Germanic supertribes and a reborn Persian superpower. Goldsworthy disagrees on both fronts. He claims there is no sufficient evidence to paint the later empire as being as prosperous or as strong as Augustus' Principate. Nor does he see the Persians or various barbarian tribes as being especially larger or more organized opponents than what confronted the earlier emperors. Instead Rome's greatest enemy was itself. The constant civil wars fought after Marcus Aurelius destabilized Roman society and weakened the borders, allowing otherwise weak enemies to exploit Roman instability.

The later emperors cared more about mere survival than about imperial welfare at large, which led to deleterious reforms. Senators were excluded from military command so as to no longer threaten the emperor, but ironically this opened the power struggle to a much wider and far less predictable strata of society below them, namely Equestrian officers and bureaucrats. Furthermore, the split between the civil bureaucracy and the military forces, and the increasing division of both into smaller units, was designed to prevent any one official from having the resources to overthrow the emperor. But this also had the effect of reducing the empire's ability to quickly marshal the necessary resources to oppose foreign invasion. The result was of course an increasing trickle of foreign foes who were allowed to occupy the land, thus depriving the West of needed tax revenue, which in turn weakened the army and bureaucracy, and so encouraging more infiltration and forced settlement.

The tale of western Roman collapse is a long and depressing epic, but Goldsworthy tells it expertly. The prose is enchanting: intelligent but direct and always engaging. Where some saw his Caesar biography as rather needlessly verbose, the author manages in this work to condense about four hundred years of Roman history into as many pages. The books also contains various maps and illustrations, charts and tables, and several pages of photographs. The last hundred pages is populated by a chronology, glossary, bibliography, end notes and an index. This is an excellent narrative for the general reader interested in late antiquity, whether or not one fully agrees with the author's conclusions.

[svinayak]

How to Stage a Military Coup: From Planning to Execution
by Ken Connor (Author), David Hebditch (Author)


# Paperback: 256 pages
# Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing (March 26, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1602393753
# ISBN-13: 978-1602393752

Fed up with taxes? Angered and disappointed by corrupt leaders? How to Stage a Military Coup lays down practical strategies that have proven themselves around the globe. David Hebditch and Ken Connor examine, with a critical eye, successful as well as failed coup attempts throughout the twentieth century with the aim of showing their readers just what it takes to swiftly and soundly overthrow a government. Exploring coups from Nigeria, to Cuba, to Iraq, and with true stories of SAS combat written by Ken Connor, the book gives an insightful glimpse into this violent and rarely-seen world of shifting power.

How to Stage a Military Coup is a unique textbook for the armchair revolutionary, as well as a practical guide for the idealist with a soft spot for the sound of artillery fire. From evaluation of the political climate and investigation of potential allies, to recruiting and training personnel, to strategies for ensuring timely transfer of power, the book leaves no aspect of the coup d'état unexamined. The book also includes appendixes, notes, and a world map of coups d'état.

Book Description
The coup remains the most common form of power change throughout the world. The government being targeted by a coup attempt could be democratically elected, a dictatorship, or a junta put in place by the previous month's coup. The motivation is usually a combination of power, greed and exploitation disguised as patriotism. How to Stage a Military Coup explores these violent and often bloody appropriations of authority, alongside the political, military, and social conditions out of which they arise. Taking into account factors such as timing, media control, popular support, and government organizational structure, and by drawing on examples of coups worldwide, both failed and successful, the authors reveal exactly what it takes to carry out a successful government take-over.

The new book by David Hebditch and Ken Connor, author of "Ghost Force: The Secret History of the SAS", appears to be a guide to planning and executing a military coup...
Clearly from the title alone this is NOT the sort of book that should be required reading for defence force personnel.
But Hebditch and Connor's book is far from an endorsement of illegal activities by defence forces but rather a highly informative guide to the evil practice of coups written in a surprisingly entertaining format.
Taking advantage of a fictional narrative introducing each chapter, about what appears to be British special forces launching a coup in the UK, and Hebditch's ironic writing style the reader is treated to the equivalent of a university education on coups without hardly noticing it.
Throughout the book Ken Connor makes many observations from his own personal experience as the longest serving member of the British Special Air Service, 23 years that put him up close with the realities of military coups.
The book explores the history of the modern coup, there were 14 coups or coup attempts in 2004 alone, and looks at why and how they happen.
Its does so by referring to the human experience of these coups, not high-blown academic interpretation, and still retains a certain dark humour.
Ultimately the book is a work of military history and illuminates this rarely talked about unsavoury element of the military experience that is fortunately outside the modern history of English speaking nations.
However with many soldiers serving overseas from western countries understanding military coups is vital not only to protect our own force but also to promote respect for legitimate government in our allied forces.
"How to stage a military coup" should be read by military personnel to prepare them for the challenges of operating overseas and for some good entertainment.
Who knows, maybe knowing how to stage a coup will help a western soldier from stopping one in its tracks.

How To Stage A Military Coup: From Planning To Execution by David Hebditch and Ken Connor is an interesting and thought-provoking exploration of the military empowerment of obtaining placement in government through the exercise of military force or the threat of such force. Introducing the reader to a detailed and in-depth understanding (which Connor has had first hand experience) of the act known as a military coup or coup d'etat, How To Stage A Military Coup is an outstanding and unique study of what may frequently be used against various unstable governments throughout the world. How To Stage A Military Coup is particularly recommended to students of politics, international studies, and the utilization of military power with a role in establishing and/or overthrowing governments.

[svinayak]

America's Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power
by Nicholas Spykman (Author)


# Paperback: 525 pages
# Publisher: Transaction Publishers (March 31, 2007)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1412806313
# ISBN-13: 978-1412806312

Less than a year after the United States entered the Second World War, Nicholas Spykman wrote a book that placed the war effort in the broader context of the 1940s global balance of power. In "America's Strategy in World Politics", Spykman examined world politics from a realist geopolitical perspective. The United States, he explained, was fighting for its very survival as an independent country because the conquests of Germany and Japan raised the specter of our geopolitical encirclement by hostile forces controlling the power centers of Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia.

Spykman warned that the United States could not safely retreat to a defensive position in the Western Hemisphere. Spykman looked beyond the immediate strategic requirements of the Second World War, envisioning a postwar world in which the United States would help shape the global balance of power to meet its security needs.

Even though Soviet Russia was our wartime ally, Spykman recognized that a geopolitically unbalanced Soviet Union could threaten to upset the postwar balance of power and thereby endanger U.S. security. Spykman also foresaw the rise of China in postwar Asia, and the likely need for the United States to ally itself with Japan to balance China's power. He also recognized that the Middle East would play a pivotal role in the postwar world. Spykman influenced American postwar statesmen and strategists. During the Cold War, the U.S. sought to deny the Soviet Union political control of Western Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. Spykman's geopolitical vision of U.S. security, supported by a balanced Eurasian land mass, coupled with his focus on power as the governing force in international relations, makes "America's Strategy in World Politics" relevant to the twenty-first century.

[svinayak]

What Every American Should Know About the Middle East
by Melissa Rossi (Author)

# Paperback: 512 pages
# Publisher: Plume (December 30, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0452289599
# ISBN-13: 978-0452289598

The What Every American Should Know series returns with a timely guide to the region Americans need to understand the most (and know the least)

The latest edition of Melissa Rossi’s popular What Every American Should Know series gives a crash course on one of the most complex and important regions of the world. In this comprehensive and engaging reference book, Rossi offers a clear analysis of the issues playing out in the Middle East, delving into each country’s history, politics, economy, and religions. Having traveled through the area over the past year, she exposes firsthand the U.S.’s geopolitical moves and how our presence has affected the region’s economic and political development. Topics include:

· Why Iran is viewed as a threat by most Middle East countries
· What resource is more important than petroleum in regional power plays
· What’s really behind the fighting between Sunni and Shia
· How Saudi Arabia inadvertently feeds the violence in Iraq and beyond
· How monarchies like those in Jordan and Qatar are more open and progressive than the so-called republics
With answers that will surprise many Americans, and covering a vast history and cultural complexity that will fascinate any student of the world, What Every American Should Know About the Middle East is a must-read introduction to the most critical region of the twenty-first century.

[svinayak]

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Paperback)
by Malcolm Gladwell (Author)


# Paperback: 304 pages
# Publisher: Back Bay Books (January 7, 2002)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0316346624
# ISBN-13: 978-0316346627

Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the "stickiness" of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes, such as comparing the pedagogical methods of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues, or explaining why it would be even easier to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the actor Rod Steiger. Although some readers may find the transitional passages between chapters hold their hands a little too tightly, and Gladwell's closing invocation of the possibilities of social engineering sketchy, even chilling, The Tipping Point is one of the most effective books on science for a general audience in ages. It seems inevitable that "tipping point," like "future shock" or "chaos theory," will soon become one of those ideas that everybody knows--or at least knows by name. --Ron Hogan --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

The premise of this facile piece of pop sociology has built-in appeal: little changes can have big effects; when small numbers of people start behaving differently, that behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. Gladwell's thesis that ideas, products, messages and behaviors "spread just like viruses do" remains a metaphor as he follows the growth of "word-of-mouth epidemics" triggered with the help of three pivotal types. These are Connectors, sociable personalities who bring people together; Mavens, who like to pass along knowledge; and Salesmen, adept at persuading the unenlightened. (Paul Revere, for example, was a Maven and a Connector).

Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for New Yorker Magazine, in The Tipping Point, writes a fascinating study of human behavior patterns, and shows us where the smallest things can trigger an epidemic of change. Though loaded with statistics, the numbers are presented in a way that makes the book read like an exciting novel. Gladwell also gives several examples in history, where one small change in behavior created a bigger change on a national level. He also studies the type of person or group that it takes to make that change.

Gladwell's first example is the resurgence of the popularity of Hush Puppies, which had long been out of fashion, and were only sold in small shoe stores. Suddenly, a group of teenage boys in East Village, New York, found the cool to wear. Word-of-mouth advertising that these trend-setters were wearing the once-popular suede shoes set off an epidemic of fashion change, and boys all over America had to have the "cool" shoes.

Galdwell also examines the difference in personality it takes to trigger the change. For example, we all know of Paul Revere's famous ride, but how many of us know that William Dawes made a similar ride? The difference was that people listened to Revere and not to Dawes. Why? Revere knew so many different people. He knew who led which village, knew which doors to knock on to rouse the colonists. Dawes didn't know that many people and therefore could only guess which people to give his message.

There are several other phenomena that Gladwell examines, showing the small things that spark a change, from the dip in the New York City crime rate to the correlation between depression, smoking and teen suicide. If you want to change the world for the better, this book will give you an insight into the methods that work, and those that will backfire. It's all in knowing where to find The Tipping Point.

[svinayak]

The War Chronicles: From Chariots to Flintlocks: New Perspectives on the Two Thousand Years of Bloodshed That Shaped the Modern World
by Joseph Cummins (Author)

# Hardcover: 400 pages
# Publisher: Fair Winds Press; illustrated edition edition (September 1, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 159233296X
# ISBN-13: 978-1592332960

22 Centuries of Warfare, 22 Wars that Changed the World.

All are captured in 400 pages filled with more than 150 archival illustrations gathered from around the world. The War Chronicles acts as a perfect primer for novices while offering seasoned history readers new perspectives on many famous and some not-so-well-known conflicts. Each chapter includes a quick-reference summary, a timeline, an overview of the war, essays on its principal leaders, a series of short, often offbeat features on aspects of the conflict, and a detailed account of a pivotal battle.

Author Joseph Cummins highlights pivotal victories that changed nations, from the Norman invasion of England in 1066 to the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521, and delineates defining moments in the development of political philosophies, from Athens’ defense of democracy against Persian despotism to the championing of equal rights for all in the American Revolution. It recounts the heroism of armies and individuals, from the Spartans’ fight to the death against the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 BC to the Korean admiral who inspired his country to repel a massive Japanese invasion in the 1590s. Yet it does not shy away from showing the acts of savagery that characterize much warfare, describing, for example, the trail of devastation left by the Mongols as they cut a swath through Asia and Eastern Europe in the thirteenth century, and the atrocities perpetrated on German civilians by all sides in the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century.



The marvelous thing is that you could just use it as a reference book and because of the excellent organization and full index it would be better than most. However, the quality of the writing and research make it much more. This thick book reads like a bullet as you trace military history from The Greco-Persian Wars of 500-449 BC to the American Revolution of 1775-83 (both wars for freedom against imperial oppression.) Even though I was generally familiar with the vast majority of the 22 wars covered here I still found interesting sidelights that I wasn't familiar with. For the rest, it served as good review and refresher of the development of warfare in the world.

As for the unique organization of the book, the 22 chapters uniformly give you the dates of the conflict; you see at a glance who the principle figures were, the combatants, the theater of operations, casualties; you get a concise thumbnail of the entire conflict; you get the timeline. This followed by a description of the entire war in much more detail. Then, you get a detailed account of the principle battle. Next you get a biography of the two principle players on each side. This is followed by the "dossier" section which gives details of the make up, organization, and weaponry involved, as well as interesting little historical tidbits.

The illustrations deserve a separate mention- they are numerous and outstanding. The vast majority are in full, glorious color- including several two-page spreads. The one minor criticism that I have of the entire book is that what is clearly an illustration of a cross bow is shown under the article on longbows...

As I read this book I kept wishing that it had existed when I was a schoolboy, for I would have been constantly checking it out or reading it during lunch. I could see this book being used as a High School or undergraduate primary text for a military history class. In addition, I see it appealing to real time strategy game enthusiasts- such as AGE OF EMPIRES.

The author plans to publish a second volume that will stretch from the French Revolution to the Vietnam War, but this volume can clearly stand alone as its own look at the development of warfare unto the dawn of the modern age.


.

The book covers about 22 centuries of warfare, and delves into 22 of the most significant wars that took place during that time.

I found this book to be intruiging. For example, I'd heard about Hannibal bring an army over the Alps in order to attack the Roman Empire from the north, but what I didn't know was where he came from, why he wanted to come over the Alps, and why he was at war with the Romans in the first place. Man, I never knew he was from Carthage, which is on the northern shore of Africa! And, in order to attack Rome he first marched up through the Iberian peninsula, through what is now France, and then over the Alps.

That's just one of the interesting things I've learned from this book.

Each chapter contains readable summaries of the most influential wars throughout much of the history of western civilization, including brushes with empires to the east. It was helpful that the author provided a quick into to each chapter, including the dates covered, the civilzations involved, the duration of the conflict, the main characters involved, and a point by point summary of events listed by date. The author then provided a more detailed description of major battles, profiles of leaders involved, descriptions of the elite of each army, and commentary on the significance of each conflict on their times as well as on the events that followed each war.

The section on each war is easily readible in one sitting. Each chapter is supplemented by historical artwork depicting each event (usually produced MUCH later than each event, but interesting nevertheless.

If you decide to get this book you will have a chance to learn something about military conquests by the Greeks, Persians, Romans, Cathaginians, Jews, Gauls, Muslims, Normans, Mongols, Vikings, Crusaders, Spaniards, English, Chinese, various other European powers including Sweden and Russia, and, to round things out, a summary of the American Revolution.

[svinayak]

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The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
by George Friedman (Author)

# Hardcover: 272 pages
# Publisher: Doubleday (January 27, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 038551705X
# ISBN-13: 978-0385517058

"Be Practical, Expect the Impossible." So declares George Friedman, chief intelligence officer and founder of Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor), a private intelligence agency whose clients include foreign government agencies and Fortune 500 companies. Gathering information from its global network of operatives and analysts (drawing the nickname "the Shadow CIA"), Stratfor produces thoughtful and genuinely engrossing analysis of international events daily, from possible outcomes of the latest Pakistan/India tensions to the hierarchy of Mexican drug cartels to challenges to Obama's nascent administration. In The Next 100 Years, Friedman undertakes the impossible (or improbable) challenge of forecasting world events through the 21st century. Starting with the premises that "conventional political analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination" and "common sense will be wrong," Friedman maps what he sees as the likeliest developments of the future, some intuitive, some surprising: more (but less catastrophic) wars; Russia's re-emergence as an aggressive hegemonic power; China's diminished influence in international affairs due to traditional social and economic imbalances; and the dawn of an American "Golden Age" in the second half of the century. Friedman is well aware that much of what he predicts will be wrong--unforeseeable events are, of course, unforeseen--but through his interpretation of geopolitics, one gets the sense that Friedman's guess is better than most.



With a unique combination of cold-eyed realism and boldly confident fortune-telling, Friedman (Americas Secret War) offers a global tour of war and peace in the upcoming century. The author asserts that the United States power is so extraordinarily overwhelming that it will dominate the coming century, brushing aside Islamic terrorist threats now, overcoming a resurgent Russia in the 2010s and 20s and eventually gaining influence over space-based missile systems that Friedman names battle stars. Friedman is the founder of Stratfor, an independent geopolitical forecasting company, and his authoritative-sounding predictions are based on such factors as natural resources and population cycles. While these concrete measures lend his short-term forecasts credence, the later years of Friedmans 100-year cycle will provoke some serious eyebrow raising. The armed border clashes between Mexico and the United States in the 2080s seem relatively plausible, but the space war pitting Japan and Turkey against the United States and allies, prognosticated to begin precisely on Thanksgiving Day 2050, reads as fantastic (and terrifying) science fiction.


