Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

[svinayak]

Raiders and Rebels: The Golden Age of Piracy
by Frank Sherry (Author)

# Paperback: 404 pages
# Publisher: Backinprint.com (September 2000)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0595144128
# ISBN-13: 978-0595144129

Frank Sherry's Raiders and Rebels: The Golden Age of Piracy is not the ultimate work on pirates, but it is an excellent account of the classic pirate era, the one we're familiar with from books like Treasure Island to the recent Pirates of the Caribbean movies. For his book, Sherry chose the period from 1692 to 1725, which may seem like a rather short era but it was in fact the period when many of the pirates we are most familiar with - Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, Anne Bonny, etc - were making their names known from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans and all places in between. The dates were not chosen arbitrarily - 1692 was when an American adventurer, Captain Tew, launched the first and one of the most successful pirate attacks on the treasure ships of the Great Mogul of India, which in turn inspired countless others as word spread of the vast riches to be had. EAST INDIA COMPANY WAS A PIRATE COMPANY IN THE INITIAL DAYS. 1725 saw the last of the pirate bases in Madagascar being abandoned. And while a few names like Captain Morgan predate the chosen era and Jean Lafitte postdate it, it does nonetheless cover the time and events on which most pirate stories and legends are based.

Sherry is good at working in the historical details, explaining why some men turned to piracy, what their tactics were, how loot was divided, why the fortunes of war between nations could change the prospects for pirates for better or worse, what was legend as opposed to what was fact, and so on. For example, walking the plank was really the stuff of novels and movies; the preferred pirate punishment was marooning. If a man committed an offense but was well regarded, he might be marooned on an actual island with vegetation. If not, he might instead be marooned on what amounted to nothing more than a sandbar at low tide. If a pirate killed a shipmate, then the dead man's body would be tied to his and both would be thrown overboard. But, it is important to note, never without a trial and a vote of the entire crew beforehand. One of the attractions of the pirate life was that it was in fact extremely democratic, with no man set over other by mere rank or birth. Spoils of successful raids were divided pretty evenly with the captain getting a mere two shares to the average crewman's share. Contrast this to the British navy where the captain got three-eighths, the admiralty got an eighth, other officers divided up an eighth, and the rest of the crew divided up the remaining three-eighths; if a ship had fifty crewmen, each man got one fiftieth of what the captain got. Small wonder so many seamen found piracy much more lucrative, not to mention fair.

This book is a wealth of information for anyone who wants to know about the period or about the men - and women - who made their names. Among the things I learned were: Captain Kidd was not actually a pirate but a pirate hunter who was done in by bad luck, poor judgement and endless self-delusion. One of the most successful pirates was a man named Henry Every, who not only knew to quit while rich but how to utterly disappear afterwards. One of the most successful men in fighting piracy was Woodes Rogers who almost single-handedly turned Nassau in the Bahamas from a pirate stronghold into a thriving and loyal-to-the-crown colony. And most interestingly, that the American colonies were for a time the main supporters of piracy, not only serving as the principal market for pirate goods but also supplying and even financing pirate ventures (it was the only way for the colonists to circumvent the costly and trade restrictive Navigation Acts enforced by Britain).

The best account though, for me anyway, was of Calico Jack Rackam and the two women pirates he became associated with, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, a small portion of which reads as follows:

"Then the idyll of Anny Bonny and Calico Jack Rackam took another bizarre twist. Rackam's ship had captured a Dutch merchantman. Needing hands for his own vessel, Calico Jack had recruited several strong young sailors from among the crew of the Dutch ship. One of these Dutch volunteers was a handsome young man, blue-eyed and flaxen-haired. Anne, never able to resist her passions, immediately fell in love with the youthful Dutch sailor. At the first opportunity, Anne, despite her professed love for Calico Jack, contrived to be alone with the youth... Anne revealed herself to the boy, possibly by baring her breasts. In her own way she also made it clear that she felt a strong attraction to the young man. She was amazed, however, when the object of her desire revealed _his_ secret: "He" was neither Dutch, nor a man, but a twenty-seven year old Englishwoman named Mary Read. It must have been an appalling moment - and a comic one, too -- as the two women discovered each other aboard a pirate ship crewed by some of the toughest and roughest sea brigands of the day."


This is the single best overall book available on piracy's Golden Age. Sherry organizes his material very well, telling a straight chronological history of piracy's evolution from early buccaneers to king's privateers to outright pirates. He devotes separate chapters to the most famous captains, elucidating their personal histories and careers in a clear and concise manner - Henry Morgan, Edward Teach (Blackbeard), Edward Low, Bartholomew Roberts (Black Bart), Calico Jack Rackham (and his lesbian pirate associates, Anne Bonney and Mary Read), the ill-fated Captain Kidd, and more. He also renders a wonderful biography of Woodes Rogers, the privateer-turned-governor of Nassau, a fascinating character whose actions, perhaps more than anyone else's, most damaged the cohesion of piracy - helping it fall apart of its own accord, due to disorganization and lack of discipline and foresight.

Sherry does not write merely about piracy as seagoing theft, but about the short-lived and surprisingly democratic "Maritime Nation." Few people realize that the "Brethren of the Coast" (as they styled themselves) were one of the earliest "countries" - and certainly the only one of their age - to institute accident and disability insurance and elected leadership, not to mention equal opportunity employment and what essentially amounted to equal-share company stock options. Sherry does an expert job of illustrating the brutality and oppression of the age, making it clear why so many sailors voluntarily joined ranks with the seafaring rebels - whose primary battle cry was not "death to all," but "Will ye join us, Brother?"

Many myths are explored and deflated, and many others shown to have a great deal of validity. There is only one recorded instance of anyone being made to walk the plank, for instance, (even if the pirates played on that prevalent myth to their own advantage), though marooning was indeed the favored form of pirate capital punishment.

Most importantly, Sherry does a fine job of making the reader feel what daily life was like for the pirates - and for their suffering cousins in the merchant marines and the Royal Navy - and portrays them in a sympathetic and understanding light. He doesn't soft-pedal the darker side of piracy, but he does put it into perspective.

Equally recommended is David Cordingly's "Under the Black Flag," though Sherry's "Raiders and Rebels" is better organized and actually more thorough.

[svinayak]

Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers
by Michael Barone (Author)


# Paperback: 352 pages
# Publisher: Three Rivers Press (June 24, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1400097932
# ISBN-13: 978-1400097937

Voltaire dismissed the Holy Roman Empire as not holy, Roman or an empire. Historians have long given a similar back of the hand to England's Glorious Revolution of the 1680s. It was glorious, they asserted, mostly in avoiding mass bloodshed, and compared to later revolutions in France, Russia and China, it wasn't much of a revolution.

Michael Barone disagrees. The change in English government as a result of the events of 1688-89 was not simply astonishing on its own terms, he argues, but pregnant with consequences for the English-speaking world. Barone is a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report, a longtime coauthor of the Almanac of American Politics and an occasional historian of recent American public life. In his current book he digs three centuries into the English past to unearth the roots of contemporary political practice on the Western side of the Atlantic -- the "Our" of his title refers to us Americans.

Some of the digging is not for the easily distracted. To motivate his main story, Barone traces the turbulent politics of mid-17th-century England, France and what became the Netherlands. It's a complicated era, just similar enough to our own to be misleading, and the careless reader risks getting overwhelmed. Thankfully, Barone entices us forward with such tidbits as that Tangerines were veterans of military service in Tangiers before they were little oranges, and that the difference between local time in London and Paris was once measured in days, 10 in the 1680s, because England refused to update its calendar.

Once Barone reaches his actual starting mark, the story snaps along. "A young Prince borne, which will cause disputes," he quotes a diarist of June 1688. The arrival of the heir was crucial, for the fate of England hung on the issue of issue -- namely whether Catholic king James II would be succeeded by a Catholic son or daughter. Religious wars had convulsed Europe for most of the century and a half since the start of the Protestant Reformation; in England the religious disputes had triggered a regicide, a civil war and several lesser eruptions of violence. Protestants insisted on observing the royal birth, suspecting that Queen Mary Beatrice wasn't really pregnant and that a surrogate would be smuggled under the bedclothes. Their attendance hardly settled the case. " 'Tis possible it may be her child," conceded James's estranged daughter Anne. "But where one believes it, a thousand do not."

The prospect of another Catholic king inspired a small group of Protestant worthies -- the Immortal Seven, their admirers called them -- to commit treason against James by inviting William of Orange, the husband of James's daughter Mary, to invade England and seize the throne. William responded by mounting the last successful invasion of England. John Churchill, James's military commander, deserted his patron and defected to William. "I am actuated by a higher principle," Churchill wrote in a letter he left for James: to wit, "the inviolable dictates of my conscience, and a necessary concern for religion." (Churchill neglected to explain why his conscience hadn't troubled him before William arrived.)

Thus William assumed the throne, ruling jointly with Mary. Yet he did so under constraints negotiated with the political brokers who invited him from the Netherlands. These restrictions constituted the "revolutionary"' aspect of what otherwise would have been a coup d'etat: In an age of absolutism elsewhere, the English monarch would defer to Parliament on key questions. A Bill of Rights ensured basic liberties to Englishmen, and the principle of self-government took what Barone rightly calls a "giant step forward."

Barone detects even larger consequences. The settlement of 1689, by marrying Dutch business sense to emerging English constitutionalism, laid the foundation for the 18th-century expansion of the British empire. An offshoot of that empire became the United States of America, whose founders wrapped themselves in the mantle of the Glorious Revolution. The 1689 settlement also fortified Britain to balance what Barone calls the "hegemonic power" of absolutist, then revolutionary, and finally Napoleonic France.

The hegemonic label is important to Barone, in that he traces the effects of the Glorious Revolution into the 20th century and beyond. The United States, he argues, was the continuing heir of the 1689 settlement, its growing strength undergirded by the same elements of law and commerce that had built the British empire. Americans eventually adopted the anti-hegemonic philosophy pursued by William and his English successors. Barone takes pleasure in noting the historical symmetry in the anti-hegemonic -- that is, anti-German -- alliance of the United States and Britain during World War II, the former led by the Dutchman Franklin Roosevelt, the latter by John Churchill's descendant Winston. He might have noted something else. Barone asks what the world would have been like had the United States not acquired the habit of opposing "tyrannical hegemonic powers," and he proceeds to list among the bad guys Louis XIV, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hitler, Stalin and "the terrorists of Osama bin Laden and the mullahs of Iran." Leaving aside that Osama and the mullahs are hardly in the same geopolitical league as Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin, Barone might have mentioned how long it took the United States to reach the stage of peaceful self-government, and how many people died -- in the American Civil War, most conspicuously -- getting there. At a time when the present administration remains committed to establishing democracy in Iraq, the most important lesson of American political history may be that democracy doesn't come easily. William of Orange and John Churchill spared England a war in the 1680s; America in the 1860s wasn't so lucky, and neither is Iraq now.

Late 17th century England. A time that totaly shapes what later becomes The United States. It defines what we became & are today. The English Revolution ended the era of Divine Right of Kings. 1688-89 brought the ascendency of the legislature & elected representation in England. Michael Barone has done a remarkable job covering an era that I think has been somewhat neglected. This book is useful for the scholar & history enhusiast alike. This story begins with the civil war & the execution of Charles I in 1649. The monarchy was abolished & replaced with the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell & son. The monarchy was restored by 1660 in the person of Charles II. Religion was everything especially the religion of the sovereign. Since Charles had no rightful heirs the crown past to his brother, upon his death, James II, in 1685. Charles faith was not an issue, But James was a devout Catholic while most Englishmen were Protestant. Plus the fact that James was a tyrant created a crisis. James was mindful that his father had been beheaded when James was a teenager. In 1688 he abdicated & fled to Catholic France. What followed was a Parliament acendency. Laws, a constitution, if you will, were past creating a new era of elected representatives, liberty, capitalism & relgious toleration. The blowback from all of that was felt in the colonies. Mary, daughter of James became Queen. Her husband, William was Standholder of Holland. He became William III, King of England. All the new restrictions created by Parliament on the monarchy were accepted by William. He was a Dutchman, in Holland where there had existed a much more tolerant culture. The biggest new restriction was the pursestrings. William had to go to Parliament for money. It appears through history that Parliament has been quite generous. It was also decreed that the sovereign could never again be Catholic. That only became problematic in 1714 when George, Elector of Hanover became George I. He was 28th in line. He didn't speak a word of English & didn't even Like London much but by golly he was Protestant. That ushered in a century plus of very prolific Georges.
A feature of the Glorious Revolution which makes it diferent from other western civilization revolutions was it's bloodlessness. We are all aware of the horrors of the French & Russian revolutions. Our own American Revolution was very bloody.
There has been a lot of material on the 16th century of Henry VIII, Bloody Mary & Elizabeth. Lots out there on the 18th century empire as well. This is a great addition to the 17th.


Michael Barone is best known in political circles for the biennial Almanac of American Politics, which contains vital information about individual leaders and areas of the country. He is a high-ranking journalist who shows up on the Sunday morning talk shows from time to time to explain What It All Means. He knows Washington, its folkways and, most importantly, his political history.

In OUR FIRST REVOLUTION, Barone transfers his insight into a new environment --- the political maelstrom of 17th-century Britain. And "maelstrom" is close to the right word for the level of upheaval that precedes his story. Within the lifetime of its central figure, King James II, the realm had known a fierce Civil War, the execution of a sitting King, the rule of an unelected "Lord Protector" and the reinstitution of the monarchy. As you can see, this is not the sort of political environment where it matters much who is on the Agriculture Committee.

OUR FIRST REVOLUTION begins by looking backward, with a quick, almost breathless review of both European and English history to date, most of which centers on the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. Years of warfare had led to the principle that the religion of the king determined the religion of the people --- a problem in England that had shuttled between Protestant and Catholic monarchs. After the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, the issue of the king's faith seemed settled --- until the heir apparent, James, Duke of York, announced that he was converting to Catholicism. This conversion was a real and apparent threat to English Protestants, who feared yet another spate of unrest and rebellion.

Barone does a masterful job of explicating the political and extra-political measures that were brought to bear to keep James off the throne --- everything from rumor-mongering to preemptive legislation. Keeping track of the intricate plotting, things like Ecclesiastical Commissions and the Exclusion Crisis are right in Barone's wheelhouse. He stays on the trail when the political crisis turns into a military crisis, as James's son-in-law, William of Orange, leads an army from The Netherlands to challenge for the throne.

Where OUR FIRST REVOLUTION falls a bit short is in its inability to illuminate the characters of the central actors; there is just not enough explanation given to exactly why James II converted to Catholicism, or what sort of personality he had, or why he fled the throne as he did. Worse, the other principal player --- his successor, William of Orange --- comes across as a big stick-in-the-mud. The one really interesting character in the book is John Churchill, who is an ancestor to Winston Churchill, and Barone frequently and gratefully cites the great man's biography of his distinguished forbearer.

But OUR FIRST REVOLUTION is largely a work of political history, not personal history, and its great plan is to show how the events of the Glorious Revolution impacted the revolutionary thinking of America's founders. It is a consequential story, and we are lucky to have Michael Barone to tell it.

This is an excellent review of the problems in England & Scotland covering the time period of great turmoil between adherents of the Catholic church and the protestant movement.It is a scholarly book, well written and researched but it is not light reading.

[svinayak]

Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the 21st Century
by Ralph Peters (Author)

# Hardcover: 384 pages
# Publisher: Stackpole Books; 1 edition (July 15, 2007)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 081170274X
# ISBN-13: 978-0811702744

In the no-holds-barred tradition that has won him so many fans across the nation and around the world, best-selling author and strategist Ralph Peters confronts the crucial security issues of our time--and the troubled times to come. With his trademark clarity and force, Peters argues that we have left behind the Age of Ideologies to enter a violent period in which ethnicity and religion--blood and faith--will continue to be the source of ferocious rebellions, genocide, and global terrorism. His compelling vision spares neither our foreign policy nor our domestic follies as he ruthlessly outlines what it will take to protect our country against this new breed of enemies.
* We have forgotten what it takes to win wars, leading to tragic, unnecessary failures.
* Too many Americans still refuse to take our enemies seriously, even though terrorists and foreign leaders are bent on inflicting apocalyptic destruction on us.
* Those enemies will use nuclear weapons, if allowed to possess them.
* Religious wars are impossible to prevent--because our enemies desire them.
* The Middle East is headed for greater chaos, and Israel may not survive.
* Civilized approaches to combat no longer work.
* Pop bestsellers have read globalization exactly wrong--it s leading the world to divisive crises of identity, not greater unity.
Despite these challenges, the United States will remain the world s most-successful and greatest power--but the cost will be determined by our willingness to face a new century s brutal realities.
Wars of Blood and Faith continues the ever-popular series of works by Ralph Peters on strategy, conflict, and the military published by Stackpole Books--titles that have not only excited and informed a wide range of readers, but which have profoundly influenced our national security.

About the Author
Ralph Peters is a retired military officer, a popular media commentator, and the author of 22 books. An opinion columnist for the New York Post, he is a member of the boards of contributors at USA Today and Armchair General magazine, a columnist for Armed Forces Journal, and a frequent guest on television and radio.
Ralph Peters is one of a handful of individuals whose every work I must read. See some others I recommend at the end of this review. Ralph stands alone as a warrior-philosopher who actually walks the trail, reads the sign, and offers up ground truth.

This book is deep look at the nuances and the dangers of what he calls the wars of blood and faith. The introduction is superb, and frames the book by highlighting these core matters:

* Washington has forgotten how to think.
* The age of ideology is over. Ethnic identity will rule.
* Globalization has contradictory effects. Internet spreads hatred and dangerous knowledge (e.g. how to make an improvised explosive device).
* The post-colonial era has begun.
* Women's freedom is the defining issue of our time.
* There is no way to wage a bloodless war.
* The media can now determine the war's outcome. I don't agree with the author on everything, this is one such case. If the government does not lie, the cause is just, and the endeavor is effectively managed, We the People can be steadfast.

A couple of expansions. I recently posted a list of the top ten timeless books at the request of a Stanford '09, and i7 includes Philip Allott's The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State. Deeper in the book the author has an item on Blood Borders, and it tallies perfectly with Allott's erudite view that the Treaty of Westphalia was a huge mistake--instead of creating artificial states (5000 distinct ethnic groups crammed into 189+ artificial political entities) we should have gone instead with Peoples and especially Indigenous Peoples whose lands and resources could not be stolen, only negotiated for peacefully. Had the USA not squandered a half trillion dollars and so many lives and so much good will, a global truth and reconciliation commission, combined with a free cell phone to every woman among the five billion poor (see next paragraph) could conceivably have achieved a peaceful reinvigoration of the planet with liberty and justice for peoples rather than power and wealth for a handful.

The author's views on the importance of women stem from decades of observation and are supported by Michael O'Hanlon's book, A Half Penny on the Federal Dollar: The Future of Development Aid, in which he documents that the single best return on investment for any dollar is in the education of women. They tend to be secular, appreciate sanitation and nutrition and moderation in all things. The men are more sober, responsible, and productive when their women are educated. THIS, not unilateral militarism, virtual colonialism, and predatory immoral capitalism, should be the heart of our foreign policy.

The book is organized into sections I was not expecting but that both make sense, and add to the whole. Part I is 17 short pieces addressing the Twenty-First Century Military. Here the author focuses on the strategic, lambastes Rumsfeld for not listening, and generally overlooks the fact that all our generals and admirals failed to be loyal to the Constitution and instead accepted illegal orders based on lies.

In Part II, Iraq and Its Neighbors, we have 24 pieces. The best piece by far in terms of provocative strategic value is "Blood Borders: How a Better Middle East Would Look." Curiously he does not address Syria or Lebanon, but I expect he will since the Syrians just evacuated Lebanon and Syria and Iran appear to be planning for a pincer movement on Baghdad after they cut the ground supply line from Kuwait.

A handful of pieces, 5 in all, are grouped in Part III, The Home Front. The best two for me were "Our Strategic Intelligence Problem" in which he points out that more money and more technology are NOT going to make us smarter, it is humans with history, culture, language, and eyes on the target that will tease out the nuances no satellite can handle. He also points out how easily our satellites are deceived. I share his anguish in the piece on "Lynching the Marines." I called and emailed the Colonel at HQMC in charge of the defense, and offered a heat stress defense that I had just learned about from a NASA engineer helping firefighters. If the body gets too hot, the brain starts to fry, and irrational behavior is the norm. The Colonel declined to acknowledge. That told me all I needed to know about how the Marines were all too eager to hang their own.

Part V was the most unfamiliar to me, covering Israel and Hezbollah. In 17 pieces, the author, an avowed supporter of Israel, pulls no punches, tarring and feathering the Israelis for being corrupt (selling off their military supplies on the black market (to whom, one wonders, since the only people in the market are terrorists?) confident the US will resupply them) and militarily and politically incompetent. To which I would add economically stupid and morally challenged--Stealing 50% of the water Israel uses to do farming that is under 5% of the GDP is both nuts and short-sighted. See the brief by Chuck Spinney at OSS.Net.

Part V, The World Beyond, is a philosophical tour of the horizon, from water wars and plagues (see my lists for books on each of the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers), to precision knifing of Russia, France, and Europe. Darfur, one of over 15 genocides being ignored right now (Darfur because Sudan pretends to be helping on terrorism and the US does not have the will or the means to be effective there) is touched on.

The book ends marvelously with a piece on "The Return of the Tribes," a piece that emphasizes the role of religion and the exclusivity of cults and specific localized tribes. They don't want to be integrated nor do they want new members.

Robert Young Pelton's The World's Most Dangerous Places: 5th Edition (Robert Young Pelton the World's Most Dangerous Places)
Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict With a New Introduction by the Author
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy


Ralph Peters has a clarity of vision and a logical belief system that is as well founded in history as it is commendable, while at the same time as believable as it is shocking. A former Army intelligence officer with over 20 years of military experience he is not only incredibly knowledgable of history but has the rarer ability to actually draw lessons from it and apply them to modern situations. He is also widely traveled, and looks at the world without the pretensions of political correctness or any other ideological bent, analyzing what he sees with an acutely strategic mind.

This book is the first I have read by him and certainly won't be the last. He cuts straight to the bone with a fierce and enjoyable writing style. Wars of Blood and Faith is a collection of newspaper articles and magazine submissions written from 2006 to early 2007, thus before the surge, and is divided into several subjects ranging basically from the war on terror, to Iraq, to the Israeli war in Lebanon in 2006, to the Home Front, and finally to the wider world than the US and the Middle East. Most of these articles are trying to explain what is happening in the war on terror, and to proscribe how it should be fought. His cure for the cancer of terror and islamofacism is elegant and ruthless, shelve our concern for intrusive morality on the battlefield (such morality is uitable and indeed even necessary for civil society) and fight hard, which means killing, and fight with the knowledge that the most immoral thing that could happen would be for the west to lose this war. He brings a lot more nuance, strategic thought, and historical knowledge to bear than this, which makes his conclusions all the more sound.