George Friedman's THE NEXT 100 YEARS has a serious "wow" factor. It's going to get people talking.

Friedman, as the chairman of Stratfor, the global intelligence firm, believes that geography, population, and the surprising way history has of confounding our expectations are all important. He also believes that conventional political analysis and forecasting "suffers from a profound failure of imagination." The convergence of these axioms leads Friedman to write a book that should flabbergast more than a few of the talking heads who populate the airwaves and cable frequencies. I would venture to guess that none of them have the intellectual wherewithal to engage his predictions knowledgeably. I guess we'll see, because no doubt Friedman will be making a splash in the press with this surprising book.

His predictions--they will raise your eyebrows. But two things will keep you from dismissing them for their outlandishness. One, Friedman, though ambitious and writing with a strong sense of self-confidence, keeps his ego in check. (He says he'll be pleased not if he's proven right on all points, but merely if his grandkids tell him some day, "Not bad.") And two, he makes a convincing case that throughout history, almost nothing in world affairs has turned out the way common sense or the prevailing notions of smart people (or journalists) thought that it would.

There's no arguing with any of that, though it's very easy to lose sight of.

At the start of the book, Friedman sets the table for his forecast by reviewing the changes in the world's geopolitics during the 20th century. He shows that every 20 years or so the world turned completely on its head. Though these events in hindsight seem to us today to be ordinary and unexceptional, if not completely predictable, if forecast in their day they would have seemed astonishingly unlikely. Please bear with me here...

In 1920, with Europe in tatters after World War I, the one thing that was sure was that peace had been forced on Germany and it would not soon lift itself up off the mat.

By 1940, of course, Germany not only roared back, but conquered most of Europe, with Russia as an unlikely ally. Britain stood alone. There was no way Hitler could lose.

Now to 1960. Germany is a ruin and the U.S., no world power at all in 1940, was contending only with the Soviets for world domination. The U.S. dominated the world's oceans and could dictate terms to its rivals, or, if it wished, just nuke them. Stalemate was the best the Soviets could hope for.

Come 1980, the U.S. had been beaten in a war--not by the Soviet Union, but by little North Vietnam--and was widely seen as in a slow, permanent retreat, expelled from Iran and watching helplessly as the oil fields fell into Soviet hands.

Now one more leap, to 2000. The Soviet Union had collapsed. China was communist in name only. NATO had advanced into Eastern Europe and even into the former USSR. (It was always supposed to happen the other way around!) The world was prosperous and peaceful. Everyone knew that the "end of history" was here, as considerations of war and power and realpolitik became secondary to spreading benign prosperity globally. Then came September 11, 2001, and the world turned on its head again.

Got all that? Good. After that unsettling review of recent world history, Friedman has set the stage to unleash his considerable imaginative and rhetorical gifts in predicting the following:

* That the U.S., which is now an adolescent power -- immature and impulsive -- will grow into the full glory of its power in the 21st century. By 2040, however, expect the unexpected. Two strong rivals will emerge to challenge us, and I probably shouldn't blow the freshness of the surprise by revealing here who Friedman believes it will be. (Just be sure, for one, not to buy real estate too close to the Rio Grande.)

* The industrialized world is facing a dramatic population drop, which will bottom out in 2050. As a result, we're in for a severe global labor shortage. The result? Today's immigration debate will flip 180 degrees as countries actually compete for immigrant laborers.

* Al Qaeda and the jihadist threat? They're history mostly, just a nuisance. (John Kerry was basically right in 2004.)

* Ditto environmental problems and energy crises: a single technological breakthrough, space-based solar power, will change everything.

* In the 21st century, minerals will become scarce on earth. Mining operations on the moon will be significant.

* The art of war is moving into orbit, and a robust space industry will develop around massive new expenditures by the U.S. and other countries.

* The U.S. will be challenged by some surprising new powers. Hint: you might want to start following news from Warsaw, Mexico City, and Istanbul a little more closely.

And so on. The book reads very accessibly and the argument at each turn is not hard to follow. The book is not at all academic or full of the jargon you might expect. There's a startling insight on every other page. By the end of it, you realize that you're a complete fool if you take any course of global events for granted.

Remember when it looked like the Berlin Wall was a permanent fixture in East Berlin? The only constant in the world is a lack of constancy. (Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?) We are, all of us, in for a lifetime of surprises. Friedman humbly takes a shot at forecasting the likeliest of them in a challenging and easy-to-read book.

You won't lack for conversation at your next lunch date if you spend an hour or so with this book. But read it quickly, because you don't want to be the fourth person in your circle of acquaintances to go around saying that war with Turkey lies in America's future. (Okay, I blew a surprise there, but that's what happens when you're lucky enough to get hold of a review copy, and the book has more than a few of them.)

[svinayak]

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
by William D. Cohan (Author)


# Hardcover: 480 pages
# Publisher: Doubleday; First Edition edition (March 10, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0385528264
# ISBN-13: 978-0385528269

On March 5, 2008, at 10:15 A.M., a hedge fund manager in Florida wrote a post on his investing advice Web site that included a startling statement about Bear Stearns & Co., the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank: “In my book, they are insolvent.”

This seemed a bold and risky statement. Bear Stearns was about to announce profits of $115 million for the first quarter of 2008, had $17.3 billion in cash on hand, and, as the company incessantly boasted, had been a colossally profitable enterprise in the eighty-five years since its founding.

Ten days later, Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun.

How this happened – and why – is the subject of William D. Cohan’s superb and shocking narrative that chronicles the fall of Bear Stearns and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street. Bear Stearns serves as the Rosetta Stone to explain how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making wrought havoc on the world financial system.

Cohan’s minute-by-minute account of those ten days in March makes for breathless reading, as the bankers at Bear Stearns struggled to contain the cascading series of events that would doom the firm, and as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke began to realize the dire consequences for the world economy should the company go bankrupt.

But HOUSE OF CARDS does more than recount the incredible panic of the first stages of the financial meltdown. William D. Cohan beautifully demonstrates why the seemingly invincible Wall Street money machine came crashing down. He chronicles the swashbuckling corporate culture of Bear Stearns, the strangely crucial role competitive bridge played in the company’s fortunes, the brutal internecine battles for power, and the deadly combination of greed and inattention that helps to explain why the company’s leaders ignored the danger lurking in Bear’s huge positions in mortgage-backed securities.

The author deftly portrays larger-than-life personalities like Ace Greenberg, Bear Stearns’ miserly, take-no-prisoners chairman whose memos about re-using paper clips were legendary throughout Wall Street; his profane, colorful rival and eventual heir Jimmy Cayne, whose world-champion-level bridge skills were a lever in his corporate rise and became a symbol of the reasons for the firm’s demise; and Jamie Dimon, the blunt-talking CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who won the astonishing endgame of the saga (the Bear Stearns headquarters alone were worth more than JP Morgan paid for the whole company).

Cohan’s explanation of seemingly arcane subjects like credit default swaps and fixed- income securities is masterful and crystal clear, but it is the high-end dish and powerful narrative drive that makes HOUSE OF CARDS an irresistible read on a par with classics such as LIAR’S POKER and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE.

Written with the novelistic verve and insider knowledge that made THE LAST TYCOONS a bestseller and a prize-winner, HOUSE OF CARDS is a chilling cautionary tale about greed, arrogance, and stupidity in the financial world, and the consequences for all of us.


"House of Cards" reports on the collapse of the investment banking house Bear Stearns (America's fifth-largest investment bank), and the beginning of the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression. Cohan's background as an investment banker allows him to cut through the complexity to explain what happened in simple, clear terms.

Bear Stearns had survived every crisis of the 20th century, including the Great Depression - without a single losing quarter - until the end of 2007. In 1997, Bear Stearns had helped pioneer the subprime mortgage-backed security by serving as co-underwriter on a $385 million offering. By the mid-2000s, it was the market leader in this segment.

The focus of the book is the last ten days of Bear Stearns, leading up to its absorption by J.P. Morgan at a fire-sale price ($10/share, down from $167; less than the value of its $1.5 billion office building), greased by $30 billion in Federal Reserve funds. (The Fed was worried that a bankruptcy of Bear Stearns could wreak fiscal havoc around the world.)

Just a year earlier it had been identified as "America's most admired securities firm" by Fortune magazine; in 2006 its Asset Management fees had reached $335 million. Bonuses were in the 8-figure range. Unfortunately, it was also the most heavily invested in mortgage-backed securities. Bear Stearns, like its competitors, financed itself with oversight sources (the cheapest source).

However, when analysts began questioning Bear's viability, given its shaky mix of assets, continued financing for Bear dried up, and it toppled. Amazingly, its chairman was too buy playing bridge and golf to get involved until too late; earlier he had forced out the only many who understood what was going on. The firm even turned down a last-minute offer from a Saudi Arabian for substantial financing ("not needed"). Its leadership then blamed the media and short-sellers for Bear's demise.

True, Bear's fall was quite rapid. However, there had been warning signs - problems at smaller firms with similar asset structures, rising risk premiums for its mortgage bond holdings ($50,000 for $10 million during the first half of 2007, rising to $350,000 on 3/5/08), its first quarterly loss at the end of 2008, and the downgrading of some of its bond holdings. Worse yet, Cohan also alluded to failing to conserve cash by reducing dividends and ceasing stock buybacks, as well as increasing leverage - unfortunately, it is not clear whether he was referring to Lehman, Bear, or both.

The bad news - the 468 pages, complete with endless interviews and accounts of bridge games, is a bit much. The even worse news - Bear Stearns' and others playing for billions has left American taxpayers with a debt of trillions. And we still haven't heard "the rest of the story."

[svinayak]

The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
by Jane Mayer (Author)

# Hardcover: 400 pages
# Publisher: Doubleday (July 15, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0385526393
# ISBN-13: 978-0385526395

History is supposed to teach us lessons from the past. From the Alien and Sedition Act, the "Red Scare" of 1919, the detention of thousands of Americans during World War II because of their Japanese ancestry, we were supposed to learn that even through the most dire threat to our safety, the rule of law ennobles us and protects us from tyranny. In "The Dark Side," Jane Mayer explains how easy it is for history to repeat itself in the name of security.

By September 11, 2001, the President of the United States had already spent fifty days of his first eight months in office on vacation. Despite several warnings of an impending attack from foreign intelligence sources as well as our own, the administration never quite understands the threat.

The attack on a clear summer morning changes that, and it changes things for worse. The subsequent invasion of Afghanistan allows the military and the C.I.A. to round up hundreds of Taliban prisoners. An offer of a $5,000 bounty for the capture of al-Qaeda and Taliban nets them hundreds more. The administration screams for actionable intelligence from these detainees, but sorting them out and interrogating them is another matter. The assumption is that "enhanced interrogation techniques" will bring more accurate results in a shorter period of time. It also has to be justified.

That comes from John Yoo, the legal counsel for the Justice Department who provides just the argument Dick Cheney and his attorney, Dick Addington are looking for. It says the president can do essentially anything he wants, and ignore Congress, if it is for the security of the country. Yoo also states that such interrogation methods are not torture unless it results in organ failure or death. Alberto Gonzalez joins in describing Afghanistan as a failed state, and their detainees as unlawful combatants. The state department is not consulted.

America's shame is just beginning.

With John Yoo's memo providing the green light, American military and C.I.A. begin to torture detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Saddam Hussein's Abu-Ghraib prison, and one in Afghanistan. The techniques they employ are standing for prolonged periods, the absence of light and irregular meal periods to enhance disorientation, water boarding, extreme cold and heat, constant loud music, humiliation, no toilet breaks, confined spaces, prolonged restraints, especially Palestinian hangings, irregular and insufficient periods of sleep, and threats. Other detainees are sent to countries for rendition, countries known for human rights abuses. Prisoners will die of exposure, heart attack, asyphixiation, or from simply being beaten to death.

While the administration claims that the techniques work, there are too many instances where the tormented harden their resolve during harsh treatment, and cooperate when treated well. Many who are tortured provide false information that sends our intelligence assets on fools' errands. The most damaging disinformation comes from Sheikh Ibn als-Libi who gives evidence against Saddam Hussein while he is being tortured. This is the justification for going to war with Iraq. He only wanted his torturers to stop.

In 2003-4, the policy begins to unravel. Charges are reduced, dropped, or changed against John Walker Lindh, Yasser Hamdi, and Jose Padilla. Since they were tortured, their charges won't stand up in court. Justice Department lawyers begin to question John Yoo's legal precedents. The CIA Inspector General begins to investigate abuses. JAG officers refuse to prosecute or serve on military tribunals. In 2005, the Abu-Ghraib scandal will break. It is later estimated that most of the detainees at "Gitmo" are people who were rounded up when they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or were turned in for the generous bounty offered. They include an eighty-year old deaf man, and a wealthy Kuwaiti businessman who will indignantly refuse to buy another Cadillac after his mistreatment. A German and a Canadian citizen will be kidnapped and tortured before they are set free. Three hundred forty of 749 detainees held in Gitmo will remain there with only a handful being charged.

In spite of a growing rebellion inside the Departments of Defense and Justice, the President refuses to remove people he promised he would hold accountable for abuses. Human Rights Watch estimates that more than 600 U.S. military and civilian personnel were involved in torture.

The true leader of this policy holds a tight rein and his resistance to change is fierce. It is Dick Cheney and his loyal lawyer, Dave Addington. Even the new attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez refuses to go toe to toe with Dave, a tall, snarling bully. Cheney takes the unprecedented step of summoning the C.I.A.'s Inspector General to his office while he is conducting his investigation. The military holds a number of investigations that limit them to looking at the lower ranks. It is also clear by 2005, that Bush is fully aware that some of his senior officials believe that Gitmo should be closed and his detention policy changed. The dissenters and naysayers are excluded from any more discussion. To this day, Bush refuses to budge.

This is a powerful story. She tells us that we must look at ourselves if we ever hope to recapture our moral greatness. Even this she concedes will take years. Her book is a good place for our national introspection to begin. It is organized and well-written. Her appeal is persuasive. It is a classic page-turner, and held my interest throughout. There were no "dry spots." Equally important are her sources and references, which are impeccable.

She concludes this powerful report with the following: "Seven years after Al Qaeda's attacks on America, as the Bush Administration slips into history, it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America's security became, and continues to be a battle for the country's soul."


Of the nearly two dozen books published so far that describe and document the nefarious deeds of George Bush's administration, Jane Mayer's book, "The Dark Side" , is perhaps the most thoroughly researched, meticulous, impressive, and deeply disturbing. It is also gripping and highly readable.

I am convinced that what Woodward and Bernstein's book "All the President's Men" did to the Nixon administration, Jane Mayer's book "The Dark Side" will do to George Bush's administration: blow away, like a piece of straw, the last sliver of credibility that the few remaining supporters of George Bush desperately cling to. "We don't torture", said the President, and Jane Mayer has responded with this book, as if to say: "That is a lie".

Although many of the incidents and details narrated in this book have been well known for quite some time, what is remarkable is the thorough and painstaking manner in which the author has arranged them together, as if she were connecting the haphazard dots and linking them together, to create a clear, convincing, and devastating picture. She has included a significant amount of new information also. Reading this book will make the hair on your nape stand up, as if electrified, and shock you to the very core, and leave you speechless.

The book is full of passages based on well-documented facts that will stun the readers and shake their conscience. For example, she has written that: "For the first time in its history, the United States sanctioned government officials to physically and psychologically torment U.S.-held captives, making torture the official law of the land in all but name."

The International committee of Red Cross wrote a secret report about the torture the prisoners were subjected to, under the supervision of the CIA at the prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and gave a copy to the CIA. Jane Mayer wrote: "The Red Cross document warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.", and she states emphatically, "The International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were `categorically' torture, which is illegal under both American and international law". The book states that Abu Zubaydah was subjected to water-torture("Waterboarding") as often as ten times a week, and up to three time a day. The CIA shared the report, later, with President Bush and Condoleezza Rice.

It is quite shocking to learn that almost half of all prisoners tortured were found to be innocent of harming the United States in any way, and were eventually let go, without being charged of any crimes, and after spending more than five years in jails. The author has written: "The analyst estimated that a full third of the camp's detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions -- up to half -- were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda."

Reading this book will make you stop and think and wonder how a small group of people in the White House could wreak so much havoc around the world, and tarnish our reputation. This is an extraordinary, thought-provoking, riveting and frightening book.

[JaiS]

Saga of valour and glory


Izzat: Historical Records and Iconography of Indian Cavalry Regiments 1750-2007
by Ashok Nath.
Centre for Armed Forces Historical Research, United Services Institution of India, New Delhi.
Pages 828. Rs 6,000.


THE Indian Army has a proud history, its lineage dating back to Mughal times when princely regiments and irregulars were raised from 1750 onwards. The most renowned among these formations were the dreaded and daring cavalry. It is of this arm that Ashok Nath, a former Captain and cavalry officer, writes with a splendid array of illustrations of badges, emblems and insignia worn by these units as they evolved over time.