As a collection of essays basically the one flaw is that several themes (including several catchphrases) are needlessly repeated, and each thought is constrained to a small number of pages. Even so many of his thought will surprise you and inform you and are very worth reading.

[svinayak]

Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East
by Karl E. Meyer (Author), Shareen Blair Brysac (Author)

# Hardcover: 480 pages
# Publisher: W. W. Norton (June 9, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 039306199X
# ISBN-13: 978-0393061994

Although Meyer and Brysac don't tell why Americans learn so disastrously little from history, they've made some of the history itself wonderfully accessible. Now they do that for the modern history of the Middle East, whose "three universal faiths" extol "brotherhood and peace, compassion and humility" but whose "mortal disciples through the ages have engaged in reciprocal butchery. The very landscape of the Holy Land forms an outdoor museum of warfare." That's a sample of writing in this elegant, instructive book, the kind whose vividness thrusts readers through the otherwise baffling story of a region where the United States is again bogged down in confusion and loss, thanks to hubris grounded in ignorance.
What importance! How, forgive me, entertaining the authors make it! "Modern history" here means from roughly 1880, when the rapacious British invaded and occupied Egypt, largely to ensure control of the new Suez Canal. It ends with now, the last kingmaker - the predominantly greedy, short-sighted, full-of-themselves imperialists through whom Meyer and Brysac dramatically story-tell - being Paul Wolfowitz of very recent ill fame. I happened to have known two of the intruders: Kim Roosevelt and Miles Copeland, who bragged about their leading CIA roles in deposing Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq of Iran in 1953. Simplifying hard, the Land of the Free that has little compunction about using the dirtiest tricks while preaching democracy to the world has paid and will continue to pay hugely for that folly, whose current expressions draw heavily on the older ones.
However, Kingmakers doesn't simplify, nor pull punches either. Weary as everyone is of "this is a book every literate citizen should read," I find myself saying it to friends.

Eminent Imperialists might be a better title for this sprightly episodic history of Anglo-American meddling in the Middle East, from the 1882 British invasion of Egypt to the current Iraq War, told through profiles of the officials who spearheaded those policies. Journalists Meyer and Brysac (Tournament of Shadows) spotlight well-known, flamboyant figures like T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and British Arabist Gertrude Bell. But they focus on unsung toilers in the trenches of imperial rule like A.T. Wilson, the British colonial administrator whose idea it was to cobble Iraq together out of three fractious Ottoman provinces, and Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA agent who choreographed the 1953 ouster of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq. Policy continuities—securing the approaches to India and access to oil—sometimes get overshadowed by the authors' biographical approach, but in a sense that's the point. Their imperialism is marked by idiosyncrasy, improvisation, unforeseen circumstances and unintended—usually tragic—consequences. Policy was very much driven by the personalities who constructed it: their Orientalist enthusiasms, knee-jerk assumptions of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, arcane Straussian precepts and stubborn maverick streaks loom as large as cold geostrategic calculations. The result is a colorful study of empire as a very human endeavor.

A brilliant narrative history tracing today's troubles back to grandiose imperial overreach of Great Britain and the United States.

Kingmakers is the story of how the modern Middle East came to be, told through the lives of the Britons and Americans who shaped it. Some are famous (Lawrence of Arabia and Gertrude Bell); others infamous (Harry St. John Philby, father of Kim); some forgotten (Sir Mark Sykes, Israel's godfather, and A. T. Wilson, the territorial creator of Iraq); some controversial (the CIA's Miles Copeland and the Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz). All helped enthrone rulers in a region whose very name is an Anglo-American invention. As a bonus, we meet the British Empire's power couple, Lord and Lady Lugard (Flora Shaw): she named Nigeria, he ruled it; she used the power of the Times of London to attempt a regime change in the gold-rich Transvaal. The narrative is character-driven, and the aim is to restore to life the colorful figures who for good or ill gave us the Middle East in which Americans are enmeshed today. 30 illustrations; 2 maps.

[svinayak]

Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China
by Philip P. Pan (Author)

# Hardcover: 368 pages
# Publisher: Simon & Schuster (June 17, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1416537058
# ISBN-13: 978-1416537052

Before she was executed in a Chinese prison in 1968, a courageous political dissident named Lin Zhao gave a tiny sailboat, folded from a cellophane candy wrapper, to her friend Zhang Yuanxun. He kept it for more than 30 years, treating it as a secret treasure. Then he passed it to Hu Jie, a documentary filmmaker, who accepted the fragile origami boat and the implicit burden it carried: the duty to preserve Lin Zhao's memory. This he did obsessively, working without pay for five years to track down people who knew her and to recover her prison writings, scratched in her own blood after the authorities had denied her ink.

Philip P. Pan tells the story of the origami sailboat in Out of Mao's Shadow, his entrancing book about the struggle "for the soul of the world's most populous nation" between a "venal party-state" and "a ragtag collection of lawyers, journalists, entrepreneurs, artists, hustlers, and dreamers striving to build a more tolerant, open, and democratic China." He uses the sailboat, in a quietly moving way, to help readers feel the enduring chill of Mao's ideological twists and turns, particularly the Hundred Flowers Movement of 1957, when intellectuals such as Lin Zhao were encouraged to criticize the Communist Party, then cruelly punished for doing so.

Part of the book's poignancy is that Pan has joined the chain of transmission: He earned the documentary filmmaker's trust and promised to tell his story, just as the filmmaker had earned Zhang Yuanxun's trust and promised to preserve Lin Zhao's legacy of pain and endurance. Out of Mao's Shadow is a work of reporting, but it is also a work of conscience.

From 2001 to 2007, Pan was The Washington Post's bureau chief in Beijing. The 10 or so intersecting stories he tells here are gritty and real. This is not a big-theme book about the "true" China but a concrete, closely observed encounter with particular people, places and events. He puts the reader on a stool in the small shop of laid-off steel worker Yao Fuxin as Yao and some colleagues plot a doomed demonstration against corrupt local officials in the rust-belt city of Liaoyang. We run through cornfields with blind activist Chen Guangcheng as he escapes from government thugs in his home village, hoping to carry a petition for justice all the way to Beijing. Other protagonists include a land developer, an army doctor, a local party secretary, a crusading editor and a passel of feuding "rights protection" lawyers (as they call themselves). Pan seems to have been all over each incident, watching before, during and after it happened, getting long interviews with participants who initially did not want to talk, copying quotes from secret documents, hiding notes from a trial in his socks.

Yet some big truths emerge. Local government omnipotence and corruption are a toxic combination, personified in Pan's book by Zhang Xide, the party secretary of Linquan County. He presided over the violent repression of a peasant revolt against coercive birth-control methods and illegal taxes. And what is wonderfully revealing about today's China is that he was proud of his achievement! When a pair of crusading journalists named Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao exposed his actions, he sued them for defamation. (Their book, Will the Boat Sink the Water?, was published in English by PublicAffairs in 2006.) A local judge allowed something like a real trial to take place, enabling a rights protection lawyer named Pu Zhiqiang -- another vivid character -- to humiliate Zhang and his colleagues on cross-examination because of their eagerness to brag about their use of harsh methods. When the proceedings got out of control in this way, the local party authorities, who ultimately supervise all court decisions, disposed of the embarrassment by having the court issue no judgment. Zhang retired on full pension, while Chen and Wu's book remains banned.

Another theme is the alliance of the party with private entrepreneurs, represented by a richly loathsome female property developer named Chen Lihua. She specializes in acquiring land in Beijing through cronyism and forcibly evicting tenants with police assistance. Pan reports her rags to riches story, visits her lavish office and notices nine separate photos, one of her with each member of the party's top decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee. Chen, too, is proud of her achievements and especially of knowing how to work the system; she reflexively offers Pan a bribe.

In contrast, Pan's heroes are fighting against the system that he calls the "largest and perhaps most successful experiment in authoritarianism in the world." That they can do so without being executed is a sign of how far China has emerged from Mao's shadow. But it is also a tribute to their courage and cunning, because, as Pan notes, the machinery of repression is "cynical, stable, and nimble." The documentary filmmaker loses his job, consumes his savings and has his films banned. The crusading newspaper editor spends a short time in jail and ends up sidelined, writing for a sports magazine. The blind activist is kidnapped, beaten and sentenced to a four-and-a-half-year prison term.

Most of these reformers and dreamers are driven by a combination of outrage and hope: outrage over the system's inhumanity and hope because it is changing. The courts, investigative journalists, independent lawyers and access for foreign journalists are all developments of the past 30 years. At the same time, Pan's stories substantiate his judgment that the party apparatus has come "to resemble an organized crime network." The system rewards corrupt, repressive local officials because they get results -- economic growth, targeted levels of population growth and social order. The party, so far, has not given officials much incentive to pay attention to environmental health, urban preservation or social justice. For now, the "struggle for China's soul" remains sadly one-sided.


From Bookmarks Magazine
“What freedom the Chinese people now enjoy has come only because individuals have demanded and fought for it, and because the party has retreated in the face of such pressure,â€� Pan writes. The dream of a completely free society, however, has not yet accompanied a free marketâ€"despite the growing efforts of everyday men and women fighting the system. Through detailed and illuminating interviews with artists, journalists, entrepreneurs, and peasants, Pan reveals a country filled with local government corruption, human rights violations, and collusion between the Party and the private sector. While Pan’s exposé on China left a few critics feeling hopeless, most took away a more optimistic message about China’s future. In either event, they agreed that Out of Mao’s Shadow achieves “the immediacy of first-rate reportage and the emotional depth of field of a novelâ€� (New York Times).

As an American living in Shanghai, I've been impressed by the freedom that many people seem to enjoy here. Contrary to the Cultural Revolution, "RED COMMUNIST CHINA" image that many Americans have, the people of the middle classes in the huge coastal metropoli of this country live lives little different from those of their peers in the west, at least on the surface. The young people I meet scoff at the Little Red Book and the patriotic posturing of the Communist Party; they tend to be as cynical about politics as Americans, if not moreso. At the same time, however, there is a detectable current of discontent lurking below the surface.

Phillip Pan's "Out of Mao's Shadow" blows the lid off this discontent and reveals the dynamics of law and power in China's contemporary civil society. He shows a country that has left behind totalitarian ideology and control and replaced it with an elaborate system of amoral authoritarian gangsterism. Behind such catchphrases as Deng's "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics", Jiang's "Three Represents", and Hu's "Scientific Development Perspective", there's little true substance other than a massive kleptocracy's attempt to get rich quick off of exports and labor exploitation, or so Pan contends. At the same time, however, there is a growing middle class civil society- lawyers, journalists, filmmakers, bloggers, labor organizers, environmental activists, artists, and other troublemakers quietly pushing for change in a rapidly changing and increasingly liberal society. "Out of Mao's Shadow" is about what happens when the people and the party clash, told in a series of stories about these individuals, a small selection of modern China's heroes and villains:
-Zhao Ziyang, the liberal former General Secretary of the Communist Party, who spent the last 15 years of his life on house arrest after taking the blame for the Tiananmen Uprising.
-Hu Jie, a filmmaker who digs up the compelling story of a feisty Cultural Revolution martyr.
-Zeng Zhong, a chronicler of a period of history that the government would rather forget.
-Xiao Yunliang, a daring labor organizer from China's northeastern rust belt.
-Chen Lihua, China's richest woman, a wealthy land developer who made her millions through government connections and forced evictions.
-Zhang Xide, a party cadre who leads a brutal tax crackdown on an impoverished county.
-Jiang Yanyong, the courageous surgeon and PLA general who ended the government's SARS coverup- and then attempted to get them to come clean on the casualties at the Tiananmen massacre.
-Cheng Yizhong, a maverick newspaperman who starts China's freest and most provocative tabloid.
-Pu Zhiqiang, the weiquan (Right's Defense) lawyer who takes on a case against Zhang Xide- and almost wins.
-Chen Guangcheng, a blind student of medicine and law who takes on the country's forced sterilization program.

While there are many books on China hitting the shelves right now, there's only one like this. Pan combines incisive political commentary with personal profiles in a style that smacks of Peter Hessler (River Town, Oracle Bones) meets Fareed Zakaria (The Future of Freedom, The Post-American World). In between optimistic "business hype" titles and political paranoia tracts, Pan's "Shadow" is something completely different- a "boots on the ground" look at the untold stories of modern China. While there are a few places where I disagree with Pan's tone; while the CCP is undoubtably very corrupt, I would not characterize them as evil incarnate; there are many elements to their rule that are quite benevolently paternal, and, as Pan points out in several places, the country is progressively liberalizing under their administration, if at a fairly slow pace. Despite this minor critique, I give this book five stars for great writing and unique material you won't find anywhere else.

[ramana]

One should contrast Philip Pan's book with the panegyric by Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl Wu Dunn "China Wakes" written in early 90s.

[Gerard]

THE POST-AMERICAN WORLD
Fareed Zakaria; Penguin-Viking, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 499

[svinayak]

Pullikesi will find it useful

The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History
by Gordon S. Wood (Author)


# Hardcover: 336 pages
# Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (March 13, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1594201544
# ISBN-13: 978-1594201547

This book is a compilation of Gordon Wood's book reviews ranging from 1981 to 2007. They are arranged with chapter titles describing how each applies as a larger narrative on the contemporary state of the field of history. Examples of titles are "Microhistory" and "Anachronism in History".

The book is mostly a place for Wood to display his criticisms for postmodern historical methods. While it may seem like doing this by compiling book reviews is an odd way of doing so, the result is successful in displaying many of Wood's issues. Wood is a brutal reviewer, and there are no books that receive what could be considered "praise" while there are several that he handles ruthlessly. He is also a fairly accessible writer that any educated person should be able to understand, especially with these reviews which were written for general readers in the first place.

So what are Wood's specific views? The overall aura of this book is not necessarily that he despises all newer postmodern, multicultural ways of looking at history, but rather he is quite annoyed that they are completely taking over history. For instance, he is clearly frustrated that larger narratives are no longer accepted in the field of history, as everything has turned into microhistories. Microhistories are basically using individual stories of common people to help make inferences from the past. Wood is also frustrated with extreme multicultural history, which constantly distorts his beloved American Revolution topic that he has dedicated much of his life to. These are perhaps the most entertaining and well-argued reviews of the bunch. He seems to enjoy having a venue to bash the historians who have placed a huge meaning of the U.S. Constitution on its failure to free slaves. Wood finds this as a particularly significant and harmful anachronism.

This book might be best read by those who do not agree with him. Perhaps the Howard Zinn lover (or other stubbornly multiculturalist historians) may realize that Zinn is precisely the type of historian that America needs to be warned against. As Wood states "I suppose the most flagrant examples of present-mindedness in history writing come from trying to inject politics into history books. I am reminded of Rebecca West's wise observation that when politics comes in the door, the truth flies out the window."

Of course, however, Wood seems to find some good in the new history writing, he just believes it should be more balanced. Although that may be lost by the fact that he has very little positive things to say in most of his reviews. Perhaps the pessimism found all over the book is one of its largest drawbacks. The other significant drawback I see in this book is that some of his reviews just don't really fit very well with what their purpose is supposed to be. Ironically enough, while this entire book is mostly a criticism of multicultural and postmodern history, the chapters titled "Multicultural History" and "Postmodern History" say very little. Other reviews end up being better examples at what he is trying to say.

Most of his reviews naturally cover, as I said, the American Revolution, so if you want more of Wood on the Revolution, this is a great book. Each chapter also features a short afterword provided by Wood. He often has interesting stories to tell about the reactions different authors had of their reviews. However, most of these afterwords are very short and it would have been nicer for include more in them.

an extremely valuable collection of essays by Gordon S. Wood, one of our leading historians of the colonial and early national period (see his "The Creation of the American Republic" among other studies), consisting of 21 of his review essays. These essays originally appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, or the Atlantic between 1981-2007. The book's impact derives from several considerations. First, it is Wood who is writing the reviews, with tempered judgment (for the most part) and unimpeachable command of the material. Second, what Wood is up to is to illustrate trends or approaches in writing American history, as demonstrated in the various books under review.

Some of the approaches or "trends" that Wood discusses, sometimes quite critically, include influence in intellectual history; writing history from the perspective of "contemporary consciousness"; is there still a place for good narrative history?; is the "new historicism" correct that everything is relative?; can history be written as fiction (Schama's "Dead Certainties" the subject of review); microhistory; multicultural history; comparative history; postmodern history; history and myth; and "presentism." His authors include Gary Wills; Joyce Appleby; Elkin & McKitrick; Gary Nash; Jon Butler; Jill Lapore; Pauline Maier and many others. If Wood had written a straight substantive article on trends in history, the reader's eyes might become glazed over. But the device of introducing and discussing (and sometimes deconstructing) each approach within the framework of reviewing a book manifesting that approach, keeps things much more interesting and lively than one might expect. Wood also has included a useful introductory essay and an index. So the book is a fun way to learn an awful lot about the writing of American history in this country during the last quarter century or so.
The subtitle of this latest offering from Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Wood (The Radicalism of the American Revolution) is far grander than what he delivers between the covers: a collection of 21 book reviews of works by Simon Schama, Theodore Draper and Joyce Appleby, among others, written over the past three decades for periodicals like the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. Though reviews are occasional pieces not designed to be republished years later, some of Wood's pieces make enduring points. He lambastes scholars who clutter their writing with unintelligible jargon, and he worries that today's historical scholarship, too driven by present concerns, fails to retain a sense of how the past really is different. He makes clear that he prefers old-fashioned political history to cultural history that draws on postmodern theory. Indeed, the book is maddeningly repetitive: Wood invokes Peter Novick's This Noble Dream over and over, though not as often as he laments the use of theory in cultural history and the radical Foucault-like agendas that seem to drive certain literary historians. This volume is not without merit, but rather than appending a short afterword to each review, Wood would have done better to craft a new, unified reflection on the discipline of history. (Mar. 17)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description
Reflections on the historian's craft and its place in American culture, from a master craftsman

History is to society what memory is to the individual: without it, we don't know who we are, and we can't make wise decisions about where we should be going. But while the nature of memory is a constant, the nature of history has changed radically over the past forty years, for good but also for ill. In The Purpose of the Past, historian Gordon S. Wood examines the sea change in the field through considerations of some of its most important historians and their works. His book serves as both a history of American history-neither wholly a celebration nor a critique-and an argument for its ongoing necessity.

These are both the best of times and the worst of times for American history. New currents of thought have brought refreshing and vitally necessary changes to the discipline, expanding its compass to include previously underexamined and undervalued groups and subjects. At the same time, however, strains of extreme, even nihilistic, relativism have assaulted the relevance, even the legitimacy, of the historian's work. The divide between the work of academic and popular historians has widened into a chasm, separating some of the field's most important new ideas from what would give them much greater impact: any kind of real audience.

But The Purpose of the Past is not another crotchety elegy for what history once was but sadly now isn't; it is also a celebration of what, at its best, it is, and a powerful argument for its ongoing necessity. Along the way The Purpose of the Past offers wonderful insight into what great historians do, and how they can stumble, and what strains of thought have dominated the marketplace of ideas in historical scholarship. A master historian's commanding assessment of his field, The Purpose of the Past will enlarge the capacity to appreciate history of anyone who reads it

[svinayak]

A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century
by John Burrow (Author)


# Hardcover: 544 pages
# Publisher: Knopf (April 8, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0375413111
# ISBN-13: 978-0375413117

tion of history has had in the Western world over the past 2,500 years.

Treating the practice of history not as an isolated pursuit but as an aspect of human society and an essential part of the culture of Europe and America, John Burrow magnificently brings to life and explains the distinctive qualities found in the work of historians from the ancient Egyptians and Greeks to the present, including Livy, Tacitus, Bede, Froissart, Clarendon, Gibbon, Macaulay, Michelet, Prescott and Parkman. The author sets out not to give us the history of academic discipline but a history of choices: the choice of pasts, and the ways they have been demarcated, investigated, presented and even sometimes learned from as they have changed according to political, religious, cultural, and (often most important) partisan and patriotic circumstances. Burrow aims, as well, to change our perceptions of the crucial turning points in the history of history, allowing the ideas that historians have had about both their own times and their founding civilizations to emerge with unexpected freshness.

Burrow argues that looking at the history of history is one of the most interesting ways we have to understand the past. Certainly, this volume stands alone in its ambition, scale and fascination.


About the Author

John Burrow was Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex before becoming Professor of European Thought at Oxford. His earlier books include Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory; A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past, which won the Wolfson Prize for History; Gibbon; and The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914. He is a Fellow of the British Academy; an Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford; and in 2008 will be Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Williams College in Massachusetts.



John W. Burrow is a professor of that somewhat orphaned discipline "history of ideas", or intellectual history. Burrow approaches 'A History of Histories' as an intellectual historian, and not a critic. That means you won't find critiques regarding historical accuracy. Instead Burrow emphasizes the general character of the historians achievement, relying on the work of specialized scholars and biographers: the biography lists many excellent "secondary" sources a few of which Burrow has relied heavily on.

Burrows is, in a sense, a popularizer of some the most important histories, his goal being to "give a sense of the experience of reading these histories and what may be enjoyable about them"; he assumes that you have not read or even heard of the works. Such an approach, which mixes interpretation and summary, allows Burrow to cover a great number of works across time - from Herodotus to the late 20th century - but at some cost: a reader may feel they understand the significance of a work, but a connected developing narrative seems unclear; and while there are many block quotes (in particular with the earlier authors), often one yearns for more of a taste of the work.

How can one create a narrative of a "history of histories"? Burrow examines the ideas of the past, and how today we stand in relation to those ideas as expressed in history books. These themes include the emerging conception of a distinct European identity contrasted with Asia; ideas of republican virtue in early Rome, supposedly corrupted by conquest and vice; the Bible's narrative of transgression, punishment and redemption; the idea of an early Germanic state of "freedom" as the ultimate basis for modern constitutional democracy; 19th century ideas of nationalism; 20th century divergences into many genres, none of which dominate.

At its best, 'A History of Histories' conveys the imaginative energies of some of the worlds most famous and important historians. In the end books such as this really only matter if they send us off -- for the first or 10th time -- to read Gibbon's account of a Fall, Xenophon's travels through the desert or Parkman's epic of the New World. My copy is marked up with new histories to (re)discover.


This splendid book gives us the flavour of Western historians from the Ancient Greeks to the Twentieth Century. Burrow does not neglect the Philosophy of History, but that is not his main concern: rather does he bring out the personality of the historians through their writings and how their books have been shaped by their own times and their own experiences. Plentiful quotations from their works illustrate the book; they are beautifully chosen, and a pleasure to read in themselves.