Nath quotes a 19th-century cavalry officer being asked of what use the cavalry was in modern warfare. Came the reply: "It does lend a little style to what would otherwise merely be an ugly brawl!" To which he might have added that the cavalry also added a considerable punch in firepower together with speed and ample scope for manouvere following the transition from mounted cavalry to armoured vehicles post-First World War. Hitler’s panzer divisions cut through Europe and fierce tank battles were fought in Russia and North Africa.

The Mongols were no doubt great horsemen, but it was the invention of the stirrup that enabled them to use their bows and arrows at the gallop to sweep across the steppes to Central and South Asia and into Europe.

Nath notes that the East India Company believed the cavalry was an extravagance and initially preferred getting such units as were recruited on loan from native rulers such as the Nawab of Arcot and the Nawab of Awadh. French ascendancy caused it to change its mind. The three Presidency armies, starting with Madras and then Bengal and Bombay, raised their own cavalry regiments, with the Bengal lancers later becoming the Governor-General, now President’s, Bodyguard, the oldest regiment in the Indian Army.

Two systems were in vogue at the time: the paigah system, under which the horses and arms were owned by princes and the horsemen were hired by them, though the attachment was not as loose as might appear. The other was the khudaspa or silladar system, under which each horseman brought his own mount, arms and accoutrements. These units were generally commanded by the Indians.

After 1784, the Company began raising its own British-commanded cavalry units, often leaving the task to irregular or regular officers who gave their names to the units they raised. Thus, Skinner’s Horse, Hodson’s Horse, Probyn’s Horse, Gardner’s Horse and so on, though some bore territorial nomenclatures such as Central India Horse, Poona Horse, and the Deccan Horse, formerly of the Nizam’s forces. The Punjab units came last as British power expanded northwest, the Guides Cavalry being one of the earliest to be raised to scout the way forward. The Aden Troop was permanently stationed in Aden until it was disbanded in 1927. Fresh wars and conquests brought new units into being, some as a result of mergers and reorganisation.

The Great Uprising of 1857 brought about a major change. Many units that mutinied were disbanded. New raisings were made single-denomination and the tradition of mixed Hindu-Muslim regiments became a thing of the past. The First World War brought many more changes. The silladar system was finally given up with the existing 39 regiments being reorganised in 21 units. Further reorganisation saw the birth of the Indian Armoured Corps in 1937. By 1941, the old horse cavalry had been completely mechanised and new armoured units were raised and saw action on many fronts. However, 1947 saw the partitioning of the Indian Army between India and Pakistan. Of the 18 remaining armoured regiments, 12 came to India and six went to Pakistan. It was a sad parting, but Ashok Nath has carefully documented the fortunes of the units that went to the other side.

The volume narrates the history of each cavalry unit and traces its development from the first raising to its merger or disbandment. The basic genealogy is followed by notes on engagements fought, battle honours, its uniform, badges and emblems, motto, awards, ethnic composition and regimental march.

To the layman, the badges and emblems will be a perennial fascination. To those who served and their families, these are vignettes of personal history—of valour, courage and death, sometimes in a foreign land. The mottos tell the story: For Ashok Nath, " was a labour of love, a product of years of meticulous research in many places. The volume breaks new ground and will be treasured by both the military historians and those interested in regimental lore. The USOI has rendered a real service in sponsoring this volume and has done well to call upon the author to write a companion volume on India’s even more numerous infantry units.

[svinayak]

The American Future: A History
by Simon Schama (Author)


# Hardcover: 416 pages
# Publisher: Ecco (May 19, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0060539232
# ISBN-13: 978-0060539238

Writing a history of the future may seem provocative, or worse, downright nonsensical. What Schama has in fact done is to provide us with a strong indication of where America is likely to head in the future, based on the history of America's responses to its' challenges, now in our past.

The acknowledgement page in this edition is dated August 2008, shortly before the historic outcome of the presidential election in November was known. But the book opens in Des Moines, Iowa at 7:15 p.m. on January 3 with the caucus of Precinct 53 held at Theodore Roosevelt High. This was the exact time that Schama says he knew that "democracy came back from the dead."

A Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University, Schama is a British expatriot who has lived and taught in the United States for over thirty years. As a result of his origin and experience, combined with his masterful writing skills and insight, he might very well be described as a modern-day de Tocqueville. And, similar to Democracy in America, it is my distinct impression that this work was written first and foremost for Europeans, who may not be so well informed in American history. Although, even for an American and an American history buff such as myself, I found plenty that was new, or that was elucidated in a way that was completely new, to me.

The book is a collaborative effort with BBC television, which aired a four hour series in the UK in Autumn of 2008. And, actually, the DVD version was released in the U. S. on January 20. That series is well worth watching (and the subject of a separate review), but the book offers so much more.

Punctuated as it is with contemporary scenes from 2008, such as the aforementioned caucus, an interview with General Ricardo Sanchez, or his rendezvous with the vaqueros in the Bahia Grande of South Texas, who, to a man, consider themselves to be Mexican, while being "fiercely loyal to the United States as well," the vast majority of this volume is devoted to the time surrounding the Revolutionary War and the founding of the Republic, the Civil War and the near demise of the Republic, and the Civil Rights Era and the redefining of the Republic.

The book is divided into four parts. The first, "American War," covers the very different views on statecraft represented by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, the founding of West Point, the origins of Arlington National Cemetary, and, in particular, the astonishing history of the "Meigs Dynasty," which began with a trans-oceanic voyage from Dorset to Connecticut as early as 1636. The stories of "Return" Jonathan Meigs who fought with Benedict Arnold in Quebec, his son Jonathan, Jr. who became the first Postmaster General, Montgomery Meigs, Quartermaster General for the Union during the Civil War, and who also designed the dome on the nation's capitol, all the way down to another General Montgomery who in 2006 advised Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld on the Iraq War, are reason enough to buy this book.

Part II, "American Fervour," deals with the issue of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement, citing many of its' lesser known facts. If you are unfamiliar with either Jarena Lee or Fannie Lou Hamer, again, Schama's book is worth the price for these vignettes alone.

Immigration and multiculturalism form the core of part III, "What is an American?" Mexican-Americans, the German-American problem, the seldom-discussed history of Chinese-American "coolies" (even in my hometown of Rocklin, CA--another thing I hadn't known), Muslims in America and Jefferson's Quran (yes, he had one); these chapters portray America as the best, most promising melting pot in world history.

Finally, "American Plenty," which comprises part IV of Schama's work, considers issues of migration, irrigation and alternate energies, his thesis being that America is constantly recreating itself whilst finding ingenious ways to meet its' most pressing problems.

In a time of crippling economic woes, job loss and foreclosures, The American Future: A History may be just the antidote to pessimism we need, helping Americans, as well as the rest of the economies of the world which are dependent on America, to see that she is not likely to be falling anytime soon.

4 1/2 stars, only because I would have enjoyed more direct speculation on what Schama thinks the future actually holds. Not really the job of an historian though.

Highly recommended. Buy it, read it, learn, and feel better.

[svinayak]

The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World
by Mark Hertsgaard (Author)
# Paperback: 272 pages
# Publisher: Picador (September 1, 2003)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0312422504
# ISBN-13: 978-0312422509

In May 2001, Hertsgaard (Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future) began a six-month journey through 15 countries to interview people of all sorts, from bus drivers to former parliamentarians, about one thing: the United States. Each chapter of his book opens with an anecdote illustrating a perception he found to be widespread: the United States is a land of vast wealth but also gross self-indulgence; American leaders are influential but arrogant and na‹ve; and American citizens have immense freedom but are nonetheless insulated and ignorant. The impressions Hertsgaard gathers, however, serve primarily as springboards from which he plunges into his own blunt, sometimes dour analysis of American attitudes, practices and institutions. Hertsgaard at one point tells of a Cuban boy he met after America's presidential elections. "It sounds like you are having trouble with your democracy in the United States," the boy teases. "Perhaps Cuba should send you election observers next time." The wisecrack is an apt introduction to Hertsgaard's interpretation of the Florida ballot impasse, which he thinks exemplifies the faults of America's democratic process. If Hertsgaard's strength lies in elaborating upon foreigners' perceptions, however, his weakness lies in the way he addresses his readers. "I know that parts of this book will be difficult for some Americans to hear," he writes, in a tone a bit too superior


Hertsgaard was already circling the globe investigating other nations' perceptions of America when last September's terrorist attacks lent an unanticipated urgency to his findings. Few of those he interviewed in the 15 countries he visited express anything like the deep hatred of the U.S. that motivated the terrorists. Many voice warm admiration for America's dynamic economy, vibrant culture, and open political system. However, these same people also complain bitterly about how Americans dominate a world we poorly understand, sanctimoniously boast of democratic virtues while ignoring our complicity in the crimes of authoritarian regimes, and destroy other countries' deep-rooted cultural traditions by exporting our crass culture of self-indulgence and haste.

Mark Hertsgaard is a journalist, an astute observor and communicator, and a very fine writer. Hertsgaard is also an American and his driver for gathering the information for this book appears to be a need to produce a 'wakeup call' for Americans. Well documented with conversations with people around the world, this book sets out to show how the people in the countries of the world relate to (and even mimic) Americans as people while finding our government, our consumerism, and our foreign policy (read empiricism) distasteful. Rather than driving this idea to a dulling end, Herstgaard manages to show how Americans can learn from the perceptions of people outside the USA, can examine the flaws present in abundance in our governmental control of the media, our "dumbing down" of our information about the rest of the world condition (social and environmental) by the corporate emesis of rampant consumerism and "fluff news" that flood not only our films but also our television, magazines and, sadly, our newspapers. He submits strong warnings of the sequelae of ignoring fundamental issues of human rights in our allowing the corporate homogenation of the world, depriving the growing lower class of jobs and much needed medical and monetary support. He writes about the embarassment of the 2000 presidential elections, the rush to war post 911, the frighteningly quick passage of the Patriot Act which dangerously impinges on human rights, and the growing negligence of the Global Warming Effect and other issues of Environmental significance.

But while Hertsgaard is complete in his serious warnings about the current state of the American Mind, he does not look at the future with a hopeless eye. "The first challege for Americans is to do a better job of informing ourselves about what is going on around the world and our nation's role in it. This won't be easy, because the most readily available information comes from the media......If we are passive in the face of America's official actions overseas, we in effect endorse them." He concludes his excellent book with a question: "Why can't America be wise as well as powerful, generous as well as rich, magnanimous as well as great? For all its flaws, this country remains a place where amazing things can happen."

This book comes at a critical time for the United States. Yes, Hertsgaard has a soapbox presentation, but reading a man's commitment to the betterment of America should be required reading for our populace who would rather sit numbly in front of mindless TV 'reality' and game shows than carefully observe what is happening in the global situation. Americans are not presented as Bad Guys, just uninformed lazy minds who need to change priorities before it is too late.


The book is very informative about how much American culture and policies affect everyone in the world. Hertsgaard has encountered people in very remote areas of the world who are quite knowledgable about American culture. American products reach every corner of the earth, thus, they affect everyone on earth. The book also explains how our policies on the environment, economics, and foreign affairs affect people throughout the world. As globalization becomes more and more prevalant, books like this one become more important in order for us to understand our role and how we affect others in this new society. We must understand our actions so that we may anticipate and change how the rest of the world reacts to us.

Although it is clear from his writing that he is in support of the left wing, that does not mean this book is "left-wing propaganda." This book looks at the flaws of American foreign policies and our sometimes "cowboy mentality" when dealing with other countries and suggests some ways that we can change that and form better relationships with the rest of the world. However, it also looks at the wonderful freedoms, wealth, and potential that exists in America and how these can be gifts to the world if used responsibly.

I think some of the people who gave bad reviews may have missed the point of the way the book was written. The book was not supposed to be a bunch of interviews without any insight or reasoning to how these perceptions about the US formed. The author gave a few specific examples of ideas that many people in the world share regardless of their geographic location. The majority of the book was about the source of these views, both good and bad. Hertsgaard takes his interviews and applies the history and the current events that shape the ideas that are expressed by the people he spoke with.

Also, I think the bad reviews illustrate the author's views that Americans are largely ignorant of things that happen outside of this country, and the policies that our goverment and corporations impliment both at home and abroad. It is very hard for someone to hear that they are ignorant in any way. This does not mean Americans are ignorant. It just means we tend to be ignorant about certain things. As illustrated in the book, this is not entirely our fault. Our media gives us a very one-sided view of the world and how it works. The vast majority of mainstream media is owned by a handful of corporations who are naturally going to give us news that benefits their profit margins and image. This is not some conspiracy idea or anything like that. For the past few years, I have almost exclusively watched BBC and ITN news (on PBS). The amount of unbiased information that I received from these sources far exceeds that of network news and even CNN. Two months ago, I got digital cable and EuroNews was one of the new channels I watch (it is like a European version of CNN). Although I do not know how it ranks with other news sources in Europe, I do know that it is the BEST television news source in the US right now. I hear ideas and events that are going on all over the world (and here in the US) that are either not mentioned or glossed over in American television news. I apologize for this rant, but I think it illustrates that we are not as knowledgable about history and current events as we should be. This has to change if we are going to enter the new globalized society that is forming right now. If not, we will be left behind.

After the 9/11 tragety, the majority of Americans felt that they had to agree with everything our government was doing. Anyone who disagreed was considered anti-American. While support to our leaders and society was needed and important, it was also important to voice honest ideas and opinions. When I think of America the first thing that comes to my mind is that I have freedoms that others don't have. The first of these is the freedom of speech. So, when people disagreed with Bush and the policies that the government wanted to implement, THEY were being the real patriots and were the most pro-American. To paraphrase Hertsgaard stated in his book, we cannot substitute a feeling of security for our rights.

[svinayak]

Religion and American Culture
by George M. Marsden (Author)

# Paperback: 352 pages
# Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing; 2 edition (July 17, 2000)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0155055321
# ISBN-13: 978-0155055322

George Marsden's Religion and American Culture is a strong contribution in the field of American cultural history. In this brief work, Marsden sets out to examine the complex relationship between religion and American culture and what each tells us about the other. Marsden's thesis is that America's identity as a religious nation has always co-existed with a strong inclination towards the secular. Sometimes this mix of the sacred and secular has been peaceful. Other times this mix has created great tensions. Often times, however, the mixture of the religious and the secular has gone unnoticed as the secularization is driven by groups or individuals with religious motivations. Marsden describes how this uniquely American process leads to the irony of a highly secular culture made up of (self-described) highly religious individuals. Following the dominant stream of American Protestantism from its origins in the English Reformation and the accompanying political context, Marsden sets out to explore how the relationship of the religious and the secular has progressed from the pragmatism of the founding fathers, to the cultural declension of the present day. Marsden's method is quite strong. For the most part, Marsden allows the content of history to guide his framework as opposed to forcing his framework on the historical data he examines. For example, Marsden divides the book into historical periods but within each section he subdivides by topics. Sometimes this arrangement follows a chronological pattern, at other times it does not. The arrangement of the book allows the reader to examine each period of American history in light of Marsden's thesis about the complex relationship between the religious and the secular. Marsden tells the story of American history but he does it based upon the development of religion and culture not based upon events. Marsden also shows his strength as a historian in another way. Marsden laments the fact that "most historians have dwelt almost solely upon the secular" developments and motivations within American history. According to Marsden, this is not only philosophically unfair but also epistemologically risky. As an unapologetic evangelical teaching at strongly Catholic university, the reader should not be surprised that Marsden brings his confessional identity to the fore from the very first page. Marsden argues that the religious self-understandings of the groups and individuals that make up American culture can be a highly useful tool in interpreting the whole of American history. In a sense, then, Marsden provides the reader a brief cultural history of the United States. The reader comes away not only knowing more about religion in America, but about the history of the United States as a whole. The strongest part of the book, however, is that Marsden is content not to relax the inherent tension in the interplay between religion and culture. From the very first pages, Marsden confronts the reader with irony, paradox, division, and dissent. For example, Marsden details how the influx of massive numbers of foreign-born Catholics influenced American culture in the 19th century. Many of these Catholics left nations where the Catholic Church was the established church, but they entered an American culture where Protestantism was the dominant religious culture. The tension that developed between the dominant Protestants, still fearful of the power and influence of the Catholic church, and the immigrant Catholics had a profound impact on American poltical culture and Marsden helps display such ironies and tensions effectively throughout his book. In summary, Marsden helps the reader to better grasp the tremendous complexity of the relationship between religion, politics, and culture in American history. Furthermore, Marsden does so while striking a wonderful balance between his own unapologetic endorsement of the value of religion in the development of American cultural life and the neccesity of providing a well-researched and documented history for the reader.

Marston's book is an excellent historical survey of the interplay of religion and its surrounding culture. Throughout Marston shows how two themes have consistently been held in tension in American religious life; these being the continuing impact of the Puritan ideal of "Christian Society" and the existence of pluralism in thje midst of prevailing ideas. What is particularly interesting is how Marston shows that this puritan ethos along with the elevation of the ideal of liberty as the `American Way' has been adopted by the non-WASP demographic.

As a general history of the role of religion in american society I struggle to see how it could be much improved. Excellent.

[svinayak]

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There [BARGAIN PRICE]
by David Brooks (Author)


# Paperback: 288 pages
# Publisher: Simon & Schuster (March 6, 2001)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0684853787
# ASIN: B0013L4E66

"Bobo" is author David Brooks' acronym for a Bourgeois Bohemian, a synthesis of Reaganism and Woodstock, the folks he says are running the country today. Bobos are new money--the meritocracy of smart folk who have become rich as fast-track professionals, clever enterpreneurs, start-up capitalists, or visionaries like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Some Bobos are capitalistic hippies and some are mellowed-out business people; Bobo is their common meeting ground. True to their mixed heritage, Bobos love oxymoronic concepts like "sustainable development," "cooperative individualism" or "liberation management." Reconciliation is their middle name.

Bobos dislike showing off, but of course all rich people do, so they are allowed to show off in discreet ways. Mercedes are out, but SUV's are in. Jewelry is out, but eco-tourism is in. Bobox buy the same things the rest of us do (bread, chicken, coffee) but pay from 3 to 10 times the mass-market price in search of something better, organic, or more planet-friendly. In fact, anything that shows one to be a friend to the planet is fair game, no matter how silly. There's even a toothpaste that encourages germs to leave the mouth.

Needless to say, it takes a huge income to be a true Bobo. Brooks almost had this reviewer feeling sorry for the poor U. of Chicago professor forced to live on a "mere" household income of $180K, barely enough to cover private schools for her kids and a nanny. The wretch suffers from what Brooks calls "status-income disequilibrium" or "SID" because her pay, while handsome, pales before her similarly educated peers in the professions and business, with whom she has to socialize at symposia.

America teems with the newly rich. Bobos are most easily spotted in "Latte Towns" like Madison, Wisconsin or Northampton, Massachusetts. Ideally, such venues have "a Swedish-style government, German-style pedestrian malls, Victorian houses, Native American crafts, Italian coffee, Berkeley human rights groups, and Beverly Hills income levels." That's where you'll see the businessman wearing hiking boots patiently explaining 401(k) plans to the aging hippie who's making a killing selling bicyles, or software, or sandwiches.

Brooks is at his best describing the furbelows and follies of Bobo-dom. But Bobos in Paradise is really two books in one. Massive amounts of this text could have been computer cut-and-pasted from a work called something like American Intellectual History: 1955-2000. Sometimes Brooks maintains a light tone (without being truly funny), sometimes he is merely factual. I really didn't need to hear three times how tendentious the old Partisan Review gang was back in the fifties. I didn't really need to hear how a Bobo should act on a political chat show (smile a lot and be positive). I didn't really need to hear how TV has coopted intellectual life (that process began in the fifties with J. Fred Muggs and Steve-a-reeno, before most Bobos were born, and it was dealt with much better in the book Nobrow, anyway).

Don't get me wrong, the funny parts of this book are quite funny, and for that reason alone I'm giving it four stars. If it had been consistently funny and satiric I would have given it five. I came real close to giving it a three because the slow stretches, while not inaccurate, did little to further the author's thesis. If you intend to write pop sociology, better to write first-rate pop sociology than second-rate academic sociology.

One point to ponder is whether the term "Bobo" will catch on. In 1945 no one had heard of a "Highbrow" and in 1980 no one knew what a "Yuppie" was. And there were plenty of columnists who said that we didn't need such words, yet they became coin of the realm anyway. If it strikes you that your local rich people are starting to act like a fusion of Richard Gere and Bill Gates, or Al Gore and Jerry Garcia, then maybe the Bobo moniker might just cover them all. Hopeless trendoids, take note and read this book before the inevitable paperback edition.

You've seen them: They sip double-tall, nonfat lattes, chat on cell phones, and listen to NPR while driving their immaculate SUVs to Pottery Barn to shop for $48 titanium spatulas. They tread down specialty cheese aisles in top-of-the-line hiking boots and think nothing of laying down $5 for an olive-wheatgrass muffin. They're the bourgeois bohemians--"Bobos"--an unlikely blend of mainstream culture and 1960s-era counterculture that, according to David Brooks, represents both America's present and future: "These Bobos define our age. They are the new establishment. Their hybrid culture is the atmosphere we all breathe. Their status codes now govern social life." Amusing stereotypes aside, they're an "elite based on brainpower" and merit rather than pedigree or lineage: "Dumb good-looking people with great parents have been displaced by smart, ambitious, educated, and antiestablishment people with scuffed shoes."

Bobos in Paradise is a brilliant, breezy, and often hilarious study of the "cultural consequences of the information age." Large and influential (especially in terms of their buying power), the Bobos have reformed society through culture rather than politics, and Brooks clearly outlines this passing of the high-class torch by analyzing nearly all aspects of life: consumption habits, business and lifestyle choices, entertainment, spirituality, politics, and education. Employing a method he calls "comic sociology," Brooks relies on keen observations, wit, and intelligence rather than statistics and hard theory to make his points. And by copping to his own Bobo status, he comes across as revealing rather than spiteful in his dead-on humor. Take his description of a typical grocery store catering to discriminating Bobos: "The visitor to Fresh Fields is confronted with a big sign that says 'Organic Items today: 130.' This is like a barometer of virtue. If you came in on a day when only 60 items were organic, you'd feel cheated. But when the number hits the three figures, you can walk through the aisles with moral confidence."

Like any self-respecting Bobo, Brooks wears his erudition lightly and comfortably (not unlike, say, an expedition-weight triple-layer Gore-Tex jacket suitable for a Mount Everest assault but more often seen in the gym). But just because he's funny doesn't mean this is not a serious book. On the contrary, it is one of the more insightful works of social commentary in recent memory. His ideas are sharp, his writing crisp, and he even offers pointed suggestions for putting the considerable Bobo political clout to work. And, unlike the classes that spawned them--the hippies and the yuppies--Brooks insists the Bobos are here to stay: "Today the culture war is over, at least in the realm of the affluent. The centuries-old conflict has been reconciled." All the more reason to pay attention.

Transcendentalists vs. robber barons, beatniks vs. men in gray flannel suits, hippies vs. hawks: for more than a century, U.S. culture has been driven forward by tensions between bohemians and the bourgeoisie. Brooks, an editor at the conservative Weekly Standard and at Newsweek and an NPR commentator, argues that this longstanding paradigm has been eroded by the merging of bohemians and bourgeoisie into a new cultural, intellectual and financial elite: the "bobos." Drawing on diverse examples--from an analysis of the New York Times' marriage pages, the sociological writings of Vance Packard, Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte and such films as The Graduate--he wittily defends his thesis that the information age, in which ideas are as "vital to economic success as natural resources or finance capital," has created a culture in which once-uptight Babbitts relax and enjoy the sensual and material side of life and anti-establishment types relish capitalist success; thus a meritocracy of intellectualism and money has replaced the cultural war between self-expression and self-control. While it works well on a superficial level, Brooks's analysis is problematic upon close examination. For example, his claim that Ivy League universities moved toward a meritocracy when, in the 1960s, they began accepting some students on academic rather than family standing ignores the reality that the "legacy" system is still in force. Ultimately, by focusing myopically on the discrete phenomenon of the establishment of "bobos," Brooks avoids more complicated discussions of race, class, poverty or the cultural wars on abortion, homosexuality, education and religion that still rage today. (May)

[svinayak]

America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy
by Zbigniew Brzezinski (Author), Brent Scowcroft (Author), David Ignatius (Author)


# Hardcover: 304 pages
# Publisher: Basic Books (September 8, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0465015018
# ISBN-13: 978-0465015016

Refreshing in its candor and broad in scope, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft have put forth sound ideas about how we got to where we are, globally, and where we stand now. Added to that, they have made recommendations for the incoming president. These two men, one Democrat and one Republican, are men of stature and experience and both have been successful negotiators, so when they speak, people listen. It would have been beneficial had the Bush administration heeded their advice in many areas.

Washington Post associate editor, David Ignatius, "chairs" the discussion, in that he set up a series of interviews with the two and plays the role of moderator. He's good at it, too, gently prodding them with his own thoughts. That Brzezinski and Scowcroft agree on most of the larger issues comes as little surprise. It hearkens back to the day when foreign policy had a bipartisan component...something that has all but disappeared.

The book covers such topics as Iraq, Israel and Pakistan, ("two unsolved problems") China, (and Asia) Russia and Europe. They comment on the changing world situation and if there is one person who is largely absent from their discussions, it is President Bush. Brzezinski is more open in his disdain for the current president and one gets the feeling that Scowcroft's impressions of Bush are similar but just under the surface. They do disagree to an extent about the timetable of withdrawal from Iraq and the European Union and NATO, with regard to Russia.

Each chapter is riveting and no words are wasted. Brzezinski and Scowcroft are clearly two who have thought long and hard about America and have some disheartening feelings about America's loss of respect around the world. But they are optimistic about American global leadership in general and that it's necessary for us to regain our footing when the new president assumes office. "America and the World" is a tour de force and I highly recommend it for the wealth of experience that Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft have given in service to our country, which is shared with readers here.

Bitter, partisan rancor has characterized most discussion of foreign policy in America in recent years. This is a long tradition that has waxed and waned in intensity, depending on the perceived success or lack thereof of the country's involvement in international affairs, since the founding of the Republic. When this rancor runs high, it encourages our enemies, confuses our friends, and makes difficult the formulation and execution of any coherent U.S. foreign policy.

But there is another tradition as well, involving agreement on broad principles - the Monroe Doctrine, the containment policy of the Cold War - as well as restraint in name-calling and judging motivations - dissent is not termed un-American and intelligence mistakes are not called lies - combined with a vigorous bipartisanship that actively seeks consensus.

When this tradition is ascendant, as it was, for example, in the 1940s, American foreign policy tends to be more successful than when it is not, for example, in the Vietnam era and since 2003.

This book, as defined in its introduction, is "an experiment to see if a prominent Democrat and a prominent Republican - speaking only for themselves and not for or against either party - could find common ground for a new start in foreign policy." The experiment succeeded, and it produced what its dust jacket blurb correctly calls "a deeply informed and provocative book that defines the center of responsible opinion on American foreign policy."

The book consists of a series of discussions during the spring of 2008 between Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, and Brent Scowcroft, who held the same position under Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, moderated by David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist and former Executive Editor of the International Herald Tribune.

Brzezinski and Scowcroft might be considered foreign policy realists, in that they tend to begin with consideration of the national interest. But they both resist categorization as realists or idealists, agreeing that U.S. policy must strike a balance between the extremes of either school, combining power with principle, acknowledging limitations, and recognizing that everything can't be done at once.

They agree that the next president should stress bipartisanship in his foreign policy.

Here are some other important points of agreement:

A Cold War mindset that obscures new global realities, including the reduced role of the nation state, persists among U.S. policymakers.
The United States has become "too frightened in this age of terrorism, too hunkered down behind physical and intellectual walls."

While the "global center of gravity" is shifting toward Asia, a strong Atlantic community is vital for the United States as well as Europe, and the West will remain pre-eminent for some time.

Chances are good that China can be peacefully assimilated into the international system, and there is no need for the United States to choose between China and Japan as its principal "anchor point" in Asia.

A vigorous U.S. effort to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem should be a high priority for the next president.

In spite of its limitations and current problems, the United States remains the country most able to "exercise enlightened leadership" for the global community.

There are also some significant points of disagreement:

While both publicly opposed the invasion of Iraq before it was launched, Scowcroft believes it has "created new conditions" requiring that we stabilize the situation before leaving. As he put it, "I think simply withdrawing is an impediment to a solution. And Zbig thinks it helps."

Both believe that Russia is trying to re-assert pre-eminence in the territory of the former USSR, especially Georgia and Ukraine; both are skeptical of the utility of putting missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic; but Brzezinski favors the option of NATO membership for Ukraine while Scowcroft opposes it.

Scowcroft is more concerned than Brzezinski about a nuclear Iran, fearing that "we stand on the cusp of a great flowering of proliferation if Iran is not contained in its attempt to develop a capability for nuclear weapons;" but neither seems to have a good prescription for thwarting this development other that continuing the thus-far-futile effort to mobilize greater international pressure.

These wise men agree that U.S. policy has not adapted well to a world that is changing in fundamental ways. They want to "restore a confident, forward-looking America," and they are optimistic about the country's future - but only if it "can rise to the challenge of dealing with the world as it now is, not as we wish it to be."

[svinayak]

Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy
by Michael H. Hunt (Author)


# Paperback: 288 pages
# Publisher: Yale University Press (April 28, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 030013925X
# ISBN-13: 978-0300139259

Many historians of diplomacy refer to some inchoate set of common principles and ideas that seems to lie behind all the twists and turns of American 20th-century foreign policy; Hunt actually tries to determine what that shared ideology was. He describes three basic components of this shared ideology:
1) America's vision of national greatness,
2) the American propensity to view the world's population in a hierarchy of race (and later culture as its substitute), and
3) America's growing disappointment and horror at failed revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries.

He makes a sound, logical argument, and this book holds an importance place in its field. Certainly, Americans have always believed (and rightly so, in my opinion) that theirs is the greatest political system on earth. Indisputably, Americans have tended to assign characteristics to peoples on the basis of race (from blacks to eastern Europeans to Asians). I can't buy as strongly into the effects of failed revolutions--surely, the French Revolution shocked and displeased Americans who expected it to be a revolution in the American vein and just the first in a series of changes that would bring peace and freedom to all peoples. The Bolshevik Revolution also affected Americans' views of the world significantly, but I think Hunt overexaggerates the fears generated at home by Third World revolutions abroad. As Hunt would be the first to admit, ideology alone cannot explain foreign policy, and I find that his arguments do not explain to my satisfaction the disparity between Jeffersonian/Wilsonian and Federalist/FDR/LBJ thinkers. Overall, though, I found this book noble in its intentions and quite utilitarian in covering a neglected area in the field of foreign policy.

Then I read the last chapter. After putting forth his arguments, Hunt feels compelled to proscribe a new, more effective foreign policy for the United States. The fact that this exceeds the purview of an historian is beyond the point. His suggestions for changing the ideological notions of American diplomacy strike me as dangerously isolationist (despite his assertion to the contrary), exceedingly liberal, and naïve. He basically argues that America should get out of the business of imperialism, stop worrying about what other countries are doing, and devote itself to creating social and political equality at home. The Cold War had not ended when this book was written, but his suggestion was that we basically let Communism determine its own future while we implement socialism at home. Hunt must have been terribly disappointed to see Ronald Reagan win the Cold War so soon after this book's publication because that victory invalidates many of his recommendations. Hunt's main contention is that America cannot simultaneously maintain liberty at home while working to spread freedom abroad--while I think he is completely wrong about this, the subject is being hotly debated in the context of the war on terrorism and will surely be debated for all time.

I do recommend this book. I disagree with his conclusions, but his points are presented clearly, and his insights into history are invaluable. I should also mention that he ends the book with a chapter discussing relevant books in the field of ideology and foreign policy--although his references seem weighted toward revisionist/leftist scholars, it is a very useful introduction to further readings in the important and always hotly debated field of American diplomacy.

[svinayak]

The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
by Odd Arne Westad (Author)

# Paperback: 498 pages
# Publisher: Cambridge University Press (February 19, 2007)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 052170314X
# ISBN-13: 978-0521703147

This fine book is devoted to a hugely important topic typically neglected in most discussions of the Cold War; the course and impact of the Cold War in the Third World. Most overview monographs on the Cold War concentrate on US-Soviet relations and/or the impact of the Cold War in Europe and Japan. Westad successfully attempts an overview and structural analysis of the Cold War in the Third World. Westad opens with a pair of summary chapters on the USA and Soviet Union leading up to the beginning of the Cold War. He then covers the early decades of the Cold War in the Third World concisely, and devotes much of the book to the last 2 decades of the Cold War, including detailed analyses of the events in Afghanistan, Africa, and Central America. Based on a wealth of secondary sources and analysis of primary literature from both US and Soviet archives, the narrative is comprehensive, clear, and punctuated with thoughtful analysis.

Westad's book offers a new interpretation of the second half of the twentieth century, one that focuses on how the conflict between the US and the USSR-- and the division of the world into two halves-- played out in the Third World, and shaped and was shaped by the politics of those regions. The first two chapters are fairly heavy going, as Westad lays out sweeping statements about first the US, then the USSR, arguing that both countries developed around ideas that committed them to an almost evangelical form of statehood, of exporting their way of life. As he moves into the middle of the book, however, the story really takes off; he offers well-informed, fascinating case studies ranging from Angola and Ethiopia to Iran and Afghanistan. In every case, he illuminates the way in which the US and USSR offered only two sides on the playing field, and how people in these Third World countries responded by playing the superpowers off one another. One of the central processes that he brings to light is the way in which this situation eventually encouraged the rise of sectarian movements in many of those countries, including fundamentalist Islam, which appears here as a natural development from a generation who had watched their predecessors cast in with one of the two superpowers, and end up pawns in a global chess game. After finishing this book, I felt that I had an entirely new perspective on American history in the 20th century and better understood current-day issues from the rise of Islam to American support for Israel to the politics of central Africa. Certainly NOT a light read, but an invaluable one.

There is a lot of surprising information. While many readers will be aware of US interventions in places like Guatemala and Iran, Westad's descriptions of the depth of US interventions in places like Indonesia and Brazil will come as a surprise. Similarly, his description of how the Soviet involvement in the Third World came to be seen as a crucial element of the legitimacy of the Soviet state goes a long way towards explaining why the events in Afghanistan had such importance. With respect to the battleground states of the various Third World countries where US and Soviet interventions took place, this is generally a series of tragic stories, usually involving considerable bloodshed and impoverishment.