Burrow is very good on tracing the influence of the historians of Greece and Rome on the historians of much later centuries - of Tacitus on Gibbon, to give just one example. About a third of the book is rightly devoted to Antiquity. We are reminded how deservedly Antiquity is regarded, in this field also, as one of the cradles of European thought, and how extraordinarily relevant the experiences of the Ancient World are to our own. This was known among the educated classes in the days when Herodotus and Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus were a staple of education: they found these classics an inexhaustible fund of enlightenment and understanding of political processes, providing models as well as warnings

Certainly there is a sad falling off after the classical period. The early Christian historians abandoned the aim of being impartial, relentlessly promoted orthodox Christianity and implacably blackened the unorthodox. Where historians like Eusebius and Bede did have a philosophy to guide them, they traced what they saw as God's plan in history; but a lesser man, like the 6th century Bishop Gregory of Tours, to whom Burrow devotes an amusing chapter (he calls him `Trollope with bloodshed'), seems to show, in his mistitled History of the Franks, nothing at all of what we could recognize as philosophical reflections - though with or without such reflections, we can of course learn much about the ways of life and preoccupations that he depicts.

The same is broadly true of the medieval annals and chronicles to which Burrow devotes a solid chunk of his book. In Froissart's Chronicles we learn much about the code of chivalry between knights (though the code does not apply to the treatment of commoners). Burrow extracts some vivid or entertaining material from them, and he is often a witty and entertaining commentator himself. He remarks that we should not expect narrative or thematic connections in annals: `we should think instead of a newspaper whose time scale is the year, not the day. We are ourselves unperturbed by the most diverse news stories appearing in juxtaposition, ...' The scurrilous 13th century chronicler Matthew Paris reminds Burrow `of a modern tabloid editor: disrespectful, populist, xenophobic, and anti-intellectual', and an attempt to bowdlerize him would be `like trying to de-vein Gorgonzola'.

However, Renaissance historians, like Bruni, Machiavelli and Guiccardini, modelled themselves once again on the histories of ancient Rome and Greece. Like them, they were fine stylists and sometimes invented speeches; looked for lessons that history could teach; saw patterns of order degenerating into disorder until order was reestablished; lamented the decline of the republican virtues and the decline of freedom; were cynical (realistic?) about how rulers maintain themselves in power; and were interested in the intricate relationships between neighbouring and competing states.

During the Renaissance also we first find an interest in Antiquarianism, research not only into the sources of Roman Law, but also into the Customary Law of the `barbarians' which Roman Law replaced or absorbed. The discovery of these more ancient sources and of the `immemorial rights' of subjects will play a part in the struggle against absolutism in the 16th century France and 17th century England, and, in the hands of William Stubbs in the 19th century, in the progression of English liberties down to his own time.

As the book moves into the discussions of historians in the 17th and 18th century, it becomes slightly heavier going and is not lit up as often by shafts of Burrow's wit, though one of these historians, Edward Gibbon, compensates for this with his own, thankfully mined by Burrow.

For the 19th century we have two superlative sections contrasting Macaulay and Carlyle - all they have in common is that they both `stand at the apex of a long movement, before austere professionalism spoiled the game, to render history for the reader in its full sensuous and emotional immediacy and circumstantiality'.

These sections are followed by one brilliantly contrasting 19th century French historians, notably Michelet and Taine, showing how the French Revolution continued to be subject to different and passionate interpretations.

Another section also deals beautifully with contrasts, this time between the sober way in which Bernal Diaz describes the conquest of Mexico in which he had himself taken part and the more Gibbonesque version of the subject by W.H.Prescott in the mid-19th century. Another American historian whom Burrow describes with infectious sympathy is Francis Parkman, the evocative 19th century chronicler of the American Indians' 17th century encounters with the French (who sometimes went native) and the British (whose victory over the French was a disaster for the Indians).

Burrow's last two chapters deal with the professionalization of history: its introduction into the universities as independent faculties; its consequent bureaucratization; its aim in the late 19th century, under German influence, to be like a science; and, in the 20th century, in its conscious obedience to rival philosophies of history and the influence that other disciplines exert on it. It became more technical and more specialized. Analysis of structure became more fashionable than narrative. There was an explosion in the number of historians and in the areas of life that are of interest to them. These chapters are worthy rather than inspiring - possibly Burrow himself is less inspired by that kind of history: he treats no individual work of history with the expansiveness which he had bestowed on earlier works.

[Paul]

Also in Slate, Andrew Nathan reviews The Man on Mao's Right: From Harvard Yard to Tiananmen Square, My Life Inside China's Foreign Ministry.

for the Soul of a New China.

The title seems to promise a timely exposé in the age of the tell-all memoir, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics and China's bid for global openness: The Man on Mao's Right: From Harvard Yard to Tiananmen Square, My Life Inside China's Foreign Ministry. All the ingredients of privileged insight are on display: proximity to power, a hint of American savvy, a grim domestic reference, a promise of foreign intrigue. But open Ji Chaozhu's memoir, and you'll discover a very different kind of document, more of a memo to the grandkids than to history. As witness to a half-century of Chinese turmoil, at home and abroad, he says surprisingly little that is not already known. The revelation here is of how persistent the tell-nothing ethos of a totalitarian era can be. Ji isn't alone in hoping against hope that discretion, rather than dissension, might somehow pave the way to more openness.

Ji Chaozhu, chief English interpreter in the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, really was the man on Mao's right. He's there at Mao's shoulder in an endless succession of photos with foreign leaders atop Tiananmen, starting in 1959, and there in a famous picture of Mao and Edgar Snow in 1970. Even more of the time, he interpreted for China's premier, Zhou Enlai. He also interpreted for foreign minister Chen Yi and for Deng Xiaoping during Deng's 1979 visit to the United States. That's Ji next to Deng, both men in cowboy hats, in a widely circulated photo that created enormous U.S.-China goodwill.

Ji truly was a well-connected insider in MOFA, ultimately rising high in the ranks. He served as head of the America desk in the early 1980s, as Chinese ambassador to Britain, and, finally, as deputy secretary general of the United Nations from 1991-96. And well before that, he mingled with China's leaders on a wide variety of crucial occasions. He accompanied Zhou to the Bandung Conference in 1954 and to the Geneva conference on Indochina later that year. He went on Zhou's 14-nation Africa-Asia tour in 1963-64. But you won't find any new details about Zhou's substantive dealings with other countries' leaders. Ji's idea of vividness is to describe the premier's avuncular relations with his staff and deft responses to local protocol challenges.

Saw this in B&N yesterday. Has some interesting things to say about Nehru. Mao's instructions to to send letters to JLN were like "Mr Nehru, if you think chinese are going to allow you to shit over us, you are mistaken". Their MEA had to send this to India in a more acceptable format.

[svinayak]

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
by Margaret MacMillan (Author), Richard Holbrooke (Foreword)


# Hardcover: 608 pages
# Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (October 29, 2002)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0375508260
# ISBN-13: 978-0375508264

A joke circulating in Paris early in 1919 held that the peacemaking Council of Four, representing Britain, France, the U.S. and Italy, was busy preparing a "just and lasting war." Six months of parleying concluded on June 28 with Germany's coerced agreement to a treaty no Allied statesman had fully read, according to MacMillan, a history professor at the University of Toronto, in this vivid account. Although President Wilson had insisted on a League of Nations, even his own Senate would vote the league down and refuse the treaty. As a rush to make expedient settlements replaced initial negotiating inertia, appeals by many nationalities for Wilsonian self-determination would be overwhelmed by rhetoric justifying national avarice. The Italians, who hadn't won a battle, and the French, who'd been saved from catastrophe, were the greediest, says MacMillan; the Japanese plucked Pacific islands that had been German and a colony in China known for German beer. The austere and unlikable Wilson got nothing; returning home, he suffered a debilitating stroke. The council's other members horse-traded for spoils, as did Greece, Poland and the new Yugoslavia. There was, Wilson declared, "disgust with the old order of things," but in most decisions the old order in fact prevailed, and corrosive problems, like Bolshevism, were shelved. Hitler would blame Versailles for more ills than it created, but the signatories often could not enforce their writ. MacMillan's lucid prose brings her participants to colorful and quotable life, and the grand sweep of her narrative encompasses all the continents the peacemakers vainly carved up. 16 pages of photos, maps.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In an ambitious narrative, MacMillan (history, University of Toronto) seeks to recover the original intent, constraints, and goals of the diplomats who sat down to hammer out a peace treaty in the aftermath of the Great War. In particular, she focuses on the "Big Three" Wilson (United States), Lloyd George (Great Britain), and Clemenceau (France) who dominated the critical first six months of the Paris Peace Conference. Viewing events through such a narrow lens can reduce diplomacy to the parochial concerns of individuals. But instead of falling into this trap, MacMillan uses the Big Three as a starting point for analyzing the agendas of the multitude of individuals who came to Versailles to achieve their largely nationalist aspirations. Following her analysis of the forces at work in Europe, MacMillan takes the reader on a tour de force of the postwar battlefields of Asia and the Middle East. Of particular interest is her sympathy for those who tried to make the postwar world more peaceful. Although their lofty ambitions fell prey to the passions of nationalism, this should not detract from their efforts. This book will help rehabilitate the peacemakers of 1919 and is recommended for all libraries. Frederic Krome, Jacob Rader Marcus Ctr. of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati

At the end of World War I, between January and July 1919, many of the world's leaders gathered In Paris to draw up a peace treaty and to plan the formation of a League of Nations. Although hundreds of delegates arrived from nearly every would-be state in Europe and from as far away as Australia, Japan, and Vietnam, most of the important decisions at the Paris Conference were made by Woodrow Wilson, England's Lloyd George, and France's Georges Clemenceau, with Vittorio Orlando of Italy playing a secondary role.

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) Wilson's uncompromising idealism, Lloyd George's lack of confidence, and Clemenceau's fears of German reemergence, the Conference assembled a treaty that "grappled with huge and difficult questions," and, MacMillan argues, "if they could have done better, they certainly could have done much worse." One thing is clear, however: regardless of their rightness or wrongness, expertise or incompetence, the peacemakers made decisions that resonated for the rest of the century and still echo in the 21st century: between Serbia and Croatia; among Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus; throughout the Middle East (especially Iraq and Palestine); across the African continent; and in the Korean peninsula. Because of the importance of the Treaty of Versailles on subsequent events, "Paris 1919" is essential--and riveting--reading for understanding the world today.

At times, the conference proceedings display all the gravity of a game of Risk. The major participants repeatedly exhibit an appalling ignorance of geography, an artlessness in dealing with non-European powers, and (for all their talk of self-determination) a callousness towards territorial viability. During one of the Conference's nadirs, when the future of Asia Minor was thrashed out, Arthur Balfour exclaimed in disgust: "I have three all-powerful, all-ignorant men sitting there and partitioning continents with only a child to take notes for them." MacMillan acknowledges that the "offhand treatment of the non-European world" caused serious problems that we are still paying for today. And, among many other examples, she indicates how actions taken at the Peace Conference led to the horrifying destruction of Smyrna three years later.

By the end of such a fascinating narrative, one that almost insistently seems to portray the superpower leaders as unsophisticatedly idealistic and patronizingly egocentric, it is still startling for the reader to come across this argument: "The Treaty of Versailles is not to blame" for World War II and the subsequent rise of Germany.

True, MacMillan makes a strong and convincing case (as have other historians before her) that German reparations were not as injurious as many have claimed. She further argues that the real problem was not the treaty itself but that it "was never consistently enforced." But this begs the question: what good is a treaty that, as she repeatedly indicates, never had a chance of enforcement?


For the last couple of weeks, since finishing "Paris 1919", I have grappled with writing a review that would do justice to a book that is not only excellent reading, but also has the potential to reshape the way a reader views current events. Rather than wait longer for the writing muse who refuses to appear, I will take the more direct approach and simply write, "Buy this book and read it. It will afford you a greater understanding of international events unfolding in the world today."

Margaret Macmillan is an exceptional history writer: engaging, direct and interesting (sometimes even funny), but also a wide-ranging thinker who see and explains the vast sweep of history as well as the apparently minor ripples. She juggles the enormous cast of characters in the drama that unfolded in Paris, 1919 and explicate the myriad brought to the major players at the peace conference. Her knowledge of world history and her ability to explain it concisely are fully illustrated in her explanations of the various ethnic claims for land and self-rule individual; her ability to compare and contrast these claims is extraordinary.

She quickly reduces the Big Five to the Big Four, as the Four themselves did when they eliminated the Japanese representative from most of the debate and negotiation - he could barely follow the mostly English conversation anyway. Her descriptions of the Big Four (who eventually operated, without Italy, as the three), though apparently honest and precise, are hardly flattering:

*Wilson, preoccupied with his Fourteen Points and convinced that all would be well if the peoples of the world were allowed to practice self-determination (even though the definition varied depending upon the case and people)
*Lloyd George, determined to expand the British Empire at all costs, but who proved, ultimately, to be the mediator between Wilson and Clemenceu
*Clemenceu, torn between extracting vengeance on Germany (in the form of reparations and a land buffer) and expanding French holdings
*Orlando, whose overwrought, weeping behavior eventually embarrassed the other three and led them to exclude him from many major decisions, eliciting further weeping and an eventual walk-out (followed by a less-than-noble return)

That these four thought they could accomplish the multi-pronged task they assigned themselves - to deal with the defeated Germany, to establish national boundaries that would help ensure future world peace and to establish an organization to help enforce that peace - now seems naïve. As Ms. Macmillan illustrates, the participants appear to believe they could accomplish their goals. However, as she also illustrates, time and again, as each the discussion on question reached a stale
There's an old adage that posits that the real outcome of a war is to teach one to hate one's allies more than than opne's enemies. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret Olwen MacMillan and Richard Holbrooke outlines why this old adage exists. The book covers the 6 month period in mid 1919 where the victorious allies of WW I converged to carve up the spoils of war and how this exercise set the stage for most of the subsequent conflicts of the 20th century.

While the book focuses on the Big Three Personalities of this exercise--Wilson (United States), Lloyd George (Great Britain), and Clemenceau (France) who dominated the critical aspects of the Paris Peace Conference-this focus doesn't detract from providing an encompassing review of the entire process as well as a detailed analysis of the devastating results of the conference. It delineates all too clearly how the best intentions can be overwhelmed by both insatiable avarice as well as unencumbered and unchecked egos in conflict.

This is a timely book. As we are poised to invade Iraq and effect "regime change" it would be wise to look at a previous exercise in managing post war victory to be reminded of both the complexities as well as the risks involved in such an undertaking.

Although an expressly historical tome, this is a well written and fast paced read.
mate, the Four either delayed a final decision or deferred the question to a committee for further study. As a result, many decisions remained unresolved while others had less-than-satisfactory solutions.

She neatly and convincingly debunks the theory that the financial burden placed on Germany as part of the war reparations was a major factor leading to Hitler's rise and WWII. Not only were the reparations significantly less than those Germany extracted from France after the 1870s Franco-Prussian War, but Germany never paid the WWI reparations and, indeed, indulged itself in such tactics as scuttling part of its navy rather than turn it over to Britain. On the other hand, she reinforces the argument that Germany did not feel compelled to accept terms of an agreement that were enforced rather than negotiated - and were determined to avenge the humiliation their representatives endured during the conference.

This is an extremely interesting book and, as another reviewer has mentioned, a real page-turner. Read it.

[svinayak]

Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000
by Barry Cunliffe (Author)


# Hardcover: 480 pages
# Publisher: Yale University Press (September 2, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0300119232
# ISBN-13: 978-0300119237

Starred Review. Cunliffe, emeritus professor of archeology at Oxford, colorfully weaves history, geography archeology and anthropology into a mesmerizing tapestry chronicling the development of Europe. The sheer size of the European coastlines, as well as the inland rivers pouring into these seas, enabled many groups to move easily from one place to another and establish cultures that flourished commercially. Between 2800 and 1300 B.C., for example, Britain, the Nordic states, Greece and the western Mediterranean states were bound together by their maritime exchange of bronze, whose use in Britain and Ireland had spread by 1400 B.C. to Greece and the Aegean. From 800 to 500 B.C.—the three hundred years that changed the world—the Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans and Carthaginians emerged from relative obscurity into major empires whose struggles to control the seas were for the first time recorded in writing. Cunliffe points out that each oceanic culture developed unique sailing vessels for the kinds of commerce peculiar to it. Richly told, Cunliffe's tale yields a wealth of insights into the earliest days of European civilization. Illus., maps. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"This book is an achievement of astonishing scope: the first to present the whole prehistory of Europe from the origins of farming to the rise of urban society with evident authority, and then to go on to review the Roman world right through to the dawn of the Middle Ages. A pioneering work of synthesis on a continental scale, this is the first coherent overview of the origins of Europe which meets the challenge of treading the path from prehistory into the full light of history. Only an archaeologist could have written it, yet Professor Cunliffe has an impressive grasp also of the historical sources for the Roman world and its aftermath. His easy style should please the general reader, while the boldness and assurance of his masterly treatment will challenge and intrigue the specialist." - Lord Colin Renfrew, Formerly Disney Professor of Archaeology and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge (Colin Renfrew )

[svinayak]

The 33 Strategies of War
by Robert Greene (Author)


# Hardcover: 496 pages
# Publisher: Viking Adult (January 19, 2006)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0670034576
# ISBN-13: 978-0670034574

This book quotes Bhagavat Gita for war strategies and many more such as Sun Ztu

Robert Greene is a prolific research and thinker who has made a habit out of writing masterpieces that explore all nuances of human behavior. In his latest tome he follows the same approach as in his previous bestsellers by leading off each chapter with a quick and easy to read summary that gives you the essence of the strategy and the stories that follow. Then he leads you on one fascinating historical excursion after another that brings each strategy to life through the exploits of some of histories most famous and notorious characters.
The beauty of his approach is that there is something for everyone in this book. You may read about a tactic that is highly amusing, but that you say to yourself, "I could never do that." Then in the next chapter you may say, "That's fits in with my personality. I can do that." That's how I felt about his strategies for laying back and appearing to not care, and about his strategy for taking an unassailable position.
A brief story in chapter 4 on developing a sense of extreme urgency was well worth the cost of the book to me. It talks about Fyodor Dostoevsky and how a change in his perspective on the value of life lead to a greater appreciation for every moment, and to an era of rampant productivity that continued until his death. Because I'm an author I spend a good part of every day writing and thinking about my work. After reading about Dostoevsky I immediately felt an even higher sense of purpose and motivation.
You really can't go wrong with this book. It is very entertaining and educational. Beyond that, you could pick up some sage, time-tested advice for improving both your business and your life. Bravo!


As in his bestselling The 48 Laws of Power, Greene puts a modern spin on wisdom that has stood the test of history, only this time his role model is Sun Tzu rather than Machiavelli. The argument is fairly standard: despite our most noble intentions, "aggressive impulses that are impossible to ignore or repress" make military combat a fitting metaphor for getting ahead in life. Greene's advice covers everything from steeling one's mind for battle to specific defensive and offensive tactics—notably, the final section on "dirty" warfare is one of the book's longest. Historical lessons are outlined and interpreted, with amplifying quotations crammed into the margins. Not all of the examples are drawn from the battlefield; in one section, Greene skips nimbly from Lyndon Johnson's tenacity to Julius Caesar's decisiveness, from Joan Crawford's refusal to compromise to Ted Williams's competitive drive. Alfred Hitchcock, he says, embodies "the detached-Buddha tactic" of appearing uninvolved while remaining in total control. The diversity of subject matter compensates for occasional lapses into stilted warriorese ("arm yourself with prudence, and never completely lay down your arms, not even for friends"). For those willing to embrace its martial conceit, Greene's compendium offers inspiration and entertainment in equal measure. (Jan. 23)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
The classical scholar and author says that war occurs in five contexts--when we execute it individually, with an army of some kind, from an offensive position, from a defensive position, and through unconventional, or dirty, means. The suggestions and ideas behind this lesson are thoroughly illustrated with concise historical vignettes. Deftly balancing theory and practice, the author asks listeners to examine their options for handling conflict, understand the meaning of their past experiences, and commit themselves fully to a mature and appropriate response to conflict. He has an impressive understanding of the psychological and organizational challenges in warfare. Don Leslie gives a softly intimate reading that sounds aptly erudite but not overly intense. Pacing himself steadily, he organizes the thick sentences and dense ideas with finesse. T.W.


1
Strategy: Read Robert Greene's books lightly, dipping into them from time to time. Perhaps when you wake up in the morning, or before stepping out to go to work, or before going to bed. Don't read the books cover to cover in a few sittings. Let yourself absorb their lessons.
Reversal: Read lightly but pay attention. Don't think yourself above these strategies. Greene presents to a modern audience lessons from the classics of human literature. Do not dismiss the wisdom of ages lightly.

2
Strategy: Let the laws and strategies that Greene has sifted from the classics guide you in your everyday life. The lessons of the past have already been paid for. Do not reinvent the wheel.
Reversal: Do not insist on applying a specific strategy to a specific problem. Let a situation choose its own solution. Do not force a square peg in a round hole.

3
Strategy: Empathize. When asking someone for something, for instance when emailing Greene hoping for a reply, offer them something of value to them.
Reversal: Accept that anyone asked for something can refuse. Robert Greene receives too much email to reply to all messages.
Image: A library full of other books.


A virtual cookbook of strategic ideas: that condenses the wisdom of great warriors and generals over the ages into bite size "chunks." Presented in an organized and extremely usable and readable format.

From Alexander the Great, to Hannibal, to von Clausewitz, to McArthur the strategies that work are summarized in the context of some of their most pragmatic, dramatic and famous examples.

The book also provides an excellent introduction which traces the history and continuum of strategic warfare from "mano-y-mano," or face-to-face squirmishes (used mostly as demonstrations of individual bravery and heroism -- to full-scale war by indirection ("out thinking" the enemy and winning by superior maneuvering).

As the author notes, the best military victories are won not by exhausting blood and treasures, but without a shot or an arrow being fired: The ultimate objective of strategic war is to "get inside the head" of the opponent and "win over" his mind.

In the language of the modern military academies this is referred to as "finding the enemy's center-of-gravity," or "getting inside his decision-making cycle." Thus, the book explains the philosophies and the rationale for each of the 33 stratagems in succinct form, and in terms of how they seek to approach this idealized strategic goal.

The book is organized by type of war and the stratagems used within each war type. A valuable work that also has many non-military applications. It is even better than Greene's "48 Laws of Power." A must read for anyone engaged in any kind of combat.



Robert Greene writes in a powerful and concise manner with a focused topic. Previously, he wrote the "48 Laws of Power", an amazing book which took forms of power and breaks down the use and methodology of power with historical cases. He does the same here but with Warfare. The topic is not limited for use by real warriors. Indeed, if Clausewitz said that "War is diplomacy by another means," then one would have to ask if "Diplomacy is War by another means." If so, then the diplomatic exchanges that we all have every day in business, politics, personal relations (not all are positive!) are indeed a form of warfare with the stakes being our present and future circumstances.