Westad goes considerably beyond good narrative. Several well articulated themes run through the narrative. A basic concept is that the Cold War was driven by two competing ideologies about what should be the basis of modern society - American liberal capitalism and Soviet communism. Westad is very good on how ideological considerations consistently drove US and Soviet policy decisions, including the many cases where ideology led to gross misunderstandings of reality. Another important theme is the independent role of local elites in Third World countries. Over and over again, these elites or portions of them sought superpower support to pursue their own ends, often quite different from those of the superpowers. This led, for example, to the depressingly frequent US support of brutal dictatorships and the Soviet support of regimes who suppressed local communist parties. Westad is very good as well at showing how the Cold War involvement of the superpowers was entangled with decolonialization, another important theme. Both the US and Soviet Union presented themselves as, and made serious efforts to act as, modernizers. In a series of particularly ironic developments, both US and Soviet policies often mimicked the development policies of the imperial states they displaced.

My only substantial criticisms of Westad are his treatment of the origins of the Cold War. Westad presents US policies as rooted in a long history of US expansionism and capitalist ideology. There is considerable truth in this position but it ignores some of the specific circumstances of the 1940s. The failure of the post-WWI settlement seemed to demand a dominant international US role after WWII. Similarly, as Westad's own narrative shows, US fears of the Soviet Union were driven in good part by Stalin's aggressive and paranoid behavior.

Westad concludes by highlighting the frequently tragic consequences of US and Soviet intervention in Third World states, often transforming local conflicts into major disasters. The results of US and Soviet interventions in the Third World are among the most important results of the Cold War, and these results have been largely negative.

'This is a genuinely 'international' history ... few genuine research monographs are so wide ranging chronologically and geographically, while also trying to absorb insights from sociology and social anthropology ... taken as a whole no historian has dealt with the links between the Cold War so fully, so broadly and so thoughtfully as Westad in this new account ... a truly seminal work, whose findings will exercise those researching the Cold War for many years.' Reviews in History 'The Global Cold War is a powerful account of the way in which the third world moved to the center of international politics in the closing decades of the 20th century. Drawing on a stunning multiplicity of archival material, Odd Arne Westad integrates perspectives and disciplines which have, until now, remained separate: US and Soviet ideologies, their politics and the interventions that flowed from both; insurrection, rebellion, revolution and the power of competing models of development, systems of support or subversion (sometimes synonymous) that in part determined their outcome. Westad writes with the combination of clarity, wit and passion that have always characterized his work. This time the canvas is large enough to do full justice to his scholarship and his humanity.' Marilyn B. Young, New York University 'Odd Arne Westad's new book is an extremely important contribution to the historiography of the Cold War. With broad erudition, amazing geographical range, and inventive research in archives around the globe, Westad tells the tragic story of the United States and Soviet Union's involvement in what became the 'Third World'. The newly emerging nations of the 'South' - of Africa, Asia, and Latin America - barely emerged from their humiliating subservience to European colonialism before being dragged by Cold War rivalries into ideologically-inspired upheavals that ended up bankrupting their countries and devastating their peoples. Westad's study enables his readers to integrate the Third World into the history of the Cold War and confronts them with the meaning of intervention in the past for the international system today.' Norman M. Naimark, Stanford University 'In a reinterpretation of the Cold War that is as thorough as it is important, Westad places Soviet and American interventions in the Third World at the center of their struggle. Driven by ideology and the need to affirm the rightness of their principles, both superpowers felt compelled to contest with the other in areas of little intrinsic importance. The results were almost uniformly failures, and in the process brought much sorrow and destruction to the Third World. The picture is not a pretty one, but Westad shows that studying it reveals much about the Cold War, and about the current world scene.' Robert Jervis, Columbia University 'Based on prodigious research, this ambitious and wide-ranging book presents the most important account to date of the Cold War in the Third World. Westad's study represents broad-based, international history at its best. He deftly weaves together the tale of world politics writ large with stories about variegated processes of revolution and social change across the Third World. This should prove an indispensable work for anyone interested in the history of the twentieth-century.' Robert J. McMahon, University of Florida 'For the serious student of our times Odd Arne Westad's The Global Cold War could provide a serious weapon for their scholastic arsenal.' Open History: The Journal of the Open University History Society '... Westad's work combines sophisticated analysis, insight into the motivations and behaviours of non-Western actors, historical perspective, fair-mindedness and a sympathy for the victims on all sides. Westad's pioneering work in Soviet archives means that his book illuminates better than any other work I have read in English the thinking and motivations of the Soviet leadership and its advisers when it came to the Third World.' London Review of Books '... Westad presents a finely crafted and immaculately researched study that presents some of the findings from the archives of the former Soviet Union and its communist allies alongside the more familiar American and western sources.' International Affairs 'There are already a number of books on the Cold War, and more are likely as more information becomes available. This work will remain important, however, for shifting the focus away from Europe and North Korea, to the wider world in which the superpower struggle took place. It is well written and draws on a wide range of materials. Many will not agree with all the arguments, but it is a major contribution to our understanding of how the world became as it is.' Asian Affairs 'Westad's brilliant, bitter account, based on prodigious research, is an indictment of the superpowers. They treated the Third World as their playground and left it devastated. ... The authors provide new insights into the Berlin crises of 1958-63.' Martin McCauley

[svinayak]

The Steps to War: An Empirical Study
by Paul D. Senese (Author), John A. Vasquez (Author)


# Paperback: 334 pages
# Publisher: Princeton University Press; illustrated edition edition (July 21, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0691138923
# ISBN-13: 978-0691138923

The question of what causes war has concerned statesmen since the time of Thucydides. The Steps to War utilizes new data on militarized interstate disputes from 1816 to 2001 to identify the factors that increase the probability that a crisis will escalate to war. In this book, Paul Senese and John Vasquez test one of the major behavioral explanations of war--the steps to war--by identifying the various factors that put two states at risk for war. Focusing on the era of classic international politics from 1816 to 1945, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War period, they look at the roles of territorial disputes, alliances, rivalry, and arms races and show how the likelihood of war increases significantly as these risk factors are combined. Senese and Vasquez argue that war is more likely in the presence of these factors because they increase threat perception and put both sides into a security dilemma.

The Steps to War calls into question certain prevailing realist beliefs, like peace through strength, demonstrating how threatening to use force and engaging in power politics is more likely to lead to war than to peace.

[svinayak]

China's Rise: Challenges and Opportunities
by
C. Fred Bergsten (Author),
Charles Freeman (Author),
Nicholas R. Lardy (Author),
Derek J. Mitchell (Author)


# Hardcover: 280 pages
# Publisher: Peterson Institute for International Economcis; 1 edition (September 23, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0881324175
# ISBN-13: 978-0881324174

China has emerged as an economic powerhouse (projected to have the largest economy in the world in a little over a decade) and is taking an ever-increasing role on the world stage. China's Rise: Challenges and Opportunities is designed to help the United States better comprehend the facts and dynamics underpinning China's rise, which is an understanding that becomes more and more important with each passing day. Additionally, the authors suggest actions both countries can take that will not only maximize the opportunities for China's constructive integration into the international community but also help form a domestic consensus that will provide a stable foundation for such policies. Filled with facts for policymakers, this much-anticipated book's narrative-driven, accessible style will appeal to the general reader. The expert judgments in this book paint a picture of a China confronting domestic challenges that are in many ways side effects of its economic successes, while simultaneously trying to take advantage of the foreign policy benefits of those same successes. China's Rise: Challenges and Opportunities from The China Balance Sheet Project, a joint, multiyear project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Peterson Institute, discusses China's military modernization; China's increasing soft power influence in Asia and around the world; China's policy toward Taiwan; domestic political development; Beijing's political relations with China's provincial and municipal authorities; corruption and social unrest; rebalancing China's economic growth; the exchange rate controversy; energy and the environment; industrial policy; trade disputes; and investment issues. The book's introduction and conclusion address additional issues, such as key trends in China's political decision making and its impact on US interests.


While many people are "aware" of China, very few have much "understanding". China Rises provides information, observations and insights that are very helpful for those who are interested in developing a more informed view of China, its incredible complexities, remarkable achievements, as well as its massive challenges and opportunities. Although clearly viewed with a "western" bias, this is a book that finally provides a much more balanced perspective of US-China strategic relationships and interdependencies. It is a very useful addition to the "China" dialogue and well worth reading

[svinayak]

Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas

# Paperback: 392 pages
# Publisher: Cambridge University Press (June 2, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0521670004
# ISBN-13: 978-0521670005

Cortright's thorough and thoughtful discussion of the ideas and movements that have associated themselves with the word "peace" deserves a wide audience. It covers a lot of ground without appearing rushed and covers some interesting detail along the way on the origins of key concepts, the roles of religion and international law, and the continuing struggle against charges of cowardice and a lack of patriotism. Cortright writes with a commitment to the cause but also sufficient detachment to allow readers to make up their own minds about the issues being addressed. Peace movements have suffered from, he acknowledges, "a persistent naïveté, a tendency toward utopianism . . . , an inadequate grasp of the unavoidable dilemmas of security, [and] an unwillingness to accept the inherent egoism of human communities." Yet when "pacifism" is taken broadly to refer to all those working on the problem of how to prevent war and build peace, rather than just a pure moral stance, he notes broad achievements. Many of the commonplace ideas of international security originated with groups that were considered in their time to be either unpatriotic or hopelessly idealistic.


"Cortright (Univ. of Notre Dame) has written an excellent history of peace movements and themes. He approaches the definition of peace with an understanding of its changing concept through time and its pendulum swings from utopian to realist. Cortright covers an extensive amount of history and philosophy in a cohesive and easy to understand format. The author's ability to represent the idealistic perceptions of peace and pacifism while articulating 'realistic pacifism' is particularly pleasing." --Choice

Veteran scholar and peace activist David Cortright offers a definitive history of the human striving for peace and an analysis of its religious and intellectual roots. This authoritative, balanced, and highly readable volume traces the rise of peace advocacy and internationalism from their origins in earlier centuries through the mass movements of recent decades: the pacifist campaigns of the 1930s, the Vietnam antiwar movement, and the waves of disarmament activism that peaked in the 1980s. Also explored are the underlying principles of peace - nonviolence, democracy, social justice, and human rights - all placed within a framework of 'realistic pacifism'. Peace brings the story up-to-date by examining opposition to the Iraq War and responses to the so-called 'war on terror'. This is history with a modern twist, set in the context of current debates about 'the responsibility to protect', nuclear proliferation, Darfur, and conflict transformation.

From laypeople and students, all the way to scholars, policy-makers and business leaders, this book is a must-read for everyone. It is a pragmatic, thoroughly researched, objective and honest account of the history of nonviolent action and peace ideas struggling against incredible odds. Cortright has once again managed magnificently to write a book that is concise, understandable, and above all, a very good read.

The first chapter is titled, "What is peace?" All of us conjure up an answer of what peace is which originates from an interpretation of our personal experiences and those of others. Cortright has taken the experiences of the many and answers the question, "what is peace?" in a way that might challenge, and change your answer.

In our troubled world with destabilizing threats facing the security of our families to our world, we cannot sit idly by. Alternatives to solve these problems do exist. If you believe we are on the wrong path, (a burning question for me is how can the US spend more on our Pentagon budget annually - which does not include the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - than the entire world combined, yet I feel less secure than ever before), and you are willing to open your mind to an alternative way, I believe you have come to the right book.

[svinayak]

The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power
by David E. Sanger (Author)

# Hardcover: 528 pages
# Publisher: Harmony (January 13, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0307407926
# ISBN-13: 978-0307407924

Sanger describes what President-Elect Obama will face - results of the costs of distraction and lost opportunities in Iraq. He does not cover our weakened position due to the 2008 market collapse. His best material involves the latest developments in Iran.

The 2007 NIE report on Iran reported that they had ceased working on a bomb in 2003, but omitted the fact that this is the easiest portion - far easier than creating the required enriched fissionable material, especially given the availability of Russian experts and Pakistani help. The classified version also alleged Iran had added covert enrichment sites to the main (known) one. After crying wolf re Iraq, U.S. intelligence was unable to raise the alarm about Iran. The "good news" is that the U.S. tunneled into Irani computer systems and obtained extensive background information.

President Bush then decided to try sabotaging Iran's efforts - eg. arranging power supplies that generated unstable electricity that destroyed centrifuges (about 50) when turned on. The "bad news" is that Iran is now estimated to have 4,000 active centrifuges - enough to build a bomb/year, and is building new centrifuges that are even better. Experts see Iran as having enough material for a few weapons by 2010-12, and being set back only two years by a bombing campaign that would create enormous new problems in Iraq and elsewhere.

During the Spring 2008, Israel requested precision bunker-busting bombs and Iraq overflight rights to do the job themselves. President Bush refused.

The U.S. started Iran down the nuclear path in the 1950s; fortunately, Khomeini ignored it when the Shah was deposed. However, Saddam's use of chemical weapons on Iran rekindled interest. The U.S. had an opportunity to obtain Iran's cooperation post 9/11, especially at the time of "Mission Accomplished." Cheney, however, believed the Iranians were on the verge of collapse and successfully argued for ignoring their proposal.

Sanger now sees the U.S. at another point of strength in negotiating vs. Iran - their economy is at a nadir with the recent drop in oil prices.

Meanwhile, our intelligence chiefs have made repeated secret trips to Pakistan to try and stem a growing insurgency and cope with an ally aiding the enemy. "The Inheritance" also takes readers to Afghanistan, where Bush II never delivered on his promises to rebuild, paving the way for the Taliban's return. General McNeil (2008) tells Sanger that managing troops from 26 nations (mostly NATO), most of whom are under instructions to avoid regions where casualties were likely, and often also required advance approval from their capitals, is not a good way to win a war.

The Afghan government revenue in 2008 was $716 million, vs. a $4 billion narco-trade (per CIA). (Couldn't the NATO troops at least be used to clear the poppy fields?) Bush promised a "Marshal Plan" for Afghanistan ($90 billion in today's dollars), but months after that speech the U.S. had pledged only $290 million (half that from Iran, and only a small portion of the $5 billion total).

Another problem is Pakistan and its history of supporting the Taliban (valued by the Pakistani military and ISI for keeping India out of Afghanistan). Sanger says they have neither the will nor the means to take on al Qaeda and the Taliban. Worse yet, it has 70,000 nuclear workers, including about 2,000 "hard core" scientists and engineers. Our NIE review of the region concluded that Pakistan, with its economy near collapse, is the real prize for al Qaeda.

Then Sanger covers North Korea where actual WMD were built while the U.S. pursued phantoms in Iraq, and the technology then sold to Syria - unknown to the U.S. Sanger also then tells how China used the Bush years to expand influence in Asia and lock up oil supplies in Africa.

Sanger ends with three scenarios that depict terrorism vulnerabilities. The first (nuclear) involves a crude, very-low power nuclear device set off in D.C., and costing $500,000. The parts could either be smuggled into the U.S. in pieces or assembled - the U.S. detectors are outdated and probably couldn't detect it (despite creating 400-600 false alarms/day at Long Beach). New technology would reduce the false alarms, but probably still couldn't detect a nuclear weapon, per Sanger.

The second vulnerability is vs. biological weapons - major cities have detectors, but reading the results takes at least a day. Estimated cost: $500 million.

The third vulnerability involves a cyber attack - requiring about three years and another $500 million, and capable of destroying expensive diesel generators, electricity transmission lines, neutralizing our defenses, etc.

This important book explores the colossal failure of the Bush presidency. It shows us that Bush's policies and decisions were even worse than we knew. And that's really saying something.

It doesn't get into the Iraq war, how we got in and how we are attempting to get out. The focus instead is on opportunity cost. The real price of the war in Iraq is more profound than the $800 billion spent or even the sad human cost in deaths and casualties. The true price tag includes what we should have been doing instead. As author David Sanger puts it, when "the `decider' became the ditherer," the country became distracted from more immediate problems in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea. The winner after eight years of Bush's leadership? China.

The problems were not all Bush's fault, of course. But the way he and his administration responded weakened our country. "At the moment when we most needed to act like a truly enlightened superpower, we let fear trump judgment, we depleted our political capital and moral authority, and we sullied our reputation as the world's safest, best-regulated place to invest. The scorecard at the end of eight years is unforgiving: Barack Obama now inherits a country in far more peril -- both strategically and economically -- than Bush did when he took office."

The Inheritance is full of behind-the-scenes vignettes and insights. The author met with Bush in Crawford, Texas, eight days before the newly-elected president would be sworn in. Bush was joshing and informal, but as they entered the house, he warned, "Wipe your feet well, boys. I may have just been elected President of the United States, but Laura will have my *** if there's mud in her living room." Later, talking about his newly named press secretary, Ari Fleischer, Bush confessed "There's a lot I won't be telling him. There's a lot you won't hear." As Sanger puts it, "He got that right."

The epilogue, titled Obama's Challenge, begins with this quote: "Great crises create the opportunity to forge great presidencies." Here's hoping.

Here's the chapter list:

Introduction: The Briefing
Part 1: Iran
The Mullah's Manhattan Project
1. Decoding Project 111
2. Regime-Change Fantasies
3. Ahmadinejad's Monologue
4. The Israel Option

Part 2: Afghanistan
How The Good War Went Bad
5. The Marshall Plan That Wasn't
The Other "Mission Accomplished"

Part 3: Pakistan
"How Do You Invade An Ally?"
7. Secrets of Chaklala Cantonment
Crossing the Line

Part 4: North Korea
The Nuclear Renegade That Got Away
9. Kim Jong-Il 8, Bush 0
10. Cheney's Lost War
"Everything is Appomattox"

Part 5: China
New Torch, Old Dragons
12. Generation Lenovo
The Puncture Strategy

Part 6: The Three Vulnerabilities
14. Deterrence 2.0
15. The Invisible Attack
Dark Angel

Epilogue: Obama's Challenge
Acknowledgments
Note on Sources
Suggested Reading
Endnotes

[ramana]

The English Civil wars: 1640-1660 By Blair Worden, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Rs 695

NOT A WAR WITHOUT MEANING


The English Civil wars: 1640-1660 By Blair Worden, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Rs 695

The history that was made in England between 1640 and 1660 remains epochal because it was the first time that a monarch was beheaded as an expression of popular will and protest; it was also the first experiment with republican government. Regicide and republicanism made many historians see the events of those 20 years as a revolution. Other historians have seen the events as the expression of a country at war with itself. Hence the term, ‘the English Civil War’. Blair Worden, in this delightful little book, introduces the term, ‘Civil Wars’. He explains his use of the plural noun thus: “The civil war will mean the war fought between king and parliament in 1642-6. The civil wars will mean the range of conflicts, military and political, of the 1640s and 1650s.”

The book is divided into five short chapters: ‘Origins’, ‘War’, ‘Regicide’, ‘Republic’ and ‘Restoration’. The emphasis is heavily on political history at which Worden excels. But one looks in vain, say in the chapter, ‘Origins’, to learn something about the economic conditions (some would say, crisis) prevailing in the 1620s and 1630s. Similarly, while Worden analyses the political positions adopted by the various groups upholding the cause of parliament, there is scarcely a word about their economic ideology. This is one major lacuna of the book. It is political history at its best, but a kind of political history that believes that the subject can be understood without its interactions with the economy.

The author is also very good at separating the strands of religious doctrine and debate that excited contemporaries in the middle of the 17th century. The term, ‘Puritan Revolution’, since the time it was first used in the 19th century, has tended to act as a kind of holdall. Worden separates the various strands and where they stood against episcopacy. He does this without going into the nitty-gritty of theological doctrines. This is one of the real strengths of the book, and it serves to underscore how strong religious sentiments were in the wars that divided England in the middle of the 17th century.

Worden writes with a hint of disapproval about what happened in England in the 17th century. He comes close to upholding the king’s cause without quite saying it. He closes the book with the words of a poem written by John Dryden in 1700. Dryden walked with John Milton and Andrew Marvell in Oliver Cromwell’s funeral procession, but in 1700, looking back, he had written, “Thy wars brought nothing about.” Worden approves of this assessment.

This raises a few questions. Did the Royalists actually regain the throne that Charles “needlessly lost”? Worden seems to think so. But surely the throne to which Charles II ascended was not the same one from which his father had ruled. The terms of power had been radically altered. The significance of this change was demonstrated in the Settlement of 1688, which Worden seems to think was unconnected with the events that engulfed England between 1640 and 1660.

Historians may have overstated their case by calling the events a revolution. It would be a similar kind of exaggeration to conclude on the other side that the events signified nothing. There is meaning in failure. History, as a great historian of the 17th century, for whom Worden has much time, said, is tragedy, although not a meaningless one.

RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE

[svinayak]

Great Powers: America and the World After Bush
by Thomas P.M. Barnett (Author)

# Hardcover: 496 pages
# Publisher: Putnam Adult (February 5, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0399155376
# ISBN-13: 978-0399155376

Barnett (The Pentagon's New Map) offers a comprehensive catalogue of the failings of the Bush administration and a strategic roadmap for American foreign policy in this sweeping text. The author takes a broad approach to the contemporary political landscape, surveying U.S. history from the Revolution through the end of the Cold War and applying lessons from that history to the present. Drawing on a variety of secondary sources and his personal and professional experiences as a national security specialist and consultant, Barnett argues in favor of cooperation with rising powers such as China and India and continued movement in the direction of globalization; he distills his central thesis down to the contention that America must dramatically realign its own post-9/11 trajectory with that of the world at large. Barnett writes in a conversational style. Despite the text's vast scope, it has a clear, straightforward structure, even featuring a glossary of key terms, and it provides an accessible and engaging foray into global grand strategy.
His excoriating first chapter limns “The Seven Deadly Sins of Bush- Cheney,” starting with Lust (for world primacy). A sensible grand strategy, even for a superpower, must attract more allies than it repulses, he notes, yet the Bush administration broke treaties and advocated preemptive wars, then complained when Russia and China refused to help in Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan. Proceeding with catchy titles, Barnett delivers “A Twelve-Step Recovery Program for American Grand Strategy” in the second chapter. We must begin by admitting our powerlessness over globalization, he writes. We opened that Pandora’s box long ago, and it’s ridiculous to denounce other nations’ cheap labor and protectionist trade policies, because that’s how American growth began. Unlike many world-affairs gurus, but in line with Fareed Zakaria’s The Post- American World (2008), Barnett is an optimist, pointing out that free-market capitalism is now the world’s default system, the middle-class is increasing and poverty is diminishing. Attacking Bush’s fixation on the “global war on terror” (Sin No. 2: Anger), he stresses that it’s merely one of a half-dozen world problems, more easily solved by rising prosperity than military action. Naïveté, not anger, led to Bush’s painfully unsuccessful efforts to spread democracy. Looking back, Barnett reminds readers that America was a one-party autocracy until the 1820s and that freedom doesn’t happen when a government grants it but when an increasingly assertive, and prosperous, citizenry demand it. China’s rise mirrors the American model more than we realize, he contends, and Iraqis won’t demand a bill of rights until they have jobs.

Barnett's earlier books, especially The Pentagon's Mew Map, took much of the fear out of the War on Terror and replaced it with a challenge to America to engage with the other economic powers in the world to complete globalization and lift two billion more people out of poverty. His latest book, Great Powers, tells us why it's something we can and must do not only for those two billion people but for America's future. Particularly interesting are the parallels he draws between America's history and the state of things in many developing countries. Our government and our laws took generations to fully develop and its no suprise that the same is true elsewhere, China and Russia included. This book is a roadmap for the US for the next several generations. Barnett is nothing if not a hardheaded realist. He says that the military is still going to play a large role overseas in small wars but that the real goal is to get poor countries to attract capital and develop substantial economies of their own. This requires multinational trade and development efforts; the more countries the better. This not only lifts people out of poverty but takes away the rationale for terrorist activity.

To make the leap countries need to educate their children, boys and girls, adopt the business rules and institutions that permit foreign business to deal with them and gradually transition to governments that will work for the people not the ruling class. In Barnett's world, prosperity is king. By engaging with the other big economic players in the world the US can lead a team that can make this happen. If you are feeling sorry for the state of the world these days, this book will lift your spirits with its very believable "Yes we can!" message.

Thomas Barnett has created a masterpiece that focuses on the future, by reminding Americans of their past. Here is why: Barnett took the empirical evidence from works of hundreds of noted historians and primary sources and began to make a comparison of American history to today's world and more importantly to the world of tomorrow. All the while he continued to blog, writing his thoughts and collecting snippets of material from those 180+ who by way of responding, enlisted in his "Corp of Discovery" to chart a vision of the future. In the finest tradition of the Medici Effect, Tom Barnett collected all the intersecting ideas and points of information, mulled them over in his mind, shared them with his many readers, listened to their voices, gave presentations around the world and heard back from his audiences. Out of this mass of information he created Great Powers.

When I read Tom's work I am struck how much his view of American history dovetails with my own views. I am of the infamous boomer generation, but by fate was raised by my grandparents, who probably gave me as large a dose of "the Greatest Generation" as they had instilled in my mother, so I always seemed to feel more comfortable in my views of the world in that earlier cohort group. Today, as I teach my modern American history classes, I realize that lessons I have tried to instill into my students appear in Great Powers. So much has written about our history, concentrating on the greatest events or on our failures, as has been the case in the recent decades of navel gazing and self-loathing treatises. Tom boils it down to the really important events and persons responsible for today's rapidly connected world. Reading this book will instill a sense pride in being part of this great and grand experiment called America.

Great Powers is written for everyone interested in history, politics and strategy, but it is especially useful to generation coming up that is hungry to envision a better world. To launch them on their many courses, they need to have the knowledge that the port that launched them, the United States, is more than the negatives they have heard about since they began to read and understand. As those of the next generation sail into the future they need to know their home port is something to be proud of, and its source code of empowerment, something to be cherished.

Tom Barnett's Great Powers: America and the World After Bush is an engaging, detailed discussion about the world today and the coming decades. I did not agree with all of Barnett's assessments or recommendations, but I respected his thought process. Particularly engaging was Barnett's discussion of the American military, what he refers to as the Leviathan. Barnett discussed the role of the American military in the world, the true challenges it faces and what it does not face (China for instance), and how other nations should more openly rely on our Leviathan force.

But I part ways with Barnett on many of his other thoughts. First, his description of what a grand strategy is struck me as strange. I am not a geopolitical expert, but when I hear the phrase grand strategy I recall George Kennan's Long Telegram, which essentially stated the US strategy for the Cold War before it even began. What Kennan set out was more or less followed, with some variation, by ever US president form Truman to Reagan. But Barnett seems to say that grand strategy can be an accident of history. He discusses the development of the "American System," which has transitioned to globalization. But unlike Kennan's strategy, which was first implemented by the State Department, he seems to acknowledge that this "strategy" could be considered accidental or unintentional. Is that a strategy?

I am also not fully convinced that we should be viewing every nation on earth, and every struggle, as a microcosm of the American experience. Barnett is right that the US had developmental growing pains and we should not be surprised to see other nations having similar problems as they develop towards, we hope, democratic/capitalist nations. But I do not think all our interactions with the world should be based on that assumption. It assumes a certain logical progression of human history that I am not sure holds true. For example, Barnett spends some time discussing "development in a box." The concept being there are certain systems that need to be put in place in every nation, for example banking services, for them to develop. While it may be true that development requires banking, what type of banking can vary. In Iraq, a retail banking model might work. But in vast parts of Africa, micro credit is more appropriate. Barnett acknowledges that there are local differences that need to be accounted for, but these local differences seem so vast to me that is undercuts the entire theory of "development in a box." So far, the concept has only been used in Northern Iraq, the Kurdish reasons. It may work well there, but packing that same box for a vastly different terrain just might not work.

[svinayak]

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
by David Kilcullen (Author)

# Hardcover: 384 pages
# Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (March 16, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0195368347
# ISBN-13: 978-0195368345

Kilcullen, adviser on counterinsurgency to General Petraeus, defines accidental guerrillas as locals fighting primarily because outsiders (often Westerners) are intruding into their physical and cultural space, but they may also be galvanized by high-tech, internationally oriented ideologues. This interaction of two kinds of nonstate opponents renders both traditional counterterrorism and counterinsurgency inadequate. Kilcullen uses Afghanistan and Iraq as primary case studies for a new kind of war that relies on an ability to provoke Western powers into protracted, exhausting, expensive interventions. Kilcullen presents two possible responses. Strategic disruption keeps existing terrorists off balance. Military assistance attacks the conditions producing accidental guerrillas. That may mean full-spectrum assistance, involving an entire society. Moving beyond a simplistic war on terror depends on rebalancing military and nonmilitary elements of power. It calls for a long view, a measured approach and a need to distinguish among various enemies. It requires limiting the role of government agencies in favor of an indirect approach emphasizing local interests and local relationships. Not least, Kilcullen says, breaking the terrorist cycle requires establishing patterns of virtue, moral authority, and credibility in the larger society. Kilcullen's compelling argument merits wide attention.

This is a brilliant and comprehensive discussion of the current global environment, but has a lot of provocative comments that could be taken out of context.

Starting with two major case studies (Afghanistan and Iraq) and a few smaller ones (East Timor, Thailand, Pakistan, and the European Union), David Kilcullen builds several arguments. The most salient point to me were the need to identify both overarching patterns (like the movement of Al Qaida money and people) and to develop a refined understanding of each insurgency or movement in isolation. Also important are the concepts of the relative nature of "foreigner", "outsider", "invader" etc. and the absence of absolutes in counterinsurgency.

The case studies are well constructed and rapidly convey the complexity of the cultures and the implications of those complexities, as well as clearly identifying tactics and strategies for gaining the upperhand in the strategic sense. The central point, that many "insurgents" are locals who feel threatened operating with 'outsiders' (who threaten the locals) against other 'outsiders' (who also threaten the locals), is an old lesson of World War II Balkans, the British intervension in Malaysia, the French in Indochina and later the U.S. in Viet Nam. As far as I can tell, the reason it is forgotten is that Western militaries want to focus on big budget, big contract, high tech, maneuver warfare, and diplomats don't want to discuss conflict at all. Guerrilla warfare fits neither world view. Part of the strategic solution to these conflicts is address the issues that are exploited by "foreign fighters" (a.k.a. Al Qaida, but Communists in the past, and who knows what movements in the future). Each regional or country issue is both a part of the larger whole, and a microcosm, and has to be dealt with on both levels. When we try to 'simplify' the problem by lumping things together and ignoring the finer points of local conflicts, we complicate the solution of the local conflicts, and undermine the strategic efforts.

His final recommendations are far reaching, apparently simple, organizationally challenging, but, I believe, would significantly improve the U.S. efforts against the threats that face America.
->Develop (and implicitly, propagate and enforce the use of) a new lexicon to discuss insurgency, counter-insurgency, etc.
->Develop a good 'Grand Strategy'; don't focus on near term solutions, focus on national interest and the sensible allocation of resource towards those ends, and prioritize the geographical regions.
->Rebalance the instruments of national power; the Department of Defense is only one element, the diplomats hold the keys to infomational, diplomatic, and economic instruments, but they aren't manned proportionately.
->Develop a discrete 'Strategic Services' capability, mostly focused on infomation gathering and analysis, and providing humanitarian and other support in target areas.
->Develop a dedicated, central information warfare activity focused on getting our message out to people in 'at risk' regions.

David Kilcullen's book "The Accidental Guerrilla" is a dense read and requires you to have an intense interest in the subject. It is not for the faint of heart but is well worth the investment of reading in order to understand the subject - our safety. For those of us not involved in the military this book opens the curtain on a world we never see. I have far more respect (and disrespect in some cases) for the people who work so diligently to keep us safe and think about how to protect us from evolving threats and enemies.

David points out that while many US Military leaders where congratulating themselves on the supremacy of US strength and overwhelming dominance new hybrid threats emerged, ones we at first denied and now struggle to adapt to. While the US maintained that no major land war would ever occur again because of our massive armaments, the Chinese, for example, were developing the idea of unrestricted warfare. Colonel Qiao, said, "the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden."

Turns out that there are more wars and violence, not less, despite US dominance. The author offers four possible models for understanding why this situation exists and what responses can be taken. These localized wars could be
1) a backlash against Globalization
2) Insurgency has been globalized, i.e. funded and used by large interests that exceed national boundaries such as religious forces
3) a civil war within Islam, and
4) asymmetric warfare,
that security should be understand from a functional and capability standpoint leaving the politics out of the evaluation and response.

Great book if you want to understand the dangerous world in which we live and why simplistic answers no longer work. Made me understand the challenges leaders face, and often having to select from 2 bad choices. Very dangerous world that is not getting any better. Read this book if you want to vote meaningfully and make informed decisions with opinions based on facts instead of rhetoric or simply from partisan politics.

[svinayak]

Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country
by William Greider (Author)



# Hardcover: 336 pages
# Publisher: Rodale Books; 1 edition (March 17, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1594868166
# ISBN-13: 978-1594868160

Ever since the early 1990s, Greider (Who Will Tell the People?) has been warning that our democracy is in peril because America’s political parties have abandoned the citizenry in favor of the interests of corporations and the power elite. Here he outlines the full substance of the predicament we find ourselves in as exhibited by the financial collapse: a culmination of our decaying democracy, the negative effects of globalism, the dominance of militarism in our financial policy, the destruction of the middle class, and the threat of global climate change. Greider argues that spreading our style of democracy through force is a new form of imperialism stemming from an arrogance of power. He sees much pain in our future if we remain on our current course but finds hope for a day of reckoning when mass social movements and a third front that fills the space between big government and the private sector will take power back into the hands of ordinary citizens. While those in power may claim that Greider’s ideas are defeatist or unpatriotic, it is during times like these that his dissenting ideas are likely to resonate with a large and angry audience.