For the individual who wants to become a stronger `warrior' in today's world, this book is essential. One can become a warrior in a number of important causes: Freedom, Democracy, the Environment, Education, etc., It depends on one's interests, but the labrynthine corridors of power and strategy still apply. With this diverse perspective, Greene deftly uses strategists from various disciplines: Lyndon Johnson, Julius Caesar, Joan Crawford, Ted Williams, and more. These historical cases provide excellent studies for the student warrior. His story about Alfred Hitchcock (whom my aunt worked with in the film industry) was very telling in terms of his perceived detachment but total control.

"Qui desiderat pacem, praeparat bellum." An old Roman generals advice: "Whosoever desires peace, prepares for war." This is not an urge toward conflict but one of defense against complacency. I enjoyed Green's use of military terminology throughout, especially the use of grammar that suggests a timeless quality to his observations and truths. The format of the book is excellent. People from many backgrounds will appreciate its knowledge.


Military collected more genuine intellects and risk thinkers than most if not all other professions ... and Robert Greene puts his vast knowledge of military hitory knowledge and insights into this outstanding book. He combines in a unique way strategy, philosophy and history.

The book is comprised into five parts;
I) SELF-DIRECTED WARFARE
II) ORGANIZATIONAL (TEAM) WARFARE
III) DEFENSIVE WARFARE
IV) OFFENSIVE WARFARE
V) UNCONVENTIONAL (DIRTY) WARFARE

The first part, SELF-DIRECTED WARFARE, is absolutely mind-blowing! Greene starts the book as only very few can match. We read how the greatest generals in history saw the limits of knowledge, experience and theory and how brilliantly the great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz summarized those ideas. The importance of having no principles by Napoleon and how to wage war on your mind. We learn from the Samurai times why we are our own worst enemy, the illusion of limitless time and a consequent lack of reality that faces us all.


INDIA HAS EMPLOYED SOME OF THESE STRATEGIES
CANNOT DISCUSS HERE

[Paul]

BOOK REVIEW: The inside track on Afghan wars by Khaled Ahmed

Descent into Chaos:
How the War against Islamic Extremism is being Lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia;
By Ahmed Rashid;
Allen Lane London 2008;
Pp484; Price £12.99

Today, the Taliban and Mullah Umar continue to live in Balochistan, the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda are in the Tribal Areas where they wrested possession of a large territory from the army that favoured them. The US and the EU are under threat. George Bush and Musharraf and Karzai are the most unpopular men in the region. It is clear who has won the war

The greatest compliment one can pay to a writer is to say that his latest book is his best. It indicates a rising graph of excellence rather than descent from the peak. Ahmed Rashid’s best book without a doubt is his latest, Descent into Chaos, a critique of the policies of the United States and Pakistan, the two countries who worked together and separately to convert their war against terror into chaos. President Bush is about to lurch out of the scene next year never to be remembered as a saviour by the West. Pakistan’s ‘schizophrenic chief executive’ President Musharraf is out of his office, universally condemned in Pakistan for having ruined the country in all sorts of ways. Four chapters in part three of the book contain the most comprehensive indictment of the US policy in Afghanistan the reviewer has ever read.

Ahmed Rashid’s friend Hamid Karzai is the president of Afghanistan today. He lived in Quetta starting 1983 and fell foul of the Taliban in 1999 when Mullah Umar had his father assassinated in Quetta, with the help of the ISI, according to Hamid. Ahmed had something in common with him. Both had criticised the Taliban, and in the case of Ahmed, it was his bestseller book Taliban (2000) that had ‘led to threats from the ISI and their extremist supporters’ (p.4). Hamid was in the Mujaddidi government after the Soviets left, but the US had left the Afghan policy in the hands of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the latter looking at Afghanistan as its fifth province.

Hamid was kicked out of the Mujaddidi government by the Tajiks, but later he fell foul of Mullah Umar too by not going along with his extremist sharia. In 1999 he took his dead father’s body to Kandahar to reclaim headship of the Popalzai branch of the Durranis. In 2000, Al Qaeda backed the Taliban against the Northern Alliance with its Brigade 555 culled from North African Arab fighters, IMU from Uzbekistan, Filipino Moros and groups from Chechnya and Xinjiang. Ahmad Shah Masud was the target and his force was besieged in Taluqan. There were 3,000 Pakistanis with the Taliban too, including ‘one hundred Pakistanis from the Frontier Corps to manage artillery and communications’ provided by the ISI (p.17).

Hamid tried to align with Massoud and Hekmatyar (then in Meshed in Iran), because they asserted that they were opposed to the Taliban, but finally decided to be on his own in the south. He told the US about Al Qaeda’s dominance; he warned the British too. No one was keen to pre-empt what was coming. Meanwhile, Musharraf had taken over in Pakistan with the help of his three corps commanders, Mehmood, Aziz and Usmani. After 9/11, Musharraf convinced the three Islamists that Pakistan had to align with America or go under to India. A reference to India is enough to make the Pakistani military mind dysfunctional. The plan was to ‘only partially accept the US demands’ to be able to oust India from the arena (p.29).

The ‘partial acceptance’ in the above reference was to protect the policy on the Taliban against resolutions by the UN. Corps commander Peshawar General Imtiaz Shaheen was removed by Musharraf when he demanded change in the Taliban policy. All proposals of change of policy were blocked by generals Mehmood and Aziz. The ISI had funded the JUI of Fazlur Rehman to hold its grand International Deobandi Conference near Peshawar in April 2001 during which a message from Osama bin Laden was also allowed to be read out. The ISI got Lashkar-e Tayba to hold another conference in Lahore, send the UN the message that Pakistan would not kowtow to its resolutions (p.53). UN envoy Brahimi was mentioned as working for the Indians in the planted stories in the Pakistani press.

After 9/11, US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld put in practice the neo-con plan to conquer Al Qaeda without putting troops on the ground and without ‘nation-building’ (reconstruction) (p.173). The plan was to buy off the warlords, isolate Al Qaeda and get Osama bin Laden through paid agents. Warlords Fahim, Rasul Sayyaf and Rashid Dostam got around $14 million and Fahim got $5 million directly from General Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander who later botched the Tora Bora operation and let Osama bin Laden escape with the help of Pakistani Pashtuns — who received $1200 per person for 800 Arabs — simply because the American troops were thin on the ground. When NATO wanted to send troops, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz said no thanks (p.65 and 98). Thus Bin Laden landed up in Parachinar, the Shia-majority headquarters of Kurram Agency, and laid the foundation of what is today known as the big sectarian slaughter (p.155).

Ahmed Rashid is fair when he says Musharraf didn’t let go of his policy of backing the Taliban and through them domination of Afghanistan because he thought Americans would cut and run soon enough, leaving Pakistan holding the bag. Rumsfeld was proving him right all the time (p.335). This was the situation when the US got Pakistan to send a delegation to Mullah Umar in Kandahar to warn him to surrender Osama bin Laden or be prepared to face invasion. The ISI delegation led by General Mehmood and containing Mufti Shamzai instead told Mullah Umar to hold fast and face off the invasion. The CIA got to know that General Mehmood was playing a double game. The ISI told Musharraf that US would not commit ground troops and that the Taliban would carry on from the mountains even if ousted from the cities. This convinced Musharraf to double-deal with the US (p.77).

When the invasion came, Musharraf did not abide by his promise to withdraw the elements of his army from Afghanistan. Dozens of FC men stayed on the side of Taliban helping them prepare defences and sending intelligence back to the ISI whose excuse for the double-cross was fear of India coming in riding the Northern Alliance. Ahmed writes: ‘With one hand Musharraf played at helping the war against terrorism, while with the other continued to deal with the Taliban’ (p.78). When he tried to wean the army from supporting Islamism and its extremists after 9/11 he couldn’t convince everyone and a large number of officers remained opposed to it. When the attack came it delivered 50 cruise missiles on 31 military targets. Pakistani cities and Quetta in particular erupted in protest.

For those of us who wonder where the rich people and MPAs of Quetta get their cheap cars, the book says warlord Ismail Khan of Herat receives $5 millions dollars per day for letting hundreds of trucks come into Afghanistan from Iran through the Islam Qila border post. Quetta was host to the Taliban who had ultimately to flee Afghanistan and this continued till 2006 when there was a policy change in the US and Washington began to link Quetta to cross-border raids into Afghanistan. Pakistan gave training facilities to these Taliban in Balochistan, in Dalbandin, Chaghai, Qila Saifullah, Kuchlak, Loralai and Quetta itself (p.251). Mullah Dadullah, the cruellest of the Taliban commanders, had his extended family of 70 living in Kuchlak.

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda escaped into South Waziristan and was helped by local warriors trained in its camps in Afghanistan. By 2006, the US was convinced that thousands of Al Qaeda’s foreigners were ensconced in the Tribal Area. Musharraf was caught in the pincers of his own India policy in Afghanistan. Warlords funded by Al Qaeda were targeting him with the help of Punjabi elements demobbed from the jihadi militias the state had put together to fight India in Kashmir. In January 2006, the US hit Damadola in Bajaur with a missile and killed five senior Al Qaeda members. The idea was to get Ayman Al Zawahiri who had his local Pashtun wife living there but he escaped (p.276).

Musharraf was most put off when the Indians began funding the Baloch insurgents. This was the unkindest cut. He had appealed to his generals to join the US after 9/11 on the plea that India would join the war on terror instead and upstage Pakistan in Afghanistan. Not only had India ‘conquered’ Pakistan by investing the largest amount among the allies on nation-building but it also began probing Balochistan with money sent in, not ‘through its 13 consulates in Afghanistan’, but from Dubai, in line with its old policy of supporting all Baloch insurgencies (p.286). Another Pakistani myth the book explodes is the one about the Taliban terminating cultivation of heroin. The Taliban earned their entire money from heroin but after three bumper crops the commodity became cheap. So in 2001 the Taliban simply prohibited the cultivation to bring the price back up (p.320).

Ahmed Rashid says he is Hamid Karzai’s friend but he does tell us where he found Karzai lacking in leadership and perhaps in honesty too. He found him subject to strange bouts of inaction and indecision, he found his relative and minister Nurzai involved in heroin trafficking and did nothing. His brother Ahmad Wali Karzai was also said to be involved drug trade but Karzai defended him and did nothing (p.327). But the book blames Musharraf for not backing Karzai and finally not backing Benazir Bhutto because ‘she was very unpopular with the army’ and let her be killed in Rawalpindi (p.379). Today, the Taliban and Mullah Umar continue to live in Balochistan, the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda are in the Tribal Areas where they wrested possession of a large territory from the army that favoured them. The US and the EU are under threat. George Bush and Musharraf and Karzai are the most unpopular men in the region. It is clear who has won the war. *

Home | Editorial

[svinayak]

Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less: A Handbook for Slashing Gas Prices and Solving Our Energy Crisis
by Newt Gingrich (Author), Vince Haley (Author)

# Paperback: 120 pages
# Publisher: Regnery Publishing (September 23, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1596985763
# ISBN-13: 978-1596985766

New York Times bestselling author, former Speaker of the House, and Fox News political analyst Newt Gingrich has a plan for slashing gas prices and reducing our long-term dependence on foreign oil.

Gingrich is famous for taking big, visionary ideas and boiling them down into practical solutions as demonstrated in this year's earlier release, Real Change, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for eleven weeks. His new book Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less does just that. Dealing not only with spiraling gas prices, but with the energy crisis as a whole, Gingrich shows how we can safely reap the benefits of America's own natural resources and technology in gas, oil, coal, wind, solar, biofuels and nuclear energy.
Gingrich argues that the pinch Americans are feeling at the pump is not a blip in the economy but a looming crisis--affecting not only the price of gas, but the price of food, the strength of our economy, and our national security.

To meet this crisis, Gingrich lays out a national strategy that will tap America's scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs, and require Congress to unlock our oil reserves and remove all the impediments and disincentives that unnecessary government regulation has put in the way of American energy independence. The energy crisis is solvable, as Newt Gingrich's plan makes clear. His handbook, Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less is sure to become the talk of the presidential campaign season.

From the Back Cover
Newt Gingrich Presents a Bold Plan for America's Energy Independence:

Do It All. Do It Now. Do It for America.
America is unrivaled in our ability to solve tough problems and create bold, powerful solutions. That's exactly what we need to do with the energy crisis we now face. We CAN become energy independent, while lowering prices at the pump today and developing innovative and effective energy alternatives for the future. We CAN produce an overwhelming supply of oil and natural gas here at home, and break the stranglehold that foreign (often hostile) countries have on our energy supply, and by extension, our economy. And we CAN be responsible stewards of our environment, protecting the grand beauty and richness of our country without sacrificing our robust engines of growth, expansion, and entrepreneurship. As Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House and bestselling author, spells out in stunning simplicity, when it comes to developing domestic energy resources, we CAN do it all. Isn't it time we relied on American energy for America's security and prosperity? With your help, your citizen action, and Newt Gingrich's plan as laid out in this handbook, we can solve this energy crisis--and slash gas prices, too.

[ramana]

Book Review Pioneer, 12 Sept., 2008

Challenging China Caricatures

What sets Pallavi Aiyar's book apart is the fact that there is neither an attempt to flatten out the differences between India and China nor to reify them to the point that these then go on to become self-fulfilling prophecies writes Nimmi Kurian

Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience in China
Author: Pallavi Aiyar
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Price: Rs 395

What is perhaps most refreshing about Pallavi Aiyar's book is that she approaches China with an open mind and makes a conscious effort to steer clear of essentialism. There is neither an attempt to flatten out the differences between India and China nor to reify them to the point that these then go onto become self-fulfilling prophecies. This clearly sets her work apart from those feel-good, mix-and-stir versions of India-China cooperation that is often the standard fare. Not having a mind made up also equips her not only with a greater willingness to learn but also with a listening ear to unlearn old habits of thinking and biases.

Aiyar's account is largely based on her experiences during her five-year stay in China first as a teacher and then as a journalist. Her observations are those of a largely sympathetic and curious onlooker trying to make sense of the fast moving target that China today represents. It tells the story of China's national obsession with growth and how it has wasted no time in embracing Deng Xiaoping's alluring exhortation to get rich with the missionary zeal of a new convert. And the ease with which China, no stranger to revolutions, has ushered in the great consumer revolution. It is also a story told in part through the eyes of her young students at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute and her interactions with them. These observations are as much revealing as they are sobering given the deeply ingrained disinclination on the part of her students to question given facts. She notes their boredom with compulsory classes in Marxist thought, their fixation with their careers and "fantasising of little but money." She despairs when she realises that none of her students knew that the Dalai Lama was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. She also notes their indignant nationalistic responses during an interaction in class on the topic of media freedom. Arguing that while freedom of the press could apply to 'foreign countries', a student insisted that it was unsuitable for China because of the 'volatile' nature of Chinese people. The Chinese people, the student argued, needed to be fed constantly on a diet of appropriately good news, failing which they would get 'depressed and unproductive'.

A strong point of the book is that it problematises several dominant imageries and Aiyar acknowledges her own penchant for doing so. She is at her best when she dwells on the contrasting worlds that exist within China today -- an economy that for three decades has been scaling dizzying heights and a society that is seeing a rising graph of unrest in the form of protests, riots and strikes. A country whose contributions to global warming have turned out to be as massive as those to the global economy. It would however have enhanced the value of the book if many of these contradictions had been debated more thoroughly. For instance, one is not sure that a "genuine debate on the social and environmental costs of big dam projects" is totally "absent" in today's China. It is true that while there is deep resistance to accepting any curbs on growth, there is an emerging consensus on the severe extent of environmental degradation. There are growing fears that the country could be, as a Chinese proverb says, "draining the pond to catch the fish." This growing awareness has seen an increasing willingness to adopt greener policies such as energy-saving technologies, reforestation programmes and improving regulatory enforcement. NGOs such as Friends of Nature and Green Watershed have been scripting success stories in engaging the state on the issue of environmental protection. Late last year, top officials involved with the construction of the Three Gorges warned of an "environmental catastrophe". The willingness to acknowledge this publicly is no less significant than the decision taken recently to scale down the proposed dams on the Nu River from 13 to 4 in the face of a highly organised campaign led by local farmers and environmental campaignersThe new literature coming out of China such as Cao Jinqing's China along the Yellow River and The Blue Book brought out by the CASS also makes compelling reading for the increasingly frank treatment of complex social pressures.

The contested nature of the domestic debate on many of these issues nudges us to appreciate the reality that policy making in China today is a far more pluralistic process, involving numerous actors at various levels, than it is given credit for. If anything, the story of China's reform experience points to the creation of increasing degrees of social spaces wherein while the state appears to exercise considerable formal control, it also allows for a host of non-state actors to negotiate with the state varying spheres of functional autonomy to represent a variety of social interests, creating in the process interrelationships that are highly complex yet are also symbiotic in nature. It is of course true that the social space that has been opened up is a carefully managed one, subject to numerous direct and indirect means of state control.

Many of these larger debates point to exciting new trajectories of intellectual inquiry. Debating new questions such as these would also help steer the China studies programme in India beyond its limited and statist frames of reference. The book stops short of raising and exploring many of these issues with rigour. That said, by unbundling several conventional imageries of China in popular imagination, Aiyar is able to cut through the smoke and mirrors with relative ease.

-- The reviewer is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi and a Fellow, India China Institute, The New School, New York

[ramana]

The Telegraph, 12 Sept., 2008

THE NATION AND ITS PARTS


Common ground
COMMUNITY AND NATION: ESSAYS ON IDENTITY AND POLITICS IN EASTERN INDIA, By Papiya Ghosh,
Oxford, Rs 595

Space is an amorphous concept in post-colonial discourse. The latter half of Bill Ashcroft’s Post-Colonial Transformation is an in-depth study of space in post-colonial fiction. This space has physical, metaphoric and psychological connotations that are almost always intertwined and represented in socio-linguistic patterns. What we understand as post-colonial identity-formation is inextricably linked to the mapping of the psychological space of a community necessitated by certain historical exigencies. The gradual evolution of the communal identities of Hindus and Muslims in colonial India is an evidence of the creation of psychological space prompted by the instinct of self-preservation of these two communal entities.

This volume is a compilation of ten articles that the recently deceased historian, Papiya Ghosh, wrote over past 30 years. The articles empirically explore the changing contours of communal politics in India since the colonial era, as also the devious ways in which this politics challenged, manoeuvred and subverted the notion of nationalism itself. Ghosh chooses Bihar as the site of contestation in communal politics, highlighting the riots that not only caused mayhem and migration but also brought about radical changes in a community’s self-perception, leading up to its gradual stereotyping in the eyes of other communities.

In the first chapter itself, which focuses on the colonial Muslim politics in Bihar, Ghosh touches on problems of the Muslim identity formation. She insists that such an identity was, by no means, a given, nor was it seamlessly homogeneous as is commonly supposed. She points out that it had more a regional than a religious base to start with and that, later on, it fed on a political discourse to assume a more concrete configuration. In this context, Ghosh analyses the politics of organizations like Jamiat-Ulema-i-Hind and the Momin Conference, underlining their effort of appropriating canonical Islamic texts to construct a readily recognizable communal identity.

In the chapters that follow, Ghosh deals with the diversities and pluralities within Islam and Muslims in colonial Bihar. She unequivocally castigates the ideologies deployed by the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha, the twin communo-political outfits that unabashedly catered to bigotry and paranoia, precipitating fatal consequences. She also demonstrates how the Congress, playing a moderate role, ended up being in a cleft stick, and sympathizes with that section of the Congress sardonically dubbed the ‘Congress Muslims’ by their radicalist non-Congress brethren. At the same time, Ghosh does not hesitate to flay some Congressmen for their complicity in the riots as well as for their public participation in Hindu rituals under the garb of nationalism.

Ghosh’s book shows how the agenda of nation-building was enmeshed with forces contributing to the consolidation of communal identities. It also looks at the issues related to expatriation, putative homes and trans-territorial nationality. But more than anything else, this book is about the dynamics of identity formation that defies the logic of monolithic formulation.

ARNAB BHATTACHARYA

Is this our Arnab?

[Vikram Rathore]

Saw this on Youtube- anybody know more about this book?
[

[ramana]

Book Review from The Telegraph, 19 Sept 2008

Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos

CHRONICLE OF A BLUNDER FORETOLD


Descent Into Chaos By Ahmed Rashid,
Allen Lane, Rs 495

In 1968, with a degree in political science from Cambridge, Ahmed Rashid began his career at the unlikeliest of places: the Balochistan Liberation Front. He could have been profitably engaged in reporting the war between the peasants on the tribal belt and the Pakistani army. Instead, he reinvented himself as a guerrilla rebel and a political strategist for an oppressed people. In the late Sixties, revolution was in the air: student riots in France, race riots in America, the Russian debacle of the Prague Spring. Rashid, swept along by a heady Marxism, spent years travelling and fighting in Central Asia until he harnessed his energies into a more meaningful form of activism: once he relinquished the sword and picked up the pen, he became one of the pre-eminent South Asian journalists to report from the region.

Given Rashid’s intimate knowledge of Central Asia and its people, it is not without reason that one feels slightly let down by Descent into Chaos. With no intention of undermining his achievements — because they are formidable indeed — one feels somewhat dazed by the plethora of facts and figures in this book. Rashid may be justified in calling this work “history in the making” — but it turns out to be a diplomatic history of the region. The result, however valuable, can, at best, be called history without a credible human face.

Rashid’s thesis is not exactly original. The invasion of Afghanistan by the United States of America was motivated by the worst form of short-sightedness. After 9/11, the US had only short-term agendas — hounding out Osama bin Laden, destroying the Taliban and exterminating al Qaida — never taking any longer perspective beyond its scheme of revenge. There was a stubborn resistance to any form of nation-building — Rashid uses it interchangeably with State-building — leaving too many loose ends by the time the US took on Iraq. As a member of an experts group, appointed by Lakhdar Brahimi (former United Nations representative to Afghanistan), Rashid tried his best to persuade the US to assume a nuanced and holistic approach to the war in Afghanistan. But the US blundered its way into the region, putting its trust on the troika of the president, army and the Inter-Services Intelligence of Pakistan.

Anything wiser was unexpected of the George W. Bush administration. (During his presidential campaign of 2000, Bush did not know the name of the Pakistani president and thought that the Taliban was an all-girl pop band.) The neocons also brazenly undermined every international safeguard that Clinton had signed towards the end of his term. Bush did not send Clinton’s treaty to create the International Criminal Court for ratification to the Senate. He refused to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty or to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and also rejected the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Is it any wonder then that Bush’s cowboy regime would be in denial regarding nation-building in Afghanistan?