Bill Greider has written a very good book, and a very needed book, about the dire situation our nation is facing. The timing of its appearance, given of the curve of events, especially the public's outrage over the AIG bonuses, has made him smile, I'm sure, and seem just a bit prophetic, since he assigns a big role for growing citizen participation to build a new economy, and a "thicker" democracy. (For "the smile," see his Op-Ed in the Outlook section of the March 22, 2009 edition of the Washington Post: "Main Street is Fired Up. Does Obama Feel the Heat?" at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02511.html )

It seems a lot of folks are calling for "Fireside Chats" these days, including NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who wants President Obama to level with the people over how tough the road ahead will be, but primarily to rally them behind the Secretary of the Treasury Geithner's Bailout II; others have called the President's recent appearance on the Jay Leno show a modern day "video" equivalent of the FDR original radio broadcasts, but this writer believes it is Bill Greider who has delivered a real Fireside Chat to the nation with his new book Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of our Country (Rodale).

To be a genuine Fireside Chat, whatever the format, success is a matter of both tone and content: a conversational, over-the-fence tone, and serious, society-shaking subject matter. Greider has done justice, and then some, to both aspects. His opening chapter, "Fair Warning," is nearly pitch perfect in putting the reader at ease that the matters which follow, grave as they are, will be understandable. And he's tough, but fair, on the nation's political leaders: "I have some hard things to say about our country. Beyond recession and financial crisis, we are in much deeper trouble than many people suppose or the authorities want to acknowledge...the political behavior I do not forgive is failing to give people fair warning...those who govern ought to tell people what's coming so they at least have a chance to get out of the way."

[svinayak]

The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)
by Christopher A. Preble (Author)

# Hardcover: 212 pages
# Publisher: Cornell University Press (April 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0801447658
# ISBN-13: 978-0801447655

Numerous polls show that Americans want to reduce our military presence abroad, allowing our allies and other nations to assume greater responsibility both for their own defense and for enforcing security in their respective regions. In The Power Problem, Christopher A. Preble explores the aims, costs, and limitations of the use of this nation's military power; throughout, he makes the case that the majority of Americans are right, and the foreign policy experts who disdain the public's perspective are wrong. Preble is a keen and skeptical observer of recent U.S. foreign policy experiences, which have been marked by the promiscuous use of armed intervention. He documents how the possession of vast military strength runs contrary to the original intent of the Founders, and has, as they feared, shifted the balance of power away from individual citizens and toward the central government, and from the legislative and judicial branches of government to the exe! cutive.

In Preble's estimate, if policymakers in Washington have at their disposal immense military might, they will constantly be tempted to overreach, and to redefine ever more broadly the "national interest." Preble holds that the core national interest-preserving American security-is easily defined and largely immutable. Possessing vast military power in order to further other objectives is, he asserts, illicit and to be resisted. Preble views military power as purely instrumental: if it advances U.S. security, then it is fulfilling its essential role. If it does not-if it undermines our security, imposes unnecessary costs, and forces all Americans to incur additional risks-then our military power is a problem, one that only we can solve. As it stands today, Washington's eagerness to maintain and use an enormous and expensive military is corrosive to contemporary American democracy.

About the Author
Christopher A. Preble is Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute and a former commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy. He is the author of John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap and Exiting Iraq: Why the U.S. Must End the Military Occupation and Renew the War against Al Qaeda.

[svinayak]

Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy
by Leslie H. Gelb (Author)

# Hardcover: 352 pages
# Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (March 17, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0061714542
# ISBN-13: 978-0061714542

Gelb, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times, sets out guidelines for stewarding American power through the 21st century in this thoughtful, comprehensive and engaging examination. Drawing on Machiavelli's The Prince, the author addresses current leaders and their real-world choices, aiming his critiques at the soft and hard powerites, America's premature gravediggers, the world-is-flat globalization crowd, and the usually triumphant schemers who make up the typical U.S. foreign policy roundtable. Gelb writes that America remains the world's most powerful single nation, but this does not mean that the U.S. has absolute or even dominant global hegemony. Along with other major nations, it must accept the principle of mutual indispensability, and work toward global objectives with the full cooperation of Russia, China and other emerging powers. Gelb's bulleted rules and clear advice to President Obama distill his moderate strategic thinking on the future of America: a poised, posed, and credible sword, wrapped in diplomacy and economic power. It is a vision of a pragmatic but responsible global U.S. presence that eschews partisan politics and should find favor in the coming political clime.

The 15th century ambassador of the city-state of Florence, Italy, Niccolo Machiavelli once wrote:

"There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless."

Whether Leslie H. Gelb's book Power Rules falls into the first or the second of Machiavelli's three types of intelligence is the question to be answered in this book review.

Gelb relates what he understands for himself as a political moderate about U.S. foreign policy based on decades of working for Presidents on both sides of the political spectrum. His book emulates Machiavelli's book The Prince as a guidebook on foreign policy. In fact, Gelb even addresses a Letter to Our Elected Prince (Obama) as a preface to the book.

Using Gelb's favorite concept about U.S. foreign policy, this book is "indispendable" and should get a wide reading across the political spectrum. He disabuses just about every camp of foreign policy -- hard-dumb, soft-smart, and globalist-economic -- of their preconceived notions about foreign affairs. Instead he opts for what he calls a common sense approach. But unlike Machiavelli, Gelb's approach is based on non-necessity or non-imperatives (i.e., choice). Contrary to Machiavelli, Gelb says war is rarely necessary, as necessity is prone to being invented. Gelb is thus a postmodernist Machiavellian, however otherwise realistic and commensensical he is.

Despite that I couldn't put this well-written book down I am sorry to say that it is a disappointment not by what he wrote but what he didn't. For in singling out the invasion of Iraq by President George W. Bush II for special criticism Gelb never answers the elusive question of our time: if Bush's invasion of Iraq and his policy of pre-emptive warfare was such an obvious failure why did Machiavelli write "There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others"? Gelb loves to invoke Machiavelli to legitimate his book but unfortunately for us only selectively so. He sidestepped this issue.

Gelb offers six excellent chapters of rules for exercising power. However, while Gelb is certainly aware in his book of how foreign states (Saudi, Jordan, Iran) harbor, fund, and arm shadow terrorist networks both within and outside their countries, he frustratingly doesn't offer any guidelines of how to deal with them. Gelb puts so much emphasis on cooperation with other nations that are our allies or our rivals that he fails to answer what we do when they are also our ally-enemies? Or what kind of leverage of doors can you open with a nation that threatens to develops nukes but is willing to starve its own people (North Korea)? Bush at least opened the cultural door by sending the New York Symphony Orchestra to Pyongyang.

Gelb isn't naive. He just fails to address this paradox although he criticizes conservative foreign policy thinkers as simplistic and unable to handle complexity. Oddly, Machiavelli is mostly embraced by conservatives, not liberals.

Machiavelli wrote in Book II, Chapter 9 of his Discourses the following: "this method of starting war has always been common among the powerful and among those who still have respect for both their own word and that of others. For if I wish to wage war upon a prince with whom I have long-respected treaties, I can attack one of his friends with more justification and excuse than I can attack the prince, knowing for a certainty that if I attack his friend he will either resent it (and I shall fulfill my intention of waging war upon him) or not resent it, in which case he will reveal his weakness or lack of faith by not defending one of his dependents. Either one of these two alternatives suffices to lessen his reputation and to facilitate my plans." In other words, is the Iraq War an indirect war waged against both neighborhing Iran and Saudi Arabia? Gelb doesn't say. But if it is an indirect war then the reasons why Bush failed at devising a public justification for the war become more apparent. Gelb's approach may be commensensical, non-ideological, and aversive of what he calls "demons," but it isn't too deep.

I got the feeling from reading the book that Gelb is ingratiating himself with the new Obama Presidential administration, not for a job (like Machiavelli did with the Lorenzo de Medici), but to disabuse the Obama team of their notions of soft power and that all you have to do in foreign policy is negotiate. If so, Gelb has his own double Machiavellian motivation to slip some medicine into the dog food while playing doctor and criticizing his last patient (Bush) for not taking his medicine.

It is plausible that a faction within Saudi Arabia wanted the U.S. to fight their war for them against Iraq. We have known for a long time that the Saudis view the U.S. military as a mercenary force at their command due to their control of oil prices. We know that 19 of the 21 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi. Wasn't it the ancient Chinese war strategist Sun Tzu who wrote to get others to fight your wars for you? If this was the case, Gelb offers no understanding of how the U.S. should deal with such a situation. Should it have negotiated, gone to war with Saudi Arabia and cut its economic lifeline of oil, or what? We don't know because Gelb is stuck on answers that are obvious and full of common sense rather than those that everyone seems to want to avoid like some sort of dark family secret.

The book jacket is filled with endorsements mainly by liberal foreign policy critics who have embraced Gelb's book as a sort of vindication of their criticisms of Bush's actions and policies by the dean of foreign policy. Gelb, however, is above the fray, but to almost to a fault. That is because he leaves some of the most tantalizing and prescient propositions of Machiavelli about the Iraq War unanswered. Instead he has opted to write a book that casts a pox on everyone's houses -- which is greatly needed.

In the end, however, I am afraid that I have to put Gelb's book in the second category of Machiavelli's as that which "appreciates what others can understand" more than it casts light or depth on what we don't understand. Nonetheless, don't miss reading this excellent book. It is a *necessity,* even if it is your choice.

Leslie Gelb's distillation of a lifetime of experience both as an astute (and at times ascerbic) observer (writing the foreign affairs column for the New York Times) and involved participant (in the Johnson Defense Department and Carter State Department) shine thru in this remarkable book. Written with unusual candor and clarity, Gelb's arguments--that the world is not flat, and that America's foreign policy must center on the principle of "mutual indispensability" are compelling. His frequent use of historical references, and especially his rivoting personal experiences give the book a powerful educational flavor and a fascinating immediacy.

[svinayak]

The Cost of Capitalism: Understanding Market Mayhem and Stabilizing our Economic Future
by Robert Barbera (Author)


# Hardcover: 240 pages
# Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (February 13, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0071628444
# ISBN-13: 978-0071628440

In the Cost of Capitalism, Robert Barbera provides compelling answers to all these questions. In the process, he offers the most cogent analysis yet of today's crisis and explains how to manage the ever present potential for mayhem intrinsic to free market economies without stunting innovation and growth.
.

At the core of Barbera's thinking are three assumptions: first, boom and bust cycles have been stoked since 1985 by finance, not inflation; second, Main Street stability paradoxically invites excessive risk taking on Wall Street; and last, these things set the stage for small setbacks to deliver cataclysmic consequences.
.

Barbera applauds current efforts to unabashedly infuse public money into the global economy. It's the only way, he says, to prevent another Great Depression. And, looking beyond the crisis of the moment, Barbera contends that mainstream thinkers need to form a new economic paradigm by embracing the insights of free market champions like Joseph Schumpeter and the cautionary wisdom of Hyman Minsky.
.

Financial market mayhem comes with the territory in a free market system. Nonetheless, innovators and their bankers still offer the world the best chance for a prosperous twenty-first century. Economists, policymakers, and investors must begin to redefine their understanding of free market capitalism. The Cost of Capitalism will set them on that course..

Robert J. Barbera has written just such a book, an economic seminar that everyone will "get."

Finance usually comes across as Dull (that's dull with a capital D), but The Cost of Capitalism is not boring. For example, Barbera uses hypothetical home-buying twins, Hanna and Hal, to explain why the mortgage bubble burst after a relatively small drop in property values and how the resulting pop disabled the banking industry--the case of "a small set back delivering cataclysmic consequences."

Barbera believes that capitalism is the best economic system (no surprise there, he makes his living analyzing capitalism). He is also a disciple of Hyman Minsky. If you don't know who Minsky is, that's fine, because the book does a masterful job of placing Minsky in today's context, which lays the groundwork for a major theme of The Cost of Capitalism: Central financial planners must admit that players in the free market (from Main Street to Wall Street) make decisions based more on human nature than rational theory. The resulting behavior leads to booms and busts. The busts require government intervention--the cost of capitalism.

The book uses historical analysis to focus on cause-and-effect relationships that have somehow been missed by the Federal Reserve. Barbera writes, "From 1945 to 1985 there was no recession caused by the instability of investment prompted by financial speculation--and since 1985 there has been no recession that has not been caused by these factors." Yet, as Barbera shows, the Fed behaved as if inflation were the economy's only enemy. He argues persuasively that American capitalism needs "a new paradigm," one that recognizes the wisdom of Minsky and extracts our proverbial head from the sand.

The Cost of Capitalism is full of instructive charts and graphs, which simplify complex ideas as well as providing welcome visual breaks between analytical prose. My only complaint (any reviewer worth his/her salt has to have at least one) is that the notes and abbreviations with the graphs could have been better defined.

[svinayak]

The Crisis of Islamic Civilization
by Ali A. Allawi (Author)

# Hardcover: 320 pages
# Publisher: Yale University Press (April 28, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0300139314
# ISBN-13: 978-0300139310

Allawi (The Occupation of Iraq), former minister of defense and minister of finance in Iraq's postwar governments, offers his version of the causes and consequences of the decline of Islamic civilization and proposals for its rejuvenation. The author argues that the West's violent encroachment on the Muslim world in the 19th and 20th centuries shattered local institutions and economies and disrupted any natural evolution of Islamic society; furthermore, current efforts to modernize the faith amount to draping an entire civilization in ill-fitting, inorganic ideas. Allawi calls for a return to the creative and artistic heritage of Islam and a restoration of balance—between the physical and the spiritual... between men and women; between rights and duties—while suggesting that the time to find balance may soon run out. The writing is erudite and the conclusions fascinating, but Allawi's dismissive attitude toward Western societies and their mass rejection... of the cardinal virtues, not least wisdom and moderation, as well as a reluctance to accommodate anything other than a faith-based understanding of human reality might limit his audience.

Islam as a religion is central to the lives of over a billion people, but its outer expression as a distinctive civilization has been undergoing a monumental crisis. Buffeted by powerful adverse currents, Islamic civilization today is a shadow of its former self. The most disturbing and possibly fatal of these currents—the imperial expansion of the West into Muslim lands and the blast of modernity that accompanied it—are now compounded by a third giant wave, globalization.



These forces have increasingly tested Islam and Islamic civilization for validity, adaptability, and the ability to hold on to the loyalty of Muslims, says Ali A. Allawi in his provocative new book. While the faith has proved resilient in the face of these challenges, other aspects of Islamic civilization have atrophied or died, Allawi contends, and Islamic civilization is now undergoing its last crisis.



The book explores how Islamic civilization began to unravel under colonial rule, as its institutions, laws, and economies were often replaced by inadequate modern equivalents. Allawi also examines the backlash expressed through the increasing religiosity of Muslim societies and the spectacular rise of political Islam and its terrorist offshoots. Assessing the status of each of the building blocks of Islamic civilization, the author concludes that Islamic civilization cannot survive without the vital spirituality that underpinned it in the past. He identifies a key set of principles for moving forward, principles that will surprise some and anger others, yet clearly must be considered.

[svinayak]

China's Rise: Challenges and Opportunities
by C. Fred Bergsten (Author), Charles Freeman (Author), Nicholas R. Lardy (Author), Derek J. Mitchell (Author)

# Hardcover: 280 pages
# Publisher: Peterson Institute for International Economcis; 1 edition (September 23, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0881324175
# ISBN-13: 978-0881324174

China has emerged as an economic powerhouse (projected to have the largest economy in the world in a little over a decade) and is taking an ever-increasing role on the world stage. China's Rise: Challenges and Opportunities is designed to help the United States better comprehend the facts and dynamics underpinning China's rise, which is an understanding that becomes more and more important with each passing day. Additionally, the authors suggest actions both countries can take that will not only maximize the opportunities for China's constructive integration into the international community but also help form a domestic consensus that will provide a stable foundation for such policies. Filled with facts for policymakers, this much-anticipated book's narrative-driven, accessible style will appeal to the general reader. The expert judgments in this book paint a picture of a China confronting domestic challenges that are in many ways side effects of its economic successes, while simultaneously trying to take advantage of the foreign policy benefits of those same successes. China's Rise: Challenges and Opportunities from The China Balance Sheet Project, a joint, multiyear project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Peterson Institute, discusses China's military modernization; China's increasing soft power influence in Asia and around the world; China's policy toward Taiwan; domestic political development; Beijing's political relations with China's provincial and municipal authorities; corruption and social unrest; rebalancing China's economic growth; the exchange rate controversy; energy and the environment; industrial policy; trade disputes; and investment issues. The book's introduction and conclusion address additional issues, such as key trends in China's political decision making and its impact on US interests.
While many people are "aware" of China, very few have much "understanding". China Rises provides information, observations and insights that are very helpful for those who are interested in developing a more informed view of China, its incredible complexities, remarkable achievements, as well as its massive challenges and opportunities. Although clearly viewed with a "western" bias, this is a book that finally provides a much more balanced perspective of US-China strategic relationships and interdependencies. It is a very useful addition to the "China" dialogue and well worth reading

[svinayak]

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
by Nicholson Baker (Author), Norman Dietz (Author, Narrator)


# Hardcover
# Publisher: Playaway (July 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1615456678
# ISBN-13: 978-1615456673

"Burning a village properly takes a long time," wrote a British commander in Iraq in 1920. In this sometimes astonishing yet perplexing account of the destructive futility of war, NBCC award–winning writer Baker (Double Fold) traces a direct line from there to WWII, when Flying Fortresses and incendiary bombs made it possible to burn a city in almost no time at all. Central to Baker's episodic narrative- a chronological juxtaposition of discrete moments from 1892 to December 31, 1941-are accounts from contemporary reports of Britain's terror campaign of repeatedly bombing German cities even before the London blitz. The large chorus of voices echoing here range from pacifists like Quaker Clarence Pickett to the seemingly cynical warmongering of Churchill and FDR; the rueful resignation of German-Jewish diarist Viktor Klemperer to Clementine Churchill's hate-filled reference to "yellow Japanese lice." Baker offers no judgment, but he also fails to offer context: was Hitler's purported plan to send the Jews to Madagascar serious, or, as one leading historian has called it, a fiction? Baker gives no clue. Yet many incidents carry an emotional wallop-of anger and shock at actions on all sides-that could force one to reconsider means and ends even in a "good" war and to view the word "terror" in a very discomfiting context.