Rashid gives a painstaking inventory of the astronomical sums that were wasted on funding Pervez Musharraf in the hope that he would hand over the Taliban insurgents hiding in Pakistan. An internally divided ISI made good use of the US bounty — one half of the ISI funded Islamic extremism, while the rest filled their own coffers. Rashid’s narrative ties one unforeseen disaster with another in a prophetic sweep of history. He makes dour predictions about the rise of the Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the bane of warlordism, the flourishing of the poppy trade and widespread corruption in the US reconstruction teams. Most of his prophecies are Cassandra-like — potent, but nobody pays the slightest attention to them. (In an otherwise densely argued book, Rashid’s account of the conflict in Kashmir seems rather flippant. He treats it summarily, as if the whole situation amounts to little more than a military problem between India and Pakistan.)

It is evident from the profusion of facts (often repetitive) and the endless details (not all of which is strictly relevant) that telling a story is not the greatest strength of this book. Rashid has no sense of how to keep ordinary readers with him — and cramming the narrative with too much detail makes this a needlessly difficult book for non-experts. (For Barack Obama, though, it is compulsory reading.)

Ahmed Rashid certainly does not let his frustration with America dissolve into bleak scepticism. He is prudently hopeful that once the US starts focusing on nation-building — by ushering in democracy — things will start looking up again for Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Is this a very sound theory after all? US nation-building in Pakistan involved plucking out one thorn (Musharraf) and putting back another (Asif Ali Zardari). Rashid’s evident faith in the Pakistan People’s Party is also somewhat misplaced. And isn’t it a bit lopsided to expect America to lead the way for change, with the UN and Nato thrown in as afterthoughts? Surely Rashid must be aware that America is not merely a symptom of the ills afflicting Central Asia, but one of the ills itself.

SOMAK GHOSHAL

[ramana]

Book Review, Telegraph, Kolkota, 26 Sept., 2008

PEEK THROUGH THE WALL


Smoke and mirrors: An experience of China By Pallavi Aiyar, Fourth Estate, Rs 395

Till a few years back, there wasn’t a direct flight connecting China and India, the world’s two most populous nations that share a lengthy border, an ancient history and a love for Raj Kapoor’s films. This lack of easy accessibility, expectedly, bred both fear and stereotypes among the people. Sitting on a China Eastern flight, in 2002 (a direct link had been established by then), Pallavi Aiyar could only think of bicycles, “an exotic cuisine”, a difficult language and an inscrutable people when she thought of the land she was about to visit.

Her perceptions would change, in the course of the next five years, as Aiyar lived and travelled across China, learnt Mandarin, changed jobs (working as a “foreign expert” in the erstwhile Beijing Broadcasting Institute, then as a freelancer and, later, as a consultant with the CII), and made friends inside the Forbidden City. This is a story of a changing China through the eyes of a visitor who is both intelligent and affectionate.

Aiyar discovers a country developing rapidly: having built the world’s biggest dam, highest railway line and the fastest train, it had begun work on the largest airport. In the process, it was also busy effacing an older, and perhaps fairer, way of living. The hutongs — elegant, ornately built neighbourhoods dating back to the Yuan dynasty — are being mowed down and replaced by the glint of steel. There is also the reformed hukou, “an internal passport”, to check the migration of poor peasants into the gleaming cities. Cherished revolutionary ideals such as equality of labour are on the wane, and the State itself is on a tightrope walk, balancing the contradictions between the Market and Marx, often with disastrous consequences. Compared to India, China enjoys better healthcare and has higher literacy.

But Aiyar’s account of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to first deny, and then conceal, the real extent of SARS to the world and to China’s people reveals a society that is dangerously oppressive. The State’s strategy to ‘market’ Zhongdian in Yunnan, bordering the Tibet Autonomous Region, as a new Shangrila to the rich is chillingly devious as is its intolerance of opposition. The infamous Henan blood scandal, in which the entire province’s blood supply got contaminated by the HIV virus, is also a pointer of spiralling corruption and avarice.

But Aiyar is not unaffected by China’s beautiful people. The tales of Mr Wu, her landlord, who called only at dawn and took her out on dinners, the ancient, toothless Lao Tai Tai with bound feet, and the boisterous mahjong-players make Aiyar’s work richly anecdotal. There is also humour, in just the right dose. Aiyar recalls her initial perplexity with Beijinghua, a local dialect, which made all conversation sound like an endless snarl.

Aiyar’s experience also enables her to reflect on the challenges that bind China with her own country: endemic corruption, environmental degradation and a teeming populace. She also notes the many differences: in economy and politics, among students’ attitudes and in the collective responses towards women and food. But there are quaint similarities, such as the manner in which Hindi and Chini passengers scramble to their feet and push and shove to open overhead lockers when an aircraft lands.

Aiyar’s language and style are crisp, but the editing surprises occasionally: ‘none’ is used as a plural (p. 96). But these are too few to spoil Aiyar’s pleasant writing.

UDDALAK MUKHERJEE

[ramana]

Persian Fire-Tom Holland

by Tom Holland
418pp, Little, Brown, £20

The Persian invasions of mainland Greece in the early fifth century BC are the beginning of history as we understand that word. Seeking "to preserve the memory of the past" and also to understand how Greeks and Asiatics came into conflict, the ancient writer Herodotus deployed a technique he called historia: knowledge obtained through diligent inquiry.

Herodotus, a native of Ionian Greece or what is now western Turkey, travelled the known world asking people what had occurred in the 490s and 480s and why. The result was a story of pride, heroism and intrigue that gave first the Greeks, and then Europeans in general, a sense of special destiny. Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae were inspirations in the struggle for Greek independence from the Ottoman empire in the 19th century and, less creditably, for European domination of the near orient.

For the Iranians, national myth and Islamic history had submerged all memory of the achievements of Cyrus the Great, Cambyses and Darius until European archaeologists and translations of Herodotus arrived at the turn of the 20th century. The Pahlavi monarchy that came to power in the 1920s sought to revive ancient Persian glory as the Greek historians had known it. Patriotic Iranians named their sons Kourosh, Kambiz and Daryush.

Tom Holland showed in Rubicon, his book on Julius Caeasar and his age, that he could master a complex and fast-moving narrative from ancient history and make it a pleasure for both general readers and the learned. There is not nearly the same body of evidence for the Persian wars as there is for the breakdown of the Roman republic, but what there is is to die for.

Beside the nine books of Herodotus, there is Aeschylus's tragedy of 472BC, The Persians. The playwright had fought at the decisive sea-battle of Salamis and the high point of the drama is a report of the battle from the Persian point of view. There are also Plutarch's lives of the chief Athenian statesmen, and his account of the Spartan system of government, written much later under the Roman empire. From Iran, there are rock inscriptions of royal conquests above all at Bisitun in Kurdistan.

The Persian Empire was founded by Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BC with a mission, part bureaucratic, part religious, to bring good order and good government to creation. Cyrus's successors extended the empire into Central Asia and Africa and beyond the Danube. That left the eastern Mediterranean as a field for expansion. There, the Phoenicians, allies of the Persians, had been for some time in competition with the traders and colonies of the Greeks.

The immediate cause of the war was a revolt in the Greek cities of the Ionian coast in 499BC. With the help of reinforcements from the mainland, the Greek rebels ejected their autocratic rulers and burned the Persian provincial capital of Sardis. The revolt was put down, but in 490 the Persians launched a punitive expedition that resulted in defeat at Marathon. Ten years later Xerxes, the Persian king, launched a coordinated invasion by land and sea. The Greeks deployed their army and fleet at linked positions at Thermopylae and Artemisium. Storms and battle inflicted heavy losses on the Persian fleet, but the force at Thermopylae was outflanked. After three days of intense fighting, the rearguard of 300 Spartans under their king, Leonidas, was wiped out. Under the strategic direction of Themistocles, Athens was deliberately abandoned to the Persians. Instead, the Athenians and their allies provoked a sea-fight in the narrows at Salamis where the immense Persian and Phoenician fleet could not exploit its numbers. Xerxes withdrew to Asia and the following year his army was routed by the Spartans. Having expelled the Persians from the mainland, the Greeks counter-attacked and eventually, under Alexander the Great in the next century, captured the Persian empire in a piece.

All the ancient sources are partial, with a bias towards Athens even in Herodotus, but Holland succeeds in writing an account that is clear and uncluttered. His technique is to present his narrative as an uncontested succession of events, and leave the evaluation of sources and the scholarly reservations to notes.

He likes to cut and splice Herodotus's account when the chronology doesn't suit his narrative purposes, but he explains what he is doing and the effect is often fresh and interesting. (The exception is at Salamis, which is a very hard battle to understand, and even harder when Holland introduces a complex Persian night manoeuvre that doesn't appear to be in any ancient source at all.) Similarly, the evacuation of Athens is full of anachronistic detail. But some of the set pieces, such as the charge of the Athenian heavy infantry at Marathon and the Persian army crossing the bridge of boats strung across the Dardanelles, are thrilling.

There is one disreputable passage. The constitution of Sparta, with its severe military communism, has been a source of fascination right up to the 18th century and was encrusted with myths. Holland claims that unmarried Spartan women were routinely sodomised. In the notes, he admits ("only fair") that the earliest source for this unlikely claim dates from some six centuries after the Persian wars. Then he repeats the allegation in the text as fact.

Holland pays his dues to the clash-of-civilisations claptrap but is more inclined, like Herodotus, to "record the astonishing achievements of both our own and the Asiatic peoples". All the chief sources show that Persia was not some alien entity at moral war with Greece but deeply intertwined in the politics of the mainland cities. Even Themistocles ended his days a servant of Persia. For the Spartan subject races, known as helots, Persian rule would have felt like the sweetest liberty.

What happened is that the victories gave the ancient Greeks a sense of superiority over easterners which their modern epigones in Europe and America, who did not carry a shield at Marathon, nevertheless seek to enjoy.

· James Buchan's Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World is published by John Murray

[svinayak]

The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Birth of the Pax Americana
by Peter Clarke (Author)

# Hardcover: 592 pages
# Publisher: Bloomsbury Press (May 13, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1596915315
# ISBN-13: 978-1596915312

Britain's collapse as a great power is chronicled in this lively diplomatic history covering the end of WWII through the British withdrawal from India and Palestine in the late 1940s. Historian Clarke (Hope and Glory: Britain, 1900–2000) tells a fundamentally prosaic story. Britain, its finances, military power and morale exhausted by the war, found itself marginalized by the superpowers and dependent on American aid; when imperial commitments in India and Greece grew unaffordable, according to Clarke, Britain ditched them rather abruptly, along with its central role in world affairs. Drawing on participants' diaries, Clarke offers a fine-grained, well-paced narrative of British statesmen playing their weak hand in one negotiation after another, begging for economic concessions from the hard-nosed Americans, strategic concessions from an indifferent Stalin and political concessions from impatient subjects. At the story's center is Winston Churchill, embodiment of Britain's faltering imperial pretensions. In Clarke's caustic portrait, Churchill is vain, pompous and infantile (showily urinating on Germany's Siegfried line, for example), forever disguising a humiliating decline with grand rhetoric. The opposite of great man historiography, Clarke's sympathetic but sardonic account shows anxious leaders struggling to catch up with a world that has passed them by. 16 pages of b&w photos; maps. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description
A sweeping, brilliantly vivid history of the sudden end of the British Empire and the moment when America became a world superpower—published on the sixtieth anniversary of Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine.
“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Winston Churchill’s famous statement in November 1942, just as the tide of the Second World War was beginning to turn, pugnaciously affirmed his loyalty to the worldwide institution that he had served for most of his life. Britain fought and sacrificed on a global scale to defeat Hitler and his allies—and won. Yet less than five years after Churchill’s defiant speech, the British Empire effectively ended with Indian independence in August 1947 and the end of the British Mandate in Palestine in May 1948. As the sun set on Britain’s empire, the age of America as world superpower dawned.
How did this rapid change of fortune come about? Peter Clarke’s book is the first to analyze the abrupt transition from Rule Britannia to Pax Americana. His swift-paced narrative makes superb use of letters and diaries to provide vivid portraits of the figures around whom history pivoted: Churchill, Gandhi, Roosevelt, Stalin, Truman, and a host of lesser-known figures through whom Clarke brilliantly shows the human dimension of epochal events.
Clarke traces the intimate and conflicted nature of the “special relationship,” showing how Roosevelt and his successors were determined that Britain must be sustained both during the war and after, but that the British Empire must not; and reveals how the tension between Allied war aims, suppressed while the fighting was going on, became rapidly apparent when it ended. The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire is a captivating work of popular history that shows how the events that followed the war reshaped the world as profoundly as the conflict itself.


This work chronicles the relatively rapid dissolution of the British Empire as a consequence of already existing nationalistic pressures within its component parts and the drastic diminution of British power ironically brought about by World War II. Though a victor, Britain was dwarfed by the size of its debt and the might of its partners, the Soviet Union and the United States. Mr. Clarke delineates glimmers of decline by detailing internecine rivalries between British and American commanders, how they grow and impinge operations as Allied forces move beyond Normandy. The gradually overwhelming preponderance of American forces and equipment is resented and in cases resisted, but eventually has to be accepted: the might of the arithmetic cannot be ignored. The diminution of British power is nowhere more painfully shown than at the Yalta conference where it becomes obvious to everyone, perhaps more desperately so to Churchill himself, that the Big Three had become the Big Two, though not rudely so. (There is ample, at times ironic discussion of Churchill's positions on post-war European boundaries and the issue of which Polish government to recognize). America was clear and unanimous (Democratic and Republican) in its political judgement when it joined the war that it would save Britain but not its Empire.

Even at its height, during the Edwardian era, careful observers had noted that the British empire could not be sustained. The gradual evolution of concepts such as Dominion and Commonwealth attested to the futility of trying to exercise central control far removed from robust constituent nationalities or original settlements such as Canada, Australia and South Africa which had developed their own ways. Their loyal and quick supportive response to the challenge of WWII, though touted by Churchill as evidence of the inherent "goodness" of the British Empire, indeed manifested most enlightened self-interest, as no one doubted the debt incurred by Britain would pave the way to greater power and independence once the wartime emergency had passed. Indeed, with the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, an outpost of empire such as Australia could no longer look to Britain for support and defense, only to itself and to the United States.

Mr. Clarke's book is faithful to its title. It shows how and why it came about that the British Empire was dismantled in the aftermath of World War II. It does not discuss whether such dismantling would have come about anyway, indeed that it was contemplated even at the end of the nineteenth century. Rather, the emphasis is on the acceleration provided by the conclusion of the war, the indebtedness Britain had incurred, the new multinational world aspired to but the bipolar one which ensued. The higher up in the ranks the tale goes, the smoother it is told (e.g. the interactions between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin). The narrative gets a bit confusing and the details messy when it gets into military history such as the discussion of Operation Market Garden. In fairness to Clarke, it is difficult to discuss strategies and operational details while trying to illustrate rivalries, pettiness, egos, wounded pride, concurrently at play, as the British gradually realize that their relative power is diminishing and that the final defeat of Germany from the West is emerging as primarily an American show. After all the pain and privation, somehow it did not seem fair.

India and Pakistan are obviously covered, but those histories are better served in stand-alone texts than in survey, though what is here is apt. There is an interesting section on Palestine, the termination of the British Mandate, and the grave political and moral questions it posed for Britain in dealing with post-Nazi European Jewish emigration to a land where they were not welcomed and which was under their administrative control. There is discussion of Arab political ineptness, Zionist terrorism, Arab recalcitrance, occupying authority anti-semitism, the President Warfield SS ("Exodus") incident, etc., cumulatively leading to partition, war, the emergence of modern Israel and the growing problems America, as a power with interests in all sides of the conflict, still faces in the Middle East.

The final sections of the book deal with the economic consequences of the war (pace Keynes), and to America's role in rescuing post-war Britain, much to the chagrin of some. There's an Epilogue that aims at analysing what is referred to as the "special relationship" between Britain and America, more than just a literary conceit but, now that the power scales are so tilted, certainly not always a mutuality of interests. One cannot help but recall Hans Morgenthau's realistic dictum that countries have no friends, only interests.

Mr. Clarke's preference for detail over analysis, working by inference, so to speak, is helpful but at times proves distracting from the general thrust of argument. Churchill appears central to the narrative, as indeed he was, even when dismissed from office. The portrait that emerges is less iconographic than usual, but more human. In some ways closer to what one gets from Lord Moran's memoirs without the medical detail.

This is a valuable guide to how British imperial power came apart. It passed to no inheritor, though American interests are significantly present in most of those areas of the mapa mundi which used to be colored red.



This book is a splendid achievement. In it, Peter Clarke, former Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, examines the last thousand days of the British Empire (1944-1947) in its personal as well as in its economic dimensions. Demonstrating a comprehensive grasp of the facts and macaulayan narrative skill, Clarke shows us with what astonishing rapidity the Empire was given up, once the elites had grasped the hopelessness of the situation. Though he describes the birth of Israel and an independent India, his focus is on the troubled relations between Britain and the US in this period of world-historical transition. The timing of this book's publication was apt (2007 in the UK edition), roughly coinciding with Britain's final payment on its war debt to the US (December 2006).

Clarke sketches Churchill and FDR with light, economical strokes, bringing them to life in a way that no historian has done heretofore and showing them for the first time as, to use his phrase, "fully plausible human beings." He displays a quite remarkable capacity for stepping into the shoes his actors, major and minor, and seeing the world through their eyes. His prose is a delight--precise diction and wonderfully varied rhythms. Flashes of wit catch the reader unawares and the author's gift for phrase-making relieves a long journey (about 526 pages). It cannot be said of Clarke that his "tired tropes succumbed to repetitive strain injuries through over-exercised metaphors," though his metaphors do get a vigorous workout.

Clarke does not press the point, but his story resonates powerfully with current events. In the end, though, his message is not entirely clear. His strictures against those who, like Ghandi, were willing to indulge romantic notions if it cost a million lives, are strangely suspended whenever Churchill comes into view. Can myth-making be excused when things happen to turn out well?

dissolution of the British Empire. This is the best, both in terms of the relatively short, but entirely adequate, time period the author selects for discussion, and for his obvious but never intrusive mastery of both his subject matter and the English language. I would single out his analysis of the initially nation-saving, but ultimately calamitous, innovation of Lend-Lease as by far the most insightful and comprehensive I have ever read. And speaking of reading, I tend toward speed, but this is a "rich" book which makes the reader want to slow down and savor both the writing and the author's observations. Clarke can turn a phrase with the best of them but resists any inclination to be too clever and thus his (often alliterative) witticisms and asides are both surprising and delightfully refreshing. With this book, Clarke joins at least my select group of historians who are also masterful writers, a list which includes Roy Porter, Christopher Hibbert, Niall Ferguson and Simon Schama; he is that good. Indeed, he could have taken 1000 pages to describe the 1000 days and it would have been fine with me. Highly recommended.

[ramana]

The Shield Of Achilles- Philip Bobbit

Amazon.com Review
The scope of Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles is breathtaking: the interplay, over the last six centuries, among war, jurisprudence, and the reshaping of countries ("states," in Bobbitt's vocabulary). Bobbitt posits that certain wars should be deemed epochal--that is, seen as composed of many "smaller" wars. For example, according to Bobbitt the epochal war of the 20th century began in 1914 and ended with the collapse of communism in 1990. These military affairs--and their subsequent "ultimate" peace agreements--have caused, each in their own way, revolutionary reconstructions of the idea and actuality of statehood and, following, of relationships between these various new entities. Of these reconstructions (including the princely state, the kingly state, and the nation-state), Bobbitt is most interested in the current incarnation, which he calls the market-state: one whose borders are scuffed and hazy at best (certainly compared to earlier territorial markers) and whose strengths, weaknesses, citizens, and enemies roam across cyberspace rather than plains and valleys. The Shield of Achilles is massive, erudite, and demanding--at once highly abstract and extremely detailed. There is about it an air of detached erudition, one noticeably free of the easy "decline and fall" hysteria too often present in contemporary historical analyses. --H. O'Billovich --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
The world is at a pivotal point, argues Bobbitt, as the nation-state, developed over six centuries as the optimal institution for waging war and organizing peace, gives way to the market-state. Nation-states derive legitimacy from promising to improve the material welfare of their citizens, specifically by providing security and order. Market-states offer to maximize the opportunity of their people. Nation-states use force and law to bring about desired results. Market-states use various forms of market relationships. Bobbitt, who has an endowed chair at the University of Texas and has written five previous books on constitutional law and on nuclear strategy, argues in sprawling fashion that this paradigm shift is essentially a consequence of the "Long War" of 1914-1990, a struggle among communism, fascism and parliamentarism that, through innovation and mimicry, generated a fundamentally new constitutional and strategic dynamic that in turn generated a fundamentally new "society of states." Central to Bobbitt's thesis is the postulate that international order is a consequence of domestic order. In the work's most stimulating section, Bobbitt discusses three possible ways of reorganizing the latter. The "Meadow," essentially an extrapolation of socio-political patterns currently dominant in the U.S., features high levels of individualism around the world at the expense of collective behavior at any level. The "Park," based on a European alternate, emphasizes regionalism. The "Garden" predicates successful market states disengaging from international affairs and emphasizing renewed internal community. None of these systems will eliminate war, but the nation-state is declining, Bobbitt argues, essentially because nonstate actors confront the nation-state with threats it cannot effectively respond to. This big book is provocative and richly textured, but too often Bobbitt's arguments are obscured by his historically digressive presentation. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

and

In "The Shield of Achilles," Philip Bobbitt has realized an impressive tour de force in studying in great detail the intimate interaction of law, strategy and history between 1494 and the contemporary era. Bobbitt correctly points out that there is no state without law, strategy and history because they complement and influence one another (p. 6). There can be a state only when the governing institutions of a society have an acknowledged monopoly on the legitimate use of violence at home (law) and abroad (strategy). History relates the account of the stewardship of a society over time that in turns influences law and strategy. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Bobbitt convincingly shows that the history of the Modern State did not begin at Westphalia in 1648, but in the North of Modern Italy in 1494 (p. 805).

Bobbitt clearly demonstrates that the Modern State was put together when it proved necessary to create a constitutional order that could wage war more efficiently than the feudal and mercantile orders it replaced (p. xxv). Bobbitt spends most of his time covering the pattern of epochal wars and state formation, of peace congresses and international constitutions in Europe. The Modern State was indeed born and went through successive mutations in Europe before spreading to the rest of the world. Bobbitt gives his readers a nice pictorial representation of the six constitutional conventions of the international society of states at the end of Book I dedicated to the State of War (pp. 346-347). Book II focuses on the States of Peace.

To his credit, Bobbitt does not reduce war to a pathology that could one day be eradicated totally. War is as inevitable as death because the Modern State aims to be as efficient as possible to wage war when the opportunity arises to maximize its chance of survival and prosperity (pp. xxvii, 819). Contrary to the popular wisdom, Bobbitt rightly construes war not as the result of a decision made by an aggressor, but as the reaction of a state which cannot acquiesce to the legal and strategic demands of the aggressor (p. . Operation Iraqi Freedom is one of the most recent applications of this recurring observation.