Bestselling author Nicholson Baker, recognized as one of the most dexterous and talented writers in America today, has created a compelling work of nonfiction bound to provoke discussion and controversy -- a wide-ranging, astonishingly fresh perspective on the political and social landscape that gave rise to World War II.

Human Smoke delivers a closely textured, deeply moving indictment of the treasured myths that have romanticized much of the 1930s and '40s. Incorporating meticulous research and well-documented sources -- including newspaper and magazine articles, radio speeches, memoirs, and diaries -- the book juxtaposes hundreds of interrelated moments of decision, brutality, suffering, and mercy. Vivid glimpses of political leaders and their dissenters illuminate and examine the gradual, horrifying advance toward overt global war and Holocaust.

Praised by critics and readers alike for his exquisitely observant eye and deft, inimitable prose, Baker has assembled a narrative within Human Smoke that unfolds gracefully, tragically, and persuasively. This is an unforgettable book that makes a profound impact on our perceptions of historical events and mourns the unthinkable loss humanity has borne at its own hand.

[svinayak]

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
by Daniel Yergin (Author)


# Paperback: 928 pages
# Publisher: Free Press; New edition (December 23, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1439110123
# ISBN-13: 978-1439110126

The Prize recounts the panoramic history of the world's most important resource: oil. Daniel Yergin's timeless book chronicles the struggle for wealth and power that has surrounded oil for decades and that continues to fuel global rivalries, shake the world economy, and transform the destiny of men and nations. This updated edition categorically proves the unwavering significance of oil throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first by tracing economic and political clashes over precious "black gold."

With his far-reaching insight and in-depth research, Yergin is uniquely positioned to address the present battle over energy, which undoubtedly ranks as one of the most vital issues of our time. The canvas of his narrative history is enormous -- from the drilling of the first well in Pennsylvania through two great world wars to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Operation Desert Storm, and now both the Iraq War and climate change. The definitive work on the subject of oil, The Prize is a book of extraordinary breadth, riveting excitement, and great value -- crucial to our understanding of world politics and the economy today -- and tomorrow.

"The Prize" deserved its Pulitzer Prize three times over. It gives insight into history, without which, you can not understand history since the discovery of oil. This book gives history substance and excitement. In between the lines you can see the many small changes in the history of oil, each typically the work of a single person, that totally changed the history of WWII and the world as we know it. For example,Yergin shows that the history of WWII was very much determined by the availability of oil over and over again. The destruction of the Japanese in the south Pacific because their ships could not use proper tactics or go full speed for lack of oil is one example. The story of the "Henderson", a little destroyer, that was able to cripple the Japanese fleet by making it go into a defensive action that caused it to use more oil than it could afford and at the same time wipe out a cruiser was awe inspiring. The story of how the Japanese air force was largely destroyed by poor quality and inadequate fuel for training and flying was shocking. The book was long but fantastically interesting. I could hardly put it down. This is a book to be read slowly and pondered to allow the awesome magnitude of what is being said to sink in.

Yergin's prize-winning 1991 history stretches from the first Pennsylvania oil rush in 1860 to the crash of world oil prices in 2008, and it all reads like a novel. Well, not quite. The new epilogue, which covers the period after the Gulf war in 11 pages, skims along ten times faster than the rest and feels a bit more like a history lesson. But it gives you a balanced view of recent events.

I bought it as I started researching energy. Two full bookshelves later, I can tell you, no other book in this field holds a candle to it for fascination and information. I've read complaints about what it doesn't cover so here are some alternatives, but if you want tales of the way greed, ignorance, and cleverness respond to natural wealth and, in turn, shape world history and current global politics, this is your book.

• Oil geology and exploration: Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (New Edition).
• What to do about OPEC: Carbonomics: How to Fix the Climate and Charge It to OPEC.
• Alternatives to Oil: Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition.
• Big Oil's power: The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry--and What We Must Do to Stop It.

There's no summarizing such a book, but this might give you an idea of the tales it tells: The 1930 discovery of the Black Giant in East Texas nearly destroyed the oil industry, sending prices down to thirteen cents a barrel. After a voluntary shutdown failed, the Governor of Texas sent the Texas Rangers in on horseback. They shut down production and sent prices back up. This led to the Texas Railroad Commission becoming the first government-organized oil cartel — a model for OPEC years later.

As an economist I really appreciate the fact that Yergin gets his economics right. This is crucial for a book about price manipulation, and it's pretty unusual. For example he understands why the Saudis tried to hold price down in 1979 and why Bush Senior flew to Saudi Arabia in 1986 to try to get them to raise the price back up! Yergen helps you understand exactly why things happen in this topsey-turvey world.

In any case, The Prize has been selling like hotcakes for 18 years. Whether you're fascinated by powerful historical forces or disgusted but intrigued by fossil fuel, you won't be disappointed.

[svinayak]

The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan
by Gregory Feifer (Author)

# Hardcover: 336 pages
# Publisher: HarperCollins (January 6, 2009)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0061143189
# ISBN-13: 978-0061143182

Feifer’s account of the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion and 10-year occupation of Afghanistan from 1979–89 builds on considerable original research and on Russian-language histories not available in English. Emphasizing the experiences of Soviet personnel sent to Afghanistan, Feifer portrays their war within the context of political and military decisions that led to their fighting in Afghanistan. The actual decision by Soviet leaders to invade was, as far as Feifer can discover, a muddle. It came after the Communist government in Kabul, unable to quash violent resistance to its program, split apart in bloody factional fighting. But by staging a coup to install their stooge Babrak Karmal in power, the Soviets took the war into their own hands and escalated it accordingly. Their major offensives, acording to Feifer, never delivered a strategic victory, though they tended to prevail in individual battles depicted in the stories of several Soviet officers and soldiers. Tracing the arc of the Soviets’ military disillusionment in Afghanistan, Feifer, who is an NPR reporter in Moscow, provides essential historical background to the present war in Afghanistan. --Gilbert Taylor

The conflict is shown from multiple perspectives, first from Russian intelligence, to PDPA, to foot soldiers involved in the battles, then onto the several factions that united the country against the Soviets. It dives into the tactics and intense guerilla conflicts and shows the emotional damage that caused both sides to lose their humanity. Ultimately, these tactics plunged the soldiers involved on both sides into some of the most atrocious acts committed by mankind. In the film "Charlie Wilson's War", there is a scene where Russian fighter pilots are casually talking about relationships while gunning down civilians. This book will show a much more complicated picture which created the same stress our soldiers faced in Vietnam. In addition, we see the seeds sown for the current state of affairs. If you are a reader that is familiar with Afghanistan, you'll find that Mr. Felfer introduces a lot of these players and gives us their background, including the fate of one charismatic leader Ahmed Moassad.

Several history books can suffer from two flaws. One, the author becomes so intimately connected to his work that the information becomes second hand and he forgets how laymen approach the subject when writing. Or two, so much detail is involved that the reader can miss the overall map of what's important and happening. This book suffers from neither. It's totally accessible and Mr. Felfer knows what readers need to understand about this topic.

The only thing that bothered me is that it is marketed as saying how similar our situation is with the Russians. I think the comparison is hugely over exaggerated and there are several massive flaws with it. I won't go into them because this is a review but I should mention that the author never includes a chapter comparing our conflict with the Soviets. This is purely about the Soviets and to buy this for any other reason is faulty.

I'll just conclude this review with two other books that really helped me understand the region and helped me support Pres. Obama's decision to send more troops. They are Steve Coll's The Ghost Wars, (it'll give a brief intro to the Soviet Afghan war but really focuses on America's involvement in the region up to Sept 10, 2001) and Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos. Mr. Rashid's book is the definitive book I've read on the conflict since Sep 11, 2001.

The Soviets had come to help the locals. Why were they hiding?" Sergeant Alexander Kalandrashvili's annoyance at finding a village empty of applauding citizens when his battalion drives through in late December, 1979, is just one example of the misunderstandings that contributed to the Soviet Union's version of a quagmire: a decade or so spent bogged down, fighting an enemy that was hard to define and even harder to locate, using tactics, weapons and strategies hopelessly out of tune with the country itself. Amazingly, by the time I had read 50 pages, I found myself deeply sympathizing with the Russian officials baffled by the Afghan leaders and their double- and triple-dealing!

This history of the Soviet Union's invasion of and quest to subdue Afghanistan during the 1980s is unbelievably timely, arriving in bookstores just as the focus of the 'war on terror' shifts from Iraq to Afghanistan and debate about building up forces in that country rages. Anyone reading this will find it hard to escape the parallels between the Russians' plight of nearly three decades ago, and that of the Americans today or the irony that the roots of American engagement today lie in our efforts to support the guerilla opposition to the Soviets back then. Above all, there is the single overwhelming fact that no invading force has ever managed to permanently subdue Afghanistan.

This is a book about fascinating events, and events that are little known and little understood, except within certain circles in the former Soviet Union. But it is not a fascinating book. There are writers who can take chronicles of war and conflict and turn them into riveting narratives that are impossible to put down. Unfortunately, Feifer didn't manage to pull off that feat. The result is a very worthwhile and significant book which should be read by anyone interested in American foreign policy, but a book that all too often feels plodding in tone and that frequently becomes bogged down in an endless litany of names, places, dates, items of military hardware, details of political infighting, etc. (The chapter titles say it all: "The Soviets Dig In"; "The Mujahideen Fight Back", "The Soviets Seek Victory", etc.) In other words, it never transcends the genre of military history.

It's not fair to compare this with books like Carpet Wars: From Kabul to Baghdad: a Ten-year Journey Along Ancient Trade Routes, a compelling story of the region that is beautifully written, because the latter is not a military history. Nevertheless, having read books by Kremmer and others about the region, as well as military histories that do manage to convey all the critical information about campaigns and tactics within a broader narrative arc, I found myself struggling with this and all too often having to read paragraphs repeatedly (after my eyes glazed over with too much military hardware detail) or jump back and forth to be sure I could follow the detail of which army group was doing what.

I'm hopeful that someone will be able to take the bare bones of the story that is presented here -- how elite Soviet troops stumbled into a situation that they didn't understand and couldn't control -- and flesh it out with what must be a rich trove of first-hand stories from both sides of the prolonged war in a more comprehensive and livelier book. (It wouldn't matter to me if it were twice the length of this one, which covers the whole war in a mere 280 pages.) Feifer has presented some first-hand views to the American reader for the first time -- a valuable service. But the anecdotes he includes function as anecdotes alone, rather than giving the reader insight into broader issues and themes, such as the daily life of a conscript or a mujahadeen fighter.

An important book, and one that should command a large readership, but one that is hard to recommend to anyone who doesn't have a strong interest in foreign policy, military history or geopolitics.

A very interesting and well-written history of this region that gives some insight into just why it has been so much fought-over is Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. I would highly recommend reading this along with Feifer's book, as the latter skims over this important historical dimension only briefly.

[svinayak]

Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy
by Charlie Savage (Author)

# Paperback: 448 pages
# Publisher: Back Bay Books (April 28, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0316118052
# ISBN-13: 978-0316118057

There have been lots of books about the Bush-Cheney administration, and considerable coverage of efforts to increase presidential power. However, "Takeover's" well-researched, thoughtful and important material requires no outside leverage to gain a prominent spot amongst them.

Savage's summary asserts that Bush-Cheney have succeeded in seizing vast powers for the presidency by ignoring many of the restraints placed on it by Congress, the courts, and the Constitution. Warrantless waretapping, politicization of the Justice Department and the torture debate, use of "signing statements" to claim a right to defy new laws, efforts to impose greater control over military JAG lawyers, secrecy behind Cheney's energy task force (and innumerable other government actions), and holding U.S. citizens without trial as "enemy combatants" have all served this end.

Savage clearly sees Cheney as the force behind these moves, citing Cheney's earlier experiences and actions in government, beginning in the Nixon administration within the Office of Economic Opportunity with Don Rumsfeld, on to episodes of classified information disclosure (eg. illegal CIA spying on Americans, U.S. submarines eavesdropping on Soviet cables), Cheney's restricting access to President Ford by those with competing viewpoints (also reduced likelihood of leaks), and efforts within Congress to support Reagan-Bush power grabs (eg. forcing executive agencies to submit proposed rules to the White House before they could take effect).

The Bush-Cheney powergrab began immediately upon assuming the office. White House Counsel Gonzales was assigned a support role almost on the administration's opening day. September 11 clearly was a God-send to the Bush-Cheney efforts - protecting national security became the all-purpose rationale for more secrecy and more presidential power. However, it was not until January, 2002 that Cheney openly took ownership of the agenda to expand these powers.

Secrecy was extended wherever possible, even to rather mundane topics under the logic that even little pieces could be put together to provide information to terrorists. Republican congressional leadership was only too willing to assist by failing to oversee executive actions, and even restricting congressmen from mentioning the contents of intelligence authorization bills, for fear of criminal prosecution and expulsion. The administration also succeeded in shutting down embarrassing court cases (eg. claiming failure to pursue espionage) on the grounds of needed secrecy. Finally, suppressing scientific findings and rewriting reports has also been a major Bush secrecy tool.

Bush's power-grab even included abrogating signed international treaties. One of the administration's earliest actions was informing the Soviets that we would no longer be bound by the 1972 ABM treaty. The Geneva Accords followed, described as "quaint" by Gonzales, was later circumvented through a number of actions - Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib imprisonments, secret renditions, torture, plans for military tribunals at which defendants would not necessarily know what the evidence was against them, over-ruling JAG leadership, etc.

One of the best-known actions was Gonzales' effort to get A.G. Ashcroft to approve the administration's wiretapping program legality - while Ashcroft was under heavy sedation in an ICU bed. Ashcroft stood by his earlier refusal, while also reaffirming that he was no longer A.G. - he had temporarily ceded his power while in the hospital. (Bush authorized the program anyway. No wonder Ashcroft was booted at the beginning of Bush's second term!)

By the seventh year of Bush-Cheney, Bush had attached signing statements to about 150 bills and referenced 1,100 sections. (The latter figure compares to about 600 for all prior presidents. To be fair, Reagan was the primary prior promulgator.) During this same period, Bush vetoed only two bills. Those puzzled by the discrepancy soon realized that Bush's actions were equivalent to a line-item veto - banned by the Supreme Court in 1998, though supported by future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in a memo where he advocated implementation in slow motion so that opponents would be less likely to realize what was happening.

"Signing statements" have also been used by Bush as a means of controlling subordinates in the executive branch (another dimension of the Unitary Executive), and a way of combating "veto-proof" bills. All new bills are now reviewed by Cheney's staff for possible signing statements.

Why have signing statements continued? Savage contends that it is difficult to contest them in court, between all the administration's secrecy and the general inability to acquire legal standing.

So now we have a much-weakened system of government, per Savage. The question is "What will happen in the future?" These new tools lie ready to be used in any new "important cause," and may not be willingly put aside. In the meantime, our civics books are clearly out of date.


Savage, who won a Pulitzer for his Boston Globe articles about the signing statements George W. Bush used to negate legislation limiting presidential authority, gives that issue a key part in this account of the Bush administration's efforts to increase executive power. Covering constitutional issues as well as the political backgrounds of former White House attorneys like Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, this detailed report traces their concerted effort, from the moment Bush took office in 2001, to [leave] the presidency in better shape than he [Bush] found it. The authorization to use force against Iraq is only the tip of the iceberg. Bush has already gone so far as to declare himself able to negate treaties with other nations at will, Savage reports. He also demonstrates how many of the administration's most controversial acts have their roots in Dick Cheney's experiences in the Nixon and Ford administrations. This incisive analysis of congressional and judicial efforts to check the administration's power grabs adds up to a searing indictment. All rights reserved.

Boston Globe reporter Savage begins by detailing Vice President Cheney's extraordinary actions on 9/11, ordering the military to shoot down a civilian aircraft that had apparently been hijacked, without consulting with President Bush. Although the order was never executed, it demonstrated Cheney's command of the administration, which has given him free rein to implement a long-held ambition to shift power in favor of the presidency and to secure that shift for generations to come. Savage recounts the tumultuous history of the power struggle between the executive and legislative branches of government as well as Cheney's own personal history. Cheney served his political apprenticeship in the Nixon administration, famous for its tugs-of-war with Congress over executive privilege, as well as the administrations of Ford, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. In this troubling look at the abuse of power, Savage also details Cheney's involvement in seizing presidential power to authorize wiretapping, torture, and imprisonment of citizens without trial.