Bobbitt also makes an interesting comparison between the assassination of Kitty Genovese occurring in New York in 1964 in the presence of multiple passive witnesses and the wide indifference of the international community to the plight of Bosnia for years in the early 1990s (pp. 411-467). The international community will find in this chapter a well-articulated argumentation for doing little or nothing in the naïve or vain hope that such problems as the on-going genocide against certain groups of population in Darfur, Sudan will disappear as if by magic.

Furthermore, Bobbitt rightly draws the attention of his audience to the importance of the Peace of Paris of 1990 that ended what he called the Long War starting in 1914 (pp. 24-64, 609-663). The Peace of Paris celebrated the triumph of the parliamentary democracy as the winning nation-state model at the successive expense of fascism and communism. Bobbitt is probably at his weakest when he launches himself in scenario analysis about the future of the three competing constitutional forms of the market-state that is taking the place of the nation-state (pp. 717, 728). The international society of states has indeed the choice among the entrepreneurial market-state (e.g., the U.S.), the mercantile market-state (e.g., Japan and China) and the managerial market-state (e.g., the European Union) (pp. 670-676). Each incarnation of the market-state has its pros and cons.

As Bobbitt points out elsewhere in his book, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda could be considered a fourth, malevolent version of the market-state that is a common threat to the other three versions (p. 820). For the first time since the birth of the Modern State, a state structure is no longer necessary to constitute a lethal threat to a society (p. 806). The market-states will have to cooperate with one another for example to contain WMD proliferation, cyber-terrorism against their critical infrastructure, which is increasingly privatized and internationalized, or environmental threats to the planet (pp. 785-797, 800, 806).

Bobbitt states that there is no certainty that the first three constitutional forms of the market-state can coexist peacefully (p. 781). Bobbitt enumerates the ten constitutional conditions that will facilitate the peaceful coexistence of market states (p. 802). Unlike the three constitutional forms of the Nation-State, i.e., parliamentary democracy, communism and fascism, the three constitutional forms of the Market-State could coexist peacefully in the long run. The members of the European Union will probably stick to their managerial model of the market-state because Europe was the theater of the bloody development of a highly competitive society of states for centuries. As the leading entrepreneurial market-state, the United States will remain the champion of globalization and push for the further opening of regional trading blocks and mercantile market states in the foreseeable future.

The greatest source of instability besides terrorism and rogue nations could eventually come from some mercantile market-states such as China and Russia. These two states have not yet fully embraced the tenets of Liberalism and are not satisfied with their military position in the world as Michael Mandelbaum correctly points out in "The Ideas that Conquered the World." In all scenarios, the United States will have to bear a disproportionate burden towards the maintenance of the society of market-states as long as it has the willingness and capability to assume its leadership role (p. 803).

To summarize, "The Shield of Achilles" clearly does not target readers who have a short attention span, do not acknowledge the importance of the past to peruse the future, lack persistence, or are interested in simplistic answers to complex issues.
-------------------------
Phillip Bobbitt has created something very rare in the realm of International Relations: an entirely unique new idea. For those students of history and current events who have grown accustomed to the accepted world views: Realism, Idealism - internationalism vs. isolationism; this new entry will provide a welcome and refreshing perspective.

Rather than defining international politics in the typical framework of the "balance of power", or that of a "bipolar" or "mulitpolar" world, Bobbitt has completely redefined the course of history with his thesis. He states the modern state has evolved through the course of history and taken many different forms, based on the demands and interplay (or history) of Strategy and Constitutional development.

These various forms of the state have had differing expectations demanded from their populaces, and differing relationships amongst themselves at the international level. Based on a field relationship between Strategy and Constitutionalism, different forms of the state have proven dominant at different periods of time. Developments in one arena will create new trends in another- and the interplay is constant. Currently Bobbitt makes the case that the current incarnation of the modern state, the Nation-State, is giving way to a new form which he has named the Market-State.

Bobbitt backs up his arguments well with an historical analysis of the modern state ranging from the Machiavellian Princely-State to the wars of the Nation-States and beyond. The entire book is very well documented with Primary and Secondary sources, which are indexed and included in a comprehensive bibliography.

There is also a very interesting section written on the "Possible Worlds" of tomorrow based on the ground rules laid down throughout the book. So Bobbitt not only comments on our past and present, but continues with speculation and predictions on the near term future. This gives the "Shield" very well rounded experience for its contemporary reader. What will be interesting is if this section stands the test of time. I also hope that Mr. Bobbitt comments on his theses in future editions and expands this particular section as history progresses.

The book is Mammoth, and would require a mammoth review to do it justice. So at the expense of thoroughness, and to save you a few minutes I will say this: "The Shield of Achilles" is a long read well worth your time and its arguments should be considered by any students or participants in the field of International Relations.

[ramana]

A Choice of Enemies

A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East
Sir Lawrence Freedman, Joanne J. Myers
May 19, 2008

A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East
Introduction
Remarks
Questions and Answers
Introduction
JOANNE MYERS: I'm Joanne Myers, Director of Public Affairs Programs. On behalf of the Carnegie Council, I would like to thank you all for joining us.

Today it is a great pleasure to welcome Sir Lawrence Freedman, who will be discussing his book, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East.

The Middle East has been one of the most flammable parts of the world for many decades. The war in Iraq, the standoff with Iran, the failure to find a diplomatic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and the continuing danger posed by al-Qaeda all testify to the complexity of the region's problems. Along with Europe and Asia, the Middle East has been one of the three zones most strategically linked to the national interest of the United States. Yet it was not until British and French colonial domination had receded that America stepped into the Middle East, gradually becoming the principal guarantor of the region's peace and also ensuring stable access to the region's oil resources.

In Choice of Enemies, our guest this morning writes about America's involvement in this region, how issues were presented and the choices our country made in dealing with them—for example, whom should we oppose, whom should we support, and under what conditions? Professor Freedman aims to provide an account of how successive presidents from Jimmy Carter through Bush the Younger engaged with this part of the world. Professor Freedman writes that it is in the Middle East where he sees a recurrent theme, one that reflects how the United States has been made to confront its attitudes on the use of force and the role of its allies and of international law. He examines prevailing assumptions about the sources of power and how this power can be exploited.

As an organizing principle, our speaker chooses certain key events from the year 1979 which he believes set the terms of greater U.S. involvement in this region. These events include the Camp David summit, which led to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty; the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which led to the overthrow of the Shah; and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Also in 1979, Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq.

The sequence of events might well be coincidental and unrelated, but the evidence attests to the long-lasting and historical consequences of these occurrences, which, one could argue, include the U.S. withdrawal from Beirut, the Iran-Contra affair, and 9/11.

Our speaker is Professor of War Studies at King's College London, a post he has held since 1982. In 2001, he was appointed head of the School of Social Sciences and Public Policy at King's and, shortly thereafter, its vice principal for research. Before joining King's, Professor Freedman held research appointments at Nuffield College, Oxford, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

Professor Freedman started publishing in the late 1970s, and since then, almost every year a book or edited volume has emerged bearing his name. His writings have focused mostly on military affairs, nuclear strategy, and the Cold War, and include the widely acclaimed Kennedy's Wars.

Next to being a well-known figure in academic circles, Sir Lawrence's policy-oriented research has been recognized at the relevant British ministerial departments, with an appointment in 1997 by Tony Blair to be the official historian of the Falklands campaign.

If you want a better understanding about the history of America's relations in the Middle East and a glimpse into the future, at this time I ask that you join me in sending a very warm welcome to our very distinguished guest, Sir Lawrence, who is well equipped to illuminate America's involvement in this region.

[ramana]

Failure of Intelligence- Melvin Goodman

This is an astonishingly well balanced book that while deeply critical of CIA and its senior management also credits its strengths and successes. The author, Melvin Goodman, spent some 34 years as an analyst within the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) of CIA. His principal criticism is that CIA directors in collusion with the executive branch have routinely politicized not merely intelligence products, but the very processes of research and analysis basic to intelligence production. He further argues that most intelligence `failures' can be traced to the practice of far too many at CIA to distort the intelligence process to support policy decisions and even to suppress sound, contrary intelligence. He also sees the growing `militarization' of the U.S. Intelligence System as further evidence that the Intelligence Community (IC) is moving from producing objective and accurate intelligence to producing intelligence that supports the ideologies and prejudices of its masters.

Goodman supports his argument with a remarkably detailed chronicle of CIA intelligence production over the last 35 years. This chronology emphasizes those instances where political pressure and the need to support a particular point of view took precedence over the need to produce accurate intelligence. Also, although he doesn't say so directly, he demonstrates the truth that intelligence is only as good as the system it serves. Unlike so many books on intelligence, this book actually identifies both the good guys and the bad .guys of CIA over the years. In particular he has a fascinating analysis of CIA Directors from Bill Casey (1980-1986) onward that is quite devastating. Although his principal target is the deleterious effect of the politicization and militarization of intelligence, he also effectively criticizes CIA's analytic and clandestine tradecraft.

This is an absolutely important critique of the course of CIA and by extension the entire U.S. Intelligence Community. However, given the controversial claims made by Goodman and the fact he actually names his heroes and villains, the reader might ask does he really know what he is talking about? In this reviewer's opinion, the answer is yes he does. Having been personally involved in a number of specific intelligence events that he chronicles, this reviewer would argue that Goodman has accurately described them. This is a book that ought to guide any effort to reform the U.S. Intelligence System.

In the Factors for Surprise the authors write that shaping the product to suit poltical needs is the one of the primary causes for surprise in countries and businesses.

[svinayak]

Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War
by Seymour Melman
# Paperback
# Publisher: Mcgraw-hill Publishing Company (January 1, 1970)
McGraw-Hill, 290 pp., $8.50
# ISBN-10: 0704145480
# ISBN-13: 978-0704145481

The thesis of Seymour Melman's terrifying book can be briefly stated. There exists within the democratic capitalist political economy of the United States a second political economy that is neither capitalist nor democratic. Technically subordinate to the larger entity, this second political economy has in fact become the acknowledged master of the industrial core of the primary economic system, and the silent master of crucial areas of its political life. Each year the directorship of this inner state, through appeals of mixed fear and patriotism, renews its control over the richest portion of the nation's resources, which it then disburses to its industrial satrapies.

In 1970, Seymour Melman published Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War (New York: McGraw Hill) which detailed the tight nexus between the military elites and industrial capital. Melman showed how military control over national resources narrowed the choices available for other state programs. Further, he argued that the military-industrial complex uses arms exports as a means to manage domestic economic problems as well as to push an imperialist policy via proxy. Aggressive arms sales to the Third World began after the onset of the long recession in 1973. Arms sales to the Gulf States, for instance, enabled the recovery of revenue spent on oil. The major arms merchants sold intermediary military technology to the Third World (keeping the latest inventions for the awesome military might of the overdeveloped world). The military industrial complex earned major revenues from the exchange which enabled the defense industry to subsidize its domestic production as well as to keep the companies productive during times of lean domestic demand.
Further, arms production enabled states with flagging economies to keep employment steady. The overdeveloped world benefited from these sales even at a time when its own economies suffered from the burden of stagflation. The nuclear elites developed a theory to justify their sale of "conventional arms" to the Third World: "conventional weapons, " the nuclearcrats argued, provided a "means to circumvent" the use of the nuclear option by non-nuclear and threshold states (India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa). If these states receive adequate amounts of "conventional weapons," this wisdom contends, then they will not engage in nuclear weapons production. In other words, let these folks kill themselves with weapons which only have local range; let them have neither long-range nuclear devices nor access to "conventional weapons."
The latter option, total disarmament and non-proliferation of "conventional weapons," is not an option because the arms industry is structured into the heart of the economy of the overdeveloped world. The Third World buys vast quantities of arms from the overdeveloped world: India, for in stance, imported $17 billion of military goods between 1985 and 1989; Iraq was next on the list with $12 billion (and it was in the midst of a bloody engagement with Iran at this time). From 1992 to 1994, India increased its arms expenditure by 12 percent and Pakistan by 19.5 percent. The major exporters of arms to India include France, Sweden, UK, U.S., and Russia; Pakistan is outfitted by PRC, France, Sweden, UK, and U.S. The role of the nuclear elite in such transactions is apparent.
From 1983 to 1993, the U.S. increased its share of the [arms sales to the Third World] pie to 55 percent and Russia decreased its share to 10 percent. Within the past four years, the U.S. renamed its Office of Munitions Control to the Center of Defense Trade. With the end of Cold War II (1979- 1989), the arms business has become "trade" rather than a matter of "control."
The U. S. occasionally frames laws to restrict arms sales to states which engage in nuclear production. Two such legal provisions are the Symington Amendment, section 669 of the Foreign Assistance Act (which prevents U. S. sales to states who do not meet International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards) and the Pressler Amendment (which suspends U.S. military aid and US AID assistance to states engaged in nuclear weapons development and proliferation-in this instance, Pakistan). These legal remedies are frequently exempted to funnel weapons to allies or to those states which pay top dollar. The international community forged two protocols to control the proliferation of "conventional weapons," but even these provisions are nowhere near comprehensive. The UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (October 10, 1980) is only for weapons "which may be deemed to be excessively injurious or to have indiscriminate effects" while the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies (November 1996) is only to prevent proliferation to states "whose behavior is, or becomes, a cause for serious international concern." Other states are offered free use of weaponry.
Of course, there is a contradiction in the policy of the nuclear elites. On the one hand, these states, as the congealed representatives of their industrial, commercial, and financial blocs, want to promote a subdued passivity in the Third World in order for "commercial freedom." On the other hand, the nuclear elites want to create discord in the Third World in order to prevent a unified front to the ambitions and interests of the overdeveloped world. There is widespread resentment amongst the peoples of the Third World at the policies of the nuclear elites. States might vote with the nuclear elites at the UN, but their own populations display an impatience which comes out in mass protests or in the growth of unsavory populist movements.
India votes against a hollow treaty and the nuclear elites and their clients round up the usual suspects to begin a campaign of condemnation. The people of the overdeveloped world, soaked with propaganda from the media (which in foreign affairs, acts as the mouthpiece of the state department, et. al.), put their faith in the doublespeak of the nuclearcrats. The nuclear elites, meanwhile, balance their budgets on the blood of innocents via the sale of "conventional weapons." There is no pretense of morality in this phase of Pentagon capitalism.

[Raju]

Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life (Hardcover)
by Ted Gup (Author)

SR: Ted, your book is called “Nation of Secrets.” I want to ask you about some of the journalistic dimensions of this because you teach journalism as well as being an investigative reporter yourself. …There are some things in this book that people don’t know about.

TG: There are a number of things that are unknown, that I stumbled upon. One of them… and some of these are obscure and historical and some are not …one of them involves a covert operation the CIA ran back in the ‘60’s in India which may have had a profound effect on the government of India. It went awry and I won’t go into all the details… but a Prime Minister named Shastri died suddenly. A covert operative tells me that he fears that this covert operation than went awry may have contributed to the death of the prime minister. Which, if true, is extraordinary.

[ramana]

Couple of books reviewed in Pioneer, 6 Oct., 2008

The Phoenix Phenomenon: The Rise and Rise of India

India Express: The Future of a New Superpower
Author: Daniel Lak
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Price: Rs 499

The Indian Renaissance: India's Rise After a Thousand Years of Decline
Author: Sanjeev Sanyal
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Price: Rs 499

Debraj Mookerjee journeys through two recent books on the great Indian story and discovers fresh approaches to a truism that is almost becoming self evident these days. The deeper contexts, the hidden narratives and the leaps of faith that underline the miracle this country is witnessing come alive in Daniel Lak's India Express and Sanjeev Sanyal's The Indian Renaissance --

What is the one defining feature of India today? All manner of people are asking, and more importantly seeking to find answers to, this question. For the reviewer the answer is rather obvious. Fifteen years back, every bloke on the road meekly bleated out the same lament: "There's nothing that can be done to save this country" ("Is desh ka kuch nahin ho sakta"). Today everyone, from the guy on the street, to the retired BBC correspondent, to a top international bank's chief economist, has great hope for this country's future. Along with that hope there is the desire to understand the process by which this new reality has come to be; more significantly, questions are now being asked about how close to the top of the heap this once great nation will be thirty years on. Will this century be the one India has been waiting for since the erasure of the Harappan civilisation?

One story; two narratives. One hope; two different explorations. India Express: The Future of a New Superpower by Daniel Lak, and The Indian Renaissance: India's Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline by Sanjeev Sanyal, are two recent works that are best read together.

Daniel Lak, a Canadian, covered India for over 20 years for the BBC. His tribute to India follows perhaps in the trajectory of his predecessor Sir Mark Tully, whose No Full Stops in India (1991) was an immensely insightful read. Sir Mark followed the 1991 work with the more flattering India in Slow Motion (2004). Even the latter text, while praising the achievements of post-liberalisation India, was still trying to make sense of "a country at odds with itself" (blurb). Daniel Lak sheds some of Sir Mark's diffidence to actually call the dice. Witness Chapter 11 of Lak's book is titled 'Becoming Asia's America - The Next Liberal Superpower?'

Sanjeev Sanyal took the Delhi University, Rhodes Scholar route to corporate success as the Singapore based Chief Economist for the region with Deutsche Bank, but accumulated strong views on what made the Indian economy: India crawled up to 1991 and galloped thereafter. And yet he explores ideas beyond economics and from a time much before modernity overtook the world. Whereas Lak's work is marked by the impressionistic brush of a pair of western eyes meandering though the crazy kaleidoscope of the Indian tamasha, politically engaged yet neutral, Sanyal's journey is more textbook like, studded with figures, propped up through close analyses, and driven by a systemic dislike for Nehruvian socialism. Read together however, they offer a rounded introduction to the India of the future.

Lak clears the pitch early on in his introduction when he writes, "In this book I argue that India has arrived at the world's top table, and is awaiting due recognition." Whether the recently signed Nuclear Deal is a sign of the times is debatable, but the churning has begun. To see India's awakening merely in terms of the economy is to narrow the focus a little too much.

The economy is the more visible face of India's march into the future. It is not however the only barometer for judging India's transformation. Indian writers are fattening the purses of the top publishers, Indian activists have hit the big league with the likes of Arundhati Roy having gained cult status among placard holders, and Indians are joining the league of global leaders in diverse fields.

Lak begins by taking stock of the new economy, beginning with the Y2K debugging boom and moving on to suggest how the work Indians are doing is slowly moving up the value chain. But he also stops to register the anxiety of the other side of the software boom in the chapter 'Silicon and Slums - new economy, old problems'. He garners the views of a certain JP Natraj in Bangalore, "An unapologetic leftist and trade unionist," who chides the author for being "another one of those IT worshippers." That slums exist cheek by jowl with the steel and glass towers of the new economy is a problem that will not go away in a hurry. However, there is also the dhobi from Chennai Lak writes about, who laboured to successfully put his two kids through IT education, indicating the sort of social mobility now possible in India.

Lak records other voices as well, like Professor Ashish Bose's, India's leading demographer, the man who first theorised the BIMARU concept, and who makes a great case for empowering women to improve social demography. Prof Bose also introduces him to Nathi Devi, a Rajasthani activist headed (then) for Honk Kong to participate in a WTO meeting to, in the words of Bose, "give them a piece of her mind" about how "agricultural subsidies in rich countries kept small poor farmers like her trapped in rural poverty."

After profiling British rule in India as one that was totally deleterious to the economy, he also makes a short presentation on the transition from foreign yoke to freedom, before again profiling those smaller voices that have brought about social change, like Dr Bindeshwar Pathak's (who started Sulabh International). Lak's final hypothesis is encapsulated in the chapter where he sees India becoming a great liberal powerhouse of a nation in the years ahead. "The world's largest democracy is thinking big," Lak seems to conclude, underscoring his assertion with the conviction that not only does India have every right to do so, but that indeed the world needs it to.

Sanjeev Sanyal is an economist, and it shows. For him, posterity will view the year 1991 in the same light as 1947. It is the year when a new India was born, when Indians gained freedom "from a cultural attitude embodied in the old inward-looking regime." Three things stand out in Sanyal's book for going beyond received opinion" a) that India has been backward looking for a thousand years, and to blame its woes on either the Mughals or the British is to take a limited view, b) that most economists miss the exponential opportunities India will enjoy due to the 'second demographic' shift that will peak by about 2020, and, c) that urbanisation is inevitable, and will ultimately offer the solution out of the labour surpluses and underemployment the rural economy faces.

India's inward looking mentality stifled culture, language and the spirit of enterprise. Nehruvian socialism merely helped cement this lethargy by institutionalising a client-patron relationship in politics and rent seeking by the apparatchiks of the state.

Sanyal's views are extreme but worth pondering. They run against the grain of nationalist histories; which is exactly why they force us to examine our civilisation decline though the prism of the present, the extant reality that is witnessing the shaping of a different India by the young and the talented.

These young people, more numerous than in any other country of the world, are the new workforce. India's skilled labour force, and the contribution of a parallel school education system, will throw up opportunities unthought-of, like very high savings that will provide capital for indigenous investment. The new workforce will scavenge the by then labour-deficit manufacturing base of China, just as that country scavenged Taiwan, and Taiwan scavenged Japan. India's demographic shift will be the next big story, the manufacturing story we are unable to see, bedazzled as we are by the services sector boom. The services sector has created pockets of affluence, especially for the children of the elite. The manufacturing boom with mark the next phase of urbanisation that will create an entirely new middle class; the existing middle class numbers at present, accordingly to Sanyal, merely 50 million and not the inflated figure of 200 million people rave about.

Both Lak and Sanyal essentially believe India has a great future ahead, and they both give credit to the Liberalisation Policy of 1991 for the great burst of energy that is pulsating through the nation of the future. Perhaps they could have dedicated their efforts to the incumbent Prime Minister of India.

[ramana]

Hindu, 7 Oct., 2008

Empires of the Indus

History

River sutra


SHELLEY WALIA


A riveting account of the life and civilisation along the banks of the river Indus down the centuries.

Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River,Alice Albinia, John Murray, 2008, p. 366, Rs. 550


My travels up and down the Rhine a few years ago gave me an insight into not only the history of Germany but the economic potential evident in the rise of Germany after the damage caused by the Treaty of Versailles which left her drained of some of her vital resources. A two-day stop at a small village called Rees on the banks of the Rhine gave me a fair idea of German industry, especially from the huge trawlers that carried the powerful German cars. I could not sleep at night because of the noise of the movement of these carriers. But it did make me aware of the power of the river and its place in German development and it’s past. Indeed, the river for me is the adequate conveyance of history and spiritual values. I have had similar experiences on the river Cam and the Cherwell that flow through Cambridge and Oxford.

Alice Albinia’s book is, therefore, interesting because it takes as its central motif the river Indus, a timeless symbol of transition from the past into the present and moving on into the future. It is the story of a river that has its origins in the Tibetan mountains which then finds its way down the north of India into Pakistan. Through it, Albinia constructs a chorus of voices, now individual, now subsumed by a community and its historical and geographical location. Ancient Sanskrit classics like the Rig Veda sing of its virtues as a divine reincarnation. The Indus Valley as a significant location of the birth of Sikhism and the chief site for Sufi pilgrimage further situates it in theological history. As Albinia writes: “…it seemed that everywhere I turned, the Indus was present. Its merchants traded with Mesopotamia five thousand years ago. A Persian emperor mapped it in the sixth century BCE. The Buddha lived beside it during previous incarnations, Greek kings and Afghan sultans waded across it with their armies. The founder of Sikhism was enlightened while bathing in a tributary. And the British invaded it by gunboat, colonised it for one hundred years, and then severed it from India. The Indus was part of Indians’ lives — until 1947.” And though the river separates the two nations, India and Pakistan, it still links the antagonists in their common heritage of memories and myths that the river embodies.

Past and present

The jagged memories of the past stand juxtaposed with the political, military and social development in the Indus basin covering a period from the Greek invasions to the British Raj. The Indus, often termed as “the Unconquered Sindu, the river of rivers” and significant for being the nodal point of Indian Civilization, “is not in India, but in Pakistan, its demonised neighbour.” Interestingly, the very name “India” comes from “Indus” much to the chagrin of Muhammad Ali Jinnah who was livid at India “appropriating the past” by choosing to call the new nation India whereas he took the decision of calling the partitioned land Pakistan, “the land of the pure”: “He assumed that his coevals in Delhi would do the same, calling their country by the ancient Sanskrit title, Bharat.” {So that was the background in calling India that is Bharat!}

The account clearly renders details of life on its banks through centuries, recreating with equal vividness a complex of political and economic history associated with the river that runs from India into Pakistan and remains an integral part of the history of both the nations. Parallels between ancient values and modern squalor, between antiquity and contemporaneity sent my mind back to Spencer’s Prothalamion and the worship of the river Thames in all its pristine glory in the Elizabethan period and its decadence in modern times. The damming of the river and its connections with military antagonism has altered lives on its banks of both “the human and non-humans”.

Layered narrative

However, through its simple and clear-headed account, the book shows the eternal values of an age old culture that is epitomised through the persona of the river which provides the narrative and the frame of reference and allows the writer to get on with the task of a historian in elaborating and depicting the story of the Indus civilization. She relies mainly on the narratives of the past myths and of oral history with the sense of a deep-seated freedom to tell her story. Placed against the rich history and patterns of myth, worship and tradition, the book operates between patterns of coherence and fragmentation against which memory and history are measured.

The book therefore has a sustaining power of movement so necessary for any storytelling. It is a profound and insightful picture of life on the Indus, emerging from a time of relative innocence and prosperity to the age of progress and industrialisation. The idea of the book germinates in the writer’s mind in her small flat in New Delhi, and from the highly personal it broadens into a vast panorama of Pakistani and Indian history over five millennia. Albinia picks her way across its landscape searching out the remnants of the past with all the seeds of violence, of barbarism and cultural decay and regeneration. It thus brings back Eliot’s assertion that “historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but its presence”.

© Copyright 2000 - 2008 The Hindu

[svinayak]

One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (Hardcover)
by Thomas Frank (Author)

# Hardcover: 432 pages
# Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (October 17, 2000)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 038549503X
# ISBN-13: 978-0385495035
# Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.4 inches

After nearly a decade of bull markets, Americans have come to equate free markets with democracy. Never one for mincing words, social critic Thomas Frank, editor of The Baffler and author of The Conquest of Cool, challenges this myth. With his acerbic wit and contempt for sophistry, he declares the New Economy a fraud. Frank scours business literature, management theory, and marketing and advertising to expose the elaborate fantasies that have inoculated business against opposition. This public relations campaign joins an almost mystical belief in markets, a contempt for government in any form, and an "ecstatic" confusion of markets with democracy. Frank traces the roots of this movement from the 1920s, and sees its culmination in market populism as a fusion of the rebellious '60s with the greedy '80s. The overarching irony is the swapping of roles--suddenly Wall Street is no longer full of stodgy moneygrubbers, but cool entrepreneurs "leaping on their trampolines, typing out a few last lines on the laptop before paragliding, riding their bicycles to work, listening to Steppenwolf while they traded." Meanwhile, "Americans traded their long tradition of electoral democracy for the democracy of the supermarket, where all brands are created equal and endowed by their creators with all sorts of extremeness and diversity." Frank's close reading of the salesmen of market populism nails such financial gurus as George Gilder, Joseph Nocera, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas Friedman. Their writings, he contends, have served to make "the world safe for billionaires" by winning the cultural and political battle--legitimizing the corporate culture and its demands for privatization, deregulation, and non-interference. Frank's incisive prose verges on brilliant at times, though his yen for repetition can be exasperating. In either case, his boisterous reminder that markets are fundamentally not democracies is worth repeating as the level of wealth polarization in America reaches heights not seen since the 1920s. --Lesley Reed

From Publishers Weekly
An incisive and incendiary survey of today's cultural, political and economic landscape, social critic Frank's latest salvo conclude, that the New Economy is a fraud, management literature and theory are nothing but self-serving forms of public relations, and that, despite its self-congratulatory commercials, business is not cool. During the recent economic boom, he argues, our nation's hallowed tradition of political populism has morphed into market populism, a reverence for financial success in the marketplace as the ultimate authority of all that is good and true. Frank, founding editor of the Baffler magazine and author of The Conquest of Cool, thinks he knows who is to blame and he names names. The list is long and makes irresistible reading. Distilling vast research into highly readable volleys, he backs up his rage against the received orthodoxies of the New Economy, globalization and free markets with hard facts. He shows the resemblance between the banking crisis of the 1930s and present banking practices and demonstrates that income inequality is on the rise with the richest 10% controlling over 70% of the nation's wealth. Heaping contempt on those he views as old-fashioned hucksters turned out in hipsters' clothing, he nominates such self-proclaimed pundits as George Gilder, the Motley Fools, best-selling author Spencer Johnson and the Body Shop's Anita Roddick to his personal Hall of Shame. A fierce and informed advocate for core American political values, Frank offers a critique of the way business has taken over American society that is especially resonant in this election year. (Nov. 1)

If you look at most of the books by people like George Stigler or Gary Becker or Kenneth J. Arrow or any of a host of economists, you will find few of the issues discussed in this book. What is closer to the truth is that Frank discusses some of the assumptions that people make about business and the market. But this is largely unrelated to economic theory. When Milton Friedman argues for a radically free market economy, he has ceased speaking as an economist and has become a political philosopher, just as when Amartya Sen ceases writing about economics and begins talking about issues of justice and fairness in a political system, he has become a political philosopher. One speaks as an economist when stating what the effect of strong central regulation has on foreign investment, but one speaks as a political scientist when saying that deregulation is a bad or a good thing.

Nonetheless, Frank is very definitely concerned with the assumptions that underlie much free market-oriented policy of the past decade or so. In a sense, Frank is trying to revive questions that progressives such as Teddy Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt asked about the fairness of a society in which the needs of the many could be ignored in favor of the needs of the few. These individuals, like Frank, were deeply concerned with issues of economic equality. In the past two decades, a revival of Social Darwinism has occurred, with the result that we are in the midst of the most dramatic concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite at the expense of the middle class and the impoverished. A whole litany of statistics can be marshaled here. Frank notes that according to Federal Reserve numbers in 1979 20% of the wealth was in the hands of the top 1%, a number that strikes me as far too large. Yet by 1999 37% of the wealth was in the hands of the top 1%. After several rounds of tax cuts for the wealthy and investor classes, what would that percentage be today? 43%? 45%? 48? Clearly it is a pattern that has that been reversed. All economic indicators reveal that in the past twenty-three years there has been a dramatic shift in the wealth of the nation from the middle class to a small economic elite. Real wages for the middle class have fallen, while we are experiencing a dramatic increase in the number of millionaires and billionaires. Frank clearly thinks this is completely messed up, and I doubt if many Americans would disagree.

ONE MARKET UNDER GOD deals with the panoply of problems that result from the allied beliefs in market populism (which is one of the ultimate oxymorons) and extreme capitalism. The passion for making all roads straight for rampant capitalism, the mania for deregulation, the utter disregard for all criteria for the economic health of any nation other than how the markets are doing, are all unquestioned manias that dominate current social and political discourse. Yet FDR insisted that it was a shameful situation where we as a nation considered that the nation as a whole was doing well if the majority of the citizens were not doing well. But in the market craze of the past two decades, most Americans have not done well. Frank implies that we might want to rethink a society that thinks that America benefits from a company laying off 20,000 workers because their stock goes up as a result. As Frank points out, consideration for workers and the masses has largely dropped out of the picture.

Frank chronicles the obsession with extreme capitalism that characterizes our society (and continues to do so even after the bubble collapse suffered in 2001), and the vast array of prophets that harkens not its desirability (in fact, no one even thinks to argue that the hyper capitalism that has gripped our society is a good thing; they merely assume this as a given) but to its inevitability. Frank finds all this more than a little nutty and the obvious point of the book is to make us all stand back a bit and reconsider whether this turbo capitalism will truly result in a kind of world that we truly want.

Frank brings a number of strengths to the table in this book. First, he is a fine historian, with a much deeper grasp of trends and developments in American history than is needed for this study. Second, he is a fabulous writer. He isn't quite as funny as a comic such as Al Franken, but he is the equal of a Molly Ivins. So, in addition to being incredibly informative and to being crucial in making us rethink our national goals, it is also a pleasure to read.

I'll close with a personal anecdote. As I was reading this book (which I interrupted to read his more recent and equally superb book, WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?), I mentioned to some friends over Thai food that I was reading a great book by Thomas Frank. One of my friends remarked, "Oh, I had a friend at the U of C who had a brother named Tom Frank. They roomed together and threw some really great parties. He edits THE BAFFLER now." Well, the author of this book is the founder, of course, of THE BAFFLER, and I find it somehow comforting that such a pertinent and morally powerful book was written by someone who knows how to party.

I'm a Republican, sort of, and I've known and usually disagreed with Tom Frank for several years. Disagreed partly because of his and my age, educational, and career differences. But, as an older market research professional, disappointed with the ethos and ethics of our time, I heartily agree with Tom in his view that the American public has been sold a wrongful message on the state and - more importantly - the future of our economies. Plural is important, domestic plus export and import sales. I disagree with him on the unions' role, because he does not look at work rule problems. But otherwise, Tom Frank is right: The democratization of capital is largely a myth. Really, this is a thoughtful and - How did he have the time and stomach to read all that junk blah-blah management literature? - a very well researched and written book. The newspaper reviews, like the Chicago Tribune's, are right. Tom's written an important book about our futures.

[svinayak]

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism
by Kevin Phillips (Author)

* Hardcover: 256 pages
* Publisher: Viking Adult (April 15, 2008)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0670019070
* ISBN-13: 978-0670019076

The bestselling author reveals how the U.S. financial sector has hijacked our economy and put America’s global future at risk

In American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips warned us of the perilous interaction of debt, financial recklessness, and the increasing cost of scarce oil. The current housing and mortgage debacle is proof once more of Phillips’s prescience, and only the first harbinger of a national crisis. In Bad Money, Phillips describes the consequences of our misguided economic policies, our mounting debt, our collapsing housing market, our threatened oil, and the end of American domination of world markets. America’s current challenges (and failures) run striking parallels to the decline of previous leading world economic powers—especially the Dutch and British. Global overreach, worn-out politics, excessive debt, and exhausted energy regimes are all chilling signals that the United States is crumbling as the world superpower.

“Bad money” refers to a new phenomenon in wayward megafinance—the emergence of a U.S. economy that is globally dependent and dominated by hubris-driven financial services. Also “bad” are the risk miscalculations and strategic abuses of new multitrillion-dollar products such as asset-backed securities and the lure of buccaneering vehicles like hedge funds. Finally, the U.S. dollar has been turned into bad money as it has weakened and become vulnerable to the world’s other currencies. In all these ways, “bad” finance has failed the American people and pointed U.S. capitalism toward a global crisis. Bad Money is the perfect follow- up to Phillips’s last book, whose dire warnings are now proving frighteningly accurate.
For those who have read Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury, many of the themes in the current work will sound familiar. In this book, as well as American Theocracy, he reminds us that previous empires such a 17th century Spain, 18th century Holland, and the late 19th and early 20th century Britain all succumbed to financialization as their global power reached its peak. He argues the the United States is now in a similar position. In the last 30 years financial services have grown from 11% of GDP to 21%, and manufacturing has declined from 25% to 13%. A reversal of roles that Phillips sees as very unhealthy.

This huge growth of the financial sector was not without adverse consequences: in the last 20 years public and private debt has quadrupeled to $43 trillion. How this came about has been expertly explained in another book called The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles Morris. There was easy money as the Federal Reserve was lending money at less than the rate of inflation. Money was risk-free for the lender since they collected fees up front and sold the securitized loans to investors. When this process was repeated millions of times, one ends up with hard-to-value securitized debt throughout the global economy. Then when housing prices start to decline and homeowners start to default on their mortgages on a grand scale, you have a global crisis of American capitalism. (Bear Stearns alone was estimated to be holding $46 billion worth of bad money.)

As in American Theocracy, Phillips writes that the oil industry is another component of the current crisis. In the US oil production peaked in the 1970s, on a global level it is peaking right about now. And with the ravenous appetite for oil from newly industrialized countries such as China and India, prices will continue to go up. The US still gets "cheap" oil relative to Europe since oil is priced in dollars, but that advantage may soon disappear. The weakening dollar is forcing OPEC countries to move to Euros and other currencies. And some oil producing countries such as Iran and Venezuela are moving to other currencies for reasons other than economic.

The author began his career as a Republican strategist, but he has long since disavowed them. Having a monetary policy of free money, a fiscal policy of tax cuts and increased spending, and an ideology of unregulated market fundamentalism, the Republicans have lost most of their credibiltiy. This does not mean Phillips has gone over to the Democratic side. He believes that Bill Clinton was instrumental in the financialization of the economy, and that currently Hillary and Obama are beholden to investment bankers and hedge fund managers. What used to be the vital center in Washington is now the "venal center."

The conclusion of this volume is very gloomy. Phillips believes that we are at a pivotal moment in American history when the economy has been hollowed out, we are saddled with trillions of dollars of debt, and our political leaders are dishonest, incompetent, and negligent. Given that all that may currently be the case, it may be instructive to further meditate on the empires of the past. Spain, Holland, and Britain all managed to survive and even thrive, hopefully the US will do the same.


"Bad Money" is about the insecurity of America's future given a debt-gorged financial sector, and vulnerability caused by expensive dependence on imported oil. The term refers not just to the depreciated dollar but also dangerous attitudes and flawed financial products.

Phillips points out that over the last 30 years, financial services have nearly doubled to a record 20% of GDP (and an even greater share of corporate profits - 54% in '04), while manufacturing's share has halved to 13% (10% of profits), greatly imperiling the economy. En route, Washington has provided government bailouts and/or liquidity when financial institutions or methodologies got themselves into trouble (eg. S&L crisis; Citibank forced into technical failure, but allowed to stay open; bailing out junk bond investors by lowering federal funds rate; etc.), encouraging bigger problems down the road.

The positive impact of borrowing has declined about 60-70% from the 1970s-80s when such monies would mostly be used for factory and highway construction, compared to today's increasingly likely use for increasing leverage for LBOs, M&A, and hedge funds. Meanwhile, the negative likelihood of families experiencing a 50% drop in income has increased dramatically from 1970 - resulting in a greater probability of default.

Cognizance of our problems has been somewhat covered up with revisions to the CPI (understating costs of home ownership) and unemployment measures (not counting those who gave up and quit looking). Thus, the 2-4%/year CPI increase 2005-2007 would have been 5-7%/year, and unemployment would have been 8%.

Early millennium results include the housing sector (including its "ATM effect") providing 40% of the nation's growth in GDP and employment (an unsustainable rate achieved through financial gamesmanship that set the stage for the current financial and construction crash), while imported petroleum outlays rose from $100 billion in '02 to $302 in '06.

Observing from a distance, OPEC has reduced its foreign-currency reserves held in dollars from 75% to 62.5%, and Iraq and Venezuela began selling oil in euros and yen (admittedly for political purposes, at least at first). Meanwhile, the U.S. has antagonized major oil producers (Iran, Russia, Venezuela), and effectively dismantled Iraq - raising the risk of nations being unwilling or unable to supply the U.S. as supplies grow tighter.

Declining oil supplies, rising demand, global warming, our recession, and global loss of confidence in American financial markets are all converging and demand strong political leadership. Phillips, however, is not optimistic that this will emerge based on strong financial sector support for the Democratic Party and political failures in other nations needing dramatic change.

Phillips makes numerous comparisons between the U.S. today and the Great Depression (Eg. Total indebtedness was three times the size of GDP in 2007, higher than the prior record set in the years of the Great Depression), as well as the declines of Rome, Holland, Spain, and Great Britain. Regardless, no predictions are made about how long or deep our current downturn will be (though his writing hints the more severe possibilities), and he gives little or no attention to the steady amassing of dollars in Asia and associated growing unemployment of Americans. Finally, readers must also keep in mind that throughout the book he refers to $70 oil - obviously outdated vs. today's nearly $120.

Interesting Side Issue: Phillips states that food represents about 14% of the U.S. CPI, vs. 33% and 46% for China and India, respectively. Doesn't auger well for biofuels continuing to take 28% of the U.S. corn crop.

[SSridhar]

I have just completed reading the book “Crossed Swords” Palistan, its Army and the Wars Within” by Shuja Nawaz. Here is my review of this book.

“Crossed Swords” Pakistan, its Army and the Wars Within”
by Shuja Nawaz (Author)

# Hardcover: 655 pages
# Publisher: Oxford University Press (2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-978-0-19-547660-6
# Price INR 695

The author is eminently suited to write this book, being the brother of the late COAS of the Pakistani Army (1991-3), Gen. Asif Nawaz Janjua and himself having been a newscaster and a producer of current affairs programme of Pakistan Television, PTV, between the years 1967 and 1972. Besides, he comes from a family which has contributed many an officer to the British Indian and Pakistani Armies. Several top officials of Pakistan had also been his classmates and friends. These connections have been well used by the author to explore many aspects of the state of Pakistan, especially its politics and military. The book, a monumental work of 655 pages and 18 chapters, is intimidating from its size, but the narrative is crisp and simple. The author has tried to present the facts truthfully, without being too judgmental. He claims that his work is based on an extensive reasearch of the military archives of Pakistan as well as personal interviews with top echelons of the Pakistani military, both serving and retired. Though a few instances of antipathy towards India surfaces (which I will point out in this review), the book has very few of them. The book is essentially written with a perspective on the Pakistani Army, as the title says, but also deals with the political developments in the country as the Armed Forces of Pakistan are innately tied up as a dominant partner in every aspect of governance.

He begins his introduction aptly with the Islamic background of Pakistan and contends rightly that the Army, in those early days, was not in cahoots with the Islamist parties as widely as it is today, though the Islamic holy symbol 786 was emblazoned in GHQ and Army vehicles soon after Independence. The book written before the 2008 elections says that a small coterie of 20 Corps Commanders, assisted by a larger group of about 150 Army officers, ran the country during Musharraf’s days. He explains the clout of the Army through the Warrant of Precedence which places Army officers above equivalent civilian ranks. The first chapter is about the History of the British Indian Army and later the Pakistani Army. He seems to believe in the spurious ‘martial race’ theory of the British and how most of the Indians were ‘effeminate’. B.R. Ambedkar, in his book, Pakistan or Partition of India, has disproved this with facts. But, Pakistanis, irrespective of exposure, tend to believe in certain myths. That the so-called martial races have tasted nothing but defeats with ever increasing margins in every outing since Oct. 1947 from the ‘effeminate Army of Hindustan’, is another matter for them. He alludes to the practice of distributing lands to the servicemen in the British Indian Army, a practice that Pakistan Army picked up to later reward its officers even today. The section on the ethnic composition of the Pakistani Army of the 60s/70s makes for interesting reading. There is an interesting anecdote on how the author’s uncle saved the then Colonel Ayub Khan and his family from an enraged fellow Pashtun tribals after Ayub Khan reportedly failed to protect a train load of travellers from India at Partition time. Ayub Khan had just then been sent back from an assignment in Burma in which he did not distinguish himself either. He rose to be the only Field Marshal of Pakistan ! The second chapter of the book lays the foundation for the next chapter that deals with the first Kashmir War.

This chapter is the one where major errors creep in, as to be expected. He claims that Nehru and Patel were continuously applying pressure on Maharajah Hari Singh to accede to India and that V.P.Menon made a flurry of visits to Srinagar. He also claims that the Dogra army unleashed a ‘heavy hand’ on the Poonchis without mentioning the inciting of violence by Muslim League members in a part of India that had not been so far touched by communal violence. Of course, we know that the Pakistani charge of ‘atrocities by the State Army on the Muslims in Poonch’ and the ‘infiltration of armed Sikhs into Jammu’ were figments of feverish imagination. But, the author discusses the role of Colonel Akbar Khan of the Pakistani Army (later a key conspirator in the Rawalpindi Case) in supplying arms and generally planning the operations of the tribes and the regular Pakistani Army units. Col. Akbar Khan operated under the nom de guerre Gen. Tariq to invoke the Islamic symbolism of legendary Tariq bin Ziad of Gibraltar fame. The author dismisses the rape, loot and arson indulged in by the tribal lashkar in Kashmir with a one-liner, “The tribals had also rampaged through the town”. However, Shuja Nawaz faithfully records how Gen. Meservy, the British Commander of the Pakistani Army, willingly released ammunition and officers (Page 53) for the Kashmir operation. Shuja Nawaz also mentions that Akbar Khan “wanted to send the tribesmen back to Afghanistan from concentrations in Sialkot and Gujrat districts to avoid lawlessness in Pakistan and replace them with Pakistani tribesmen in controllable lashkars”. It truly was prescient of what is happening today with a similar foolish policy followed much later with the same tribals, the consequences of which Akbar Khan realized 60 years before. The rest of the chapter deals with the formal involvement of the Pakistani Army in Kashmir. The author shows a glimpse of Pakistani characteristic when he refers to the most gallant Indian officer, Brig, M.Usman who won the Maha Vir Chakra (posthumously) in the 1947 Kashmir operations as the “Muslim Brigadier M. Usman”. His references to “Hindu India” or a “Muslim Hyderabad Deccan” (Page 385) also betrays the same characteristic. The British continued their Great Game fears when Gen. Gracey, who took over the command of the Pakistani Army from Meservy, played up on the fears of Ghaffar Khan colluding with the Congress to incite troubles in Waziristan. The author quotes from Gracey’s recommendation which was to deploy the regular Pakistani Army.

The fourth Chapter starts with the criticism of Jinnah, heard more and more nowadays, that he retained all the power to himself and weakened Liaqat Ali that also led to the weakening of the Muslim League as a party. It explains the Punjab Riots of 1953 and how the Army won the confidence of the people and began to assume centre-stage. The next chapter deals with how the US dominance of Pakistan began to take shape. Some analysts have traced the development of an oligarchy consisting of the military and the bureaucracy during this period which worked for the US. We all know the fact that the dictum that the more it changes the more it remains the same applies perfectly to Pakistan. This is brought out by a reference to a 1952 statement by acting Secretary of the State, US Government, who warns that “mullahs are noticeably active and there is growing doubts in the minds of Pakistani people about ‘real friends’”. We also begin to see the admiration developing among the Americans for the Pakistani Army with statements such as ‘never having seen a better guard of honour than the one at Karachi’ as well as for the ‘tough’ Ayub Khan whose service record was probably not known to the Americans, Nixon’s famous “Pakistanis have less complexes than the Indians” etc. Shuaja Nawaz goes into some length about the discussions preceding the treaties and arms assistance between the US and Pakistan. The years between 1951 and 1958 were of great political turmoil in both West and East Pakistan. Again, the US assessment of characterizing the situation as one in which, “we have an unruly horse by the tail and are confronted by the dilemma of trying to tame it before we can let it go safely” seems particularly applicable to today’s situation. The assessment also spoke of an unsustainable 65% of government revenues going to the armed forces. Shuja Nawaz then goes on to describe the first Coup. There is an interesting anecdote of Iskander Mirza demanding a bribe from the Khan of Kalat and the rulers of Bahawalpur and Khairpur to keep them outside of the One Unit proposal !

Of course, the Coup and the Martial Law brought along with it the usual search for legitimacy, a perennial problem for the military rulers of Pakistan. Z.A. Bhutto’s advice to Gen. Ayub Khan not to worry too much about ‘reaction in democratic countries’ should really rank as opportunism and undemocratic attitude of the top order. The same Bhutto who later Islamized Pakistan advised Ayub Khan to ‘keep Islam out of the Constitutional Process’. In 1958, the US embassy in Pakistan said “ Pakistan offers little or no hope for viability in the foreseeable years”. It is becoming increasingly unsurprising, as one reads assessments after assessments of such negativity, that things indeed never improved in Pakistan and went from only bad to worse. But, one should appreciate Ayub Khan’s steadfastness in making the US commit themselves for a Pakistani army of size 250,000 soldiers (5.5 Divisions), that Ayub Khan felt would be just enough to counter India’s Army.

Chapter 9 describes the growing differences between Ayub Khan and J.F.Kennedy. But, by end of 1963, Pakistan had become quite strong what with all the American supplies and the UK High Commissioner Sir Maurice James made the famous statement, “. . .not so much a case of Pakistan having an Army as the Army having Pakistan”. Shuja Nawaz goes on to explain how Z.A.Bhutto hobnobbed with the Army to engineer the 1965 war. The famous ‘narrow window of opportunity’ that has exercised the Pakistani minds many times leading to ever more gloom and doom appeared now also. Ayub truly believed that India will ‘crumble under a few quick blows’ and so when Chou-en-Lai told him to ‘continue fighting even if he had to withdraw to hills’, it truly depressed him.

The next two chapters deal with the East Pakistan and how Bangladesh emerged. Z.A. Bhutto’s perfidy is recalled in detail with him even threatening those who would attend the National Assembly ‘with physical harm’. The workings of the ‘rentier state’ are brought out vividly with Yahya Khan and his closest staff working for the success of Kissinger’s China trip even as East Pakistan was burning. He ends the chapter by quoting the dubious Sarmila Bose, displaying the characteristic Pakiness. These are some of the few instances when the author has veered off from an otherwise eminently neutral version of events. Chapter 12 deals with the Bangladesh war and it is startling to find, at least for me, that even as late as June 1971, the Pakistani assessment was that the Indians were not planning to mount a war. The belief of all Pakistani Generals that India was just a pushover comes out when the author quotes Air Chief Marshal Rahim Khan, on being asked to ‘justify’ Pakistani attack,said “What justification ? Success is the biggest justification. My birds should be over Agra by now, knocking the hell out of them. I am only waiting for the good news”. The good news never came. Soon, it was time to bury the lie that “the defence of East Pakistan lay with the defence of West Pakistan”. In his deponent, Yahya Khan blames the Air Chief as he “betrayed and committed treachery by saying that he had no planes to fight with”. On why he accepted a ceasefire, Yahya seemed to put the blame on Indira Gandhi for having announced it first, “for reasons unknown to the deponent {i.e. Yahya Khan}”. He went to to claim that “no military historian would call this a military defeat”. As is customary in Pakistan, no report of anything, from the death of Jinnah, Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, the assassination of Liaqat Ali Khan etc. to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto has been made public.

This led to the Bhutto era and the author makes a startling statement that very soon after that Pakistan was placed in a leadership position in the Third World because Z.A.Bhutto successfully negotiated the release of over 90000 PoWs and got back the lost territories in West Pakistan ! Truly, such an amazing statement can come only from a Pakistani author. The author traces how Z.A.Bhutto, chosen by the Army to replace its own General Yahya Khan, soon fell out of favour with it. His forced removal of several officers, his treatment of Army Chief and the PAF Chief (he kidnapped his own Service Chiefs !) and his attempt to put the Army in the dock with a documentary on the Dacca surrender etc angered the military. The Army had been unhappy that ZAB did not press forcefully for the release of the PoWs when he met Ms. Gandhi at Simla. ZAB had explained it away by claiming that India would sooner than later release them all as it would be impossible to retain such a large number of PoWs for long and any pleading by him would render him into a position of weakness. A good ploy indeed. The brief that the Pakistani Army had given to ZAB before he travelled to Simla makes for interesting reading. The brief demands things from India as though Pakistan was the victor and India the vanquished. ZAB’s instructions to Ms. Benazir, whom he took with him to Simla deliberately, are also interesting. The Chapter also mentions the famous meeting of the scientists in Multan where ZAB announced his intention to build the bomb. Dr. Abdus Salam was rumoured to have objected to that but Shuja Nawaz does not report that and indeed says that ‘everyone believed in Bhutto’.

Chapter 14 deals with Zia’s rule, the hanging of Bhutto, his search for legitimacy (a perennial problem of military dictators in Pakistan), the strengthening of the ‘culture of entitlement’ that enabled Army officers to accumulate lands and other benefits, the Afghanistan issue. (The author talks of a 12000 Sq. Ft. house where Mirza Aslam Beg lives opoosite to the Army House in Rawalpindi) Operation Brasstacks, the case of the exploding mangoes and how the investigation was short circuited etc. The chapter also deals with how the then DG, ISI, Akhtar Abdur Rehman and Gen. Zia hijacked their new found status and power to implement their own agenda. Pakistan did not want direct involvement of its Army for fear of USSR’s reprisal (possibly they remembered the U2 flights and the Badaber issue). It was the ISI, therefore, not the Army, who dictated the Afghanistan policy and its implementation. This has continued ever since and that is why we see no distinction between the Army and the ISI. Indeed, it is the tail (the ISI) that wags the dog (the Army) in Pakistan. The chapter describes the missile fired at the Falcon aircraft taking off from Chaklala by Murtaza Bhutto’s men. Luckily, Zia escaped. Shuja Nawaz also hints at other attempts on Zia. Zia’s death led to the wily bureaucrat Ghualm Ishaq Khan to consolidate his hold on power under the patronage of the COAS. Thus the troika developed with the elected PM of Ms. Bhutto. Of course, Ms. Bhutto exercised only circumscribed powers and had to rely on the US Ambassador Oakley for developments on the nuclear front., with the first mohajir COAS of the Army, Gen. Beg and President Ghulam Ishaq Khan going to great lengths to stop her from getting to know what was happening. The author describes an interesting anecdote of Gen. Beg, the author of the Pakistani Army doctrines such as ‘offensive defence’ and ‘strategic depth’ organized a war game, Zarb-e-Momeen (Strike of the True Believer) based on his ‘offensive defence’ concept and invited the PM, Ms. Bhutto to witness it. The war game had to be rapidly wound up as the Foxland forces (Pakistan does not use the usual terminology Redland) began to win encounters ! The Benazir-ISI relationship began to deteriorate with the miserable failure of the Jalalabad siege planned by Hamid Gul. Gul promised Ms. Bhutto that Jalalabad would fall within a week and an Afghan Interim Government could be setup there. Haven’t we heard of similar bluster from Pakistani Generals since 1947 ? They promised Jinnah his Eid in Srinagar on Oct 26, 1947. Ayub Khan’s bravado and later his pleading to Lal Bahadur Shastri in Tashkent are written about in this book being reviewed. The list continues with Mirza Aslam Beg, Hamid Gul, Musharraf et al.

The next Chapter describes all the excitement of the PM going on air criticizing the President, the President being assured by the Army of its support for his ‘constitutional measures’, and then the President going on air to dismiss the PM., the Supreme Court restoring the PM, the PM telling a Punjabi General to keep a watch on the Pashtun President etc. This chapter also deals with the development of the nuclear weapon. According to the author, the first Cold Test was in March 1983 (by PAEC) and the next one was in March 1984 (by KRL). PAEC took the Plutonium route while KRL the Uranium route. Similarly, in missile development, PAEC was involved with soild engines while KRL with liquid engines. The chapter, “Liberal Autocrat” deals with the usurping of power by Musharraf. From what the author describes, the coup was long in the making because Musharraf was collecting material on corruption and misuse of power by Musharraf for quite a while.

The last chapter deals with the Army that is undergoing a change in recruitment patterns, the overwhelming power of the ISI, and the command structure. The author ends the vast book like this: “While the army remains a conservative institution at heart, it is not yet a breeding ground for large numbers of radical Islamists that many fear. Islam, however, remains a visible force in Pakistani society and the Army today. Keeping the militant Islamists at bay remains a daunting task . . .” That perfectly sums up Pakistani Army of today and the wars it had fought within itself over six decades.

[Vikram Rathore]

Here's my review of Line of Control by Mainak Dhar.

Title: Line of Control
Author: Mainak Dhar
Paperback- 314 pages
Vitasta Publishing, Delhi
ISBN 81-89766-39-2

Here's what the novel's blurb says:
It is 2011 and the world is a more dangerous place than ever before. A regime allied to Al-Qaeda has swept to power in Saudi Arabia and used its oil wealth and modern arsenal to further spread Jihad. Yet another military coup brings a fundamentalist regime to power in Pakistan, which initiates an audacious plan to strike the first blow in this new global jihad. As unprecedented terror attacks stun India, the stage is set for a conflict (with Pakistan) that brings the Indian subcontinent to the brink of a nuclear apocalypse. With a broad cast of characters from both sides that put the readers into the thick of the unfolding crisis. Lone of Control is a war thriller with fast spaced story line ripped from today’s headlines and explosive action. Learn more at http://www.loc.homestead.com

Here's my review:

I picked up Line of Control with some hesitation as war thrillers by Indian authors in the past have been a mixed bag at best. Sunderji and Rikhye did write very well researched and incisive books in The Blind Men of Hindoostan and The Fouth Round respectively, but honestly they were pieces of non-fiction masquerading as fiction- more like war games played out in print versus being real novels with characters, plot lines and the language that would keep a lay reader engaged and entertained. Line of Control's theme is certainly very topical, and its launch at a time when tensions with Pakistan and instability in Pakistan are increasing should help it find ready readers. As one reads the novel, one realizes that the author has consciously tried to build off current events, to both give an air of authenticity to the story and also to pull in the reader who may have heard of these events only recently in the news. So, there's a new coup in Pakistan after Musharraf goes, there are bomb blasts in Indian cities and so on. The topicality aside, how is Line of Control as a novel? Without resorting to hyperbole, I would say that this is a brakthrough novel. The novel itself is very well written, with characters from both the Indian and Pakistani sides that one can empathize with and also straddles the wide scope well, moving effortlessly from political machinations in the PM's office to squad level infantry combat in Kashmir. The author doesn't fall prey to the temptation of making this a simplistic 'India good, Pakistan bad' novel, but paints a convincing scenario where elements of the Pakistani establishment and military push the subcontinent to the brink, and we are able to pull back from a nuclear apocalypse only by the thinnest of margins.

The other aspect of Line of Control that should ensure a solid fan following is the description of combat and military hardware. The author has certainly done his research well, and from dogfights involving Sukhoi 30MKIs to tank battles in the desert, the book's action keeps one truly engaged, and for the military enthusiast, marks a new level of authenticity in Indian literature. As an aside, one of the interesting things about Line of Control is the overt endorsement of senior military figures. The book was launched by Gen V.N. Sharma former COAS and also Air Cde Jasjeet Singh and Maj Gen Ashok Mehta. Gen Sharma described the book as describing `very well the cut and thrust of combat' while Jasjeet Singh said it would `beat Tom Clancy any day', according to the book's website. After reading the book, one tends to agree with them.

[ramana]

Sea of Faith

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this elegant, fast-paced, and judicious cultural and religious history, journalist O'Shea, author of The Perfect Heresy, provides a remarkable glimpse into the origins of the conflicts between Christians and Muslims as well as their once peaceful coexistence. He focuses on seven military battles—Yarmuk A.D. 636), Poitiers (732), Manzikert (1071), Hattin (1187), Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), Constantinople (1453) and Malta (1565)—between Christians and Muslims as the high-water marks of their attempts to shape the Mediterranean ("sea of faith") world of the Middle Ages. O'Shea vividly captures and recreates not only the enmity between the two religions but also the sectarian rivalries and political intrigues within each religion. Yet the relationship between Christianity and Islam was marked not only by bloody Crusades and wars of conquest. As O'Shea so eloquently points out, Christians and Muslims also experienced long periods of rapprochement, signaled by the long peace at Córdoba in the early Middle Ages and in the intellectual and social flourishing at Toledo and Palermo in the 11th century. O'Shea's marvelous accomplishment offers an unparalleled glimpse of the struggles of each religion to establish dominance in the medieval world as well as at the strategies for living together that the religions enacted as they shared the same territory. (June)

and

The shared history of Christianity and Islam began, shortly after Islam emerged in the early 7th century, with a question: who would inherit the Greco-Roman world of the Mediterranean? Here the author of The Perfect Heresy chronicles both the meeting of minds—moments of cultural interchange and tolerance in Cordoba, Palermo, and Constantinople—and the collisions of armies that marked the interaction of Cross and Crescent in the Middle Ages, helping to explain their apparently intractable conflict today. Stephen O’Shea vividly recounts seven pivotal battles between Christians and Muslims that shaped the "geography of belief" in the Mediterranean world.

The last review is important to understand what happened?

[negi]

Gurujano, anyone read 'The White Tiger' by Aravind Adiga. ?
Basically looking forward to a jingo's take on this novel.

[svinayak]

The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life
by Avinash K. Dixit (Author), Barry J. Nalebuff (Author)

http://www.artofstrategy.info/

# Hardcover: 512 pages
# Publisher: W. W. Norton (September 29, 2008)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0393062430
# ISBN-13: 978-0393062434

Game theory means rigorous strategic thinking. It’s the art of anticipating your opponent’s next moves, knowing full well that your rival is trying to do the same thing to you. Though parts of game theory involve simple common sense, much is counterintuitive, and it can only be mastered by developing a new way of seeing the world. Using a diverse array of rich case studies—from pop culture, TV, movies, sports, politics, and history—the authors show how nearly every business and personal interaction has a game-theory component to it. Are the winners of reality-TV contests instinctive game theorists? Do big-time investors see things that most people miss? What do great poker players know that you don’t? Mastering game theory will make you more successful in business and life, and this lively book is the key to that mastery.

Avinash Dixit is an economics professor at Princeton University, and Barry Nalebuff is a professor of economics and management at Yale School of Management. They practice what they preach—Dixit is one of the most successful researchers and teachers among economists, while Nalebuff applies game theory to business strategy and is the cofounder of one of America’s fastest growing companies, Honest Tea.



Avinash K. Dixit is the John J. F. Sherrerd ’52 University Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Along with Thinking Strategically, he is the author of eight other books, including Games of Strategy (with Susan Skeath); Theory of International Trade (with Victor Norman); Investment Under Uncertainty (with Robert Pindyck); The Theory of Equilibrium Growth; and Lawlessness and Economics: Alternative Modes of Governance.

Professor Dixit has won Princeton’s Economics Department teaching prize and the Von Neumann Award from the Budapest University of Economic Science and Public Administration. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the British Academy. He has been president of the Econometric Society (2001) and the American Economic Association (2008). A graduate of Bombay University and Cambridge University, he earned his doctorate at MIT. He has honorary degrees from the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration and the University of Warwick.

To visit Avinash's homepage, click here.

Barry J. Nalebuff is the Milton Steinbach Professor of Economics and Management at Yale School of Management. Along with Thinking Strategically, he is the coauthor of Co-opetition (with Adam Brandenburger) and Why Not? (with Ian Ayres).

In addition to his academic work, Professor Nalebuff has extensive experience consulting with multinational firms. He currently serves on the board of Nationwide Mutual and is the chairman and co-founder of Honest Tea, one of Inc. magazine’s fastest growing companies in America. A graduate of MIT, a Rhodes Scholar, and Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, Nalebuff earned his doctorate at Oxford University. Avinash was one of his first professors at MIT.

[Victor]

Gurujano, anyone read 'The White Tiger' by Aravind Adiga. ?
Basically looking forward to a jingo's take on this novel.

From a HT article today:

Adiga's novel is creating ripples in India for its defiantly unglamorous portrait of country's economic miracle.
Refusing that the novel was an attack on the growth story of the country, Adiga said writers like him should highlight the brutal aspects of India.

Don't know what to make of it but the Hooker Prize is not an endorsement IMO and probably fits the opinion we have of it here on BR. Personally don't have time to read this stuff.

[SSridhar]

South Asia’s Cold War: Nuclear Weapons and Conflict in Comparative Perspective
By Rajesh M Basrur
Routledge 2008
Pp.171; Price £70

Khaled Ahmed's Review

Here is a very readable unravelling of the mystery of Indo-Pak rivalry in the nuclear era, from a teacher in Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. The organising idea is that of the cold war, mark two, after two states have deterred each other with nuclear arsenals. The book therefore studies the vicissitudes of the US-USSR equation, the US-China equation, the China-USSR equation and the latest US-North Korea equation. The conceptual framework is derived from the study of the Cold War behaviour patterns for application to the Indo-Pak conduct of nuclear-backed relations.

The key sentence is: ‘Because they have a history of tension, are propelled by clashing conceptions of identity, and are insecure about each other’s military capabilities, cold-warring states compete with great intensity’ (p.17). Clashing narratives lead to readiness to go to war, but the moment tension escalates and war breaks out there is a sudden urge to use restraint and draw back — because of the nuclear weapons. Author Basrur quotes ultra-realist Kenneth Waltz: ‘Contemplating war when the use of nuclear weapons is possible focuses one’s attention not on the probability of victory but in the possibility of annihilation’.

Nuclear opponents allow conventional thinking and keep on accumulating weapons of all sorts above levels required to deter. After having started this race, they begin to think of the ‘balance’ which is not based on an even matching but on such qualities as reliability, vulnerability and accuracy. Pakistan and India follow the pattern of the earlier cold warriors, additionally based on the concepts of identity, that violent aspect of humanity which drives the passion of war. Basrur agrees that identities are constructed by states and are supposed to be permanent. There is the idea of the self and its identity in relation to others. Among states, this idea takes two forms, internal and external: group identity inside the state and the identity of the state in relation to other states.

States create internal cohesion by constructing an enemy identity outside the state. The act of getting scared of the enemy outside unites the nation living within a state. In fact nations are mostly created by the act of first designating an enemy outside the state. ‘National elites lacking strong domestic underpinning and facing internal challenges will be tempted to use conflict with other states to safeguard their positions. India began to construct a national identity based on unity among diversity and the external dimension of this construction was that the loss of Kashmir with its Muslim majority will undo the principle of containing diversity. Retention of its part of the divided Kashmir has made its identity that of a satisfied state’.

On the other hand, Pakistan’s identity was based on unity constructed out of a single religious group, and the exclusion of a part of the Muslim majority Kashmir made it a permanently ‘dissatisfied’ state through a sense of incompletion. Paradoxically, the notion of being incomplete kept the Pakistani nation united. India’s development was accompanied by tensions of internal identity, which it was able to absorb because of its democratic order. Similar tensions in Pakistan were not absorbed well by Pakistan because of its lack of democracy and a social order that sought a coercive ideological fulfilment. Pakistan’s identity is fragile because its success hinges to the failure of India.

The other tension on Pakistan was the role of the challenger it adopted towards hegemon India. It sought parity with which it sought to justify conflict, based internally on collective psychology which it projected outwards on the basis of a flawed strategy. Later it sought war-justifying parity with India on the basis of possession of nuclear weapons, only to discover that nuclear weapons rendered war obsolete and froze the status quo to the discomfiture of the challenger or revisionist state. The book quotes Mandelbaum on the narrowness of options available to strong and weak states living in an anarchic international system.

This takes us to the strong state seeking close economic interdependence to increase its influence inside the weak state; the weak state opposes it for the same reason and begins to consider low-cost strategies that place the strong state under pressure through asymmetrical low-intensity war. But can this kind of revisionist option be exercised under the nuclear umbrella? Can a low level war be carried out while the option of nuclear strike depends on both giving credence to the ‘madness’ of a strike? India, looking to freeze the status quo, used compellance in 1998 to make the nuclear test its device. It was wrong in thinking so, because Pakistan used nuclear deterrence to try to win a conventional skirmish at Kargil in 1999.

But the two drew back, tracing the trajectory of behaviour of the other cold war nuclear adversaries. They also imitated the others by positing minimum deterrence but they threaten to tilt into arms race on the basis of comparisons made on outreach, delivery, accuracy and survivability. Deterrence cannot be maintained without arms-racing. There were incidents of possible nuclear war on the basis of miscalculation, but the two drew back just like the other nuclear powers. The fact that Pakistan continues to be prepared to use asymmetrical methods can cross the threshold of tolerance as it did when the Jaish terrorists attacked the Indian parliament in 2001. Once the conventional war is resorted to, Pakistan’s conventional vulnerability brings nuclear war up front, requiring India to back off.

Pakistan in the war-waging mode relies on the enemy looking at it as an irrational or insane state. The book quotes General Aslam Beg as not being averse to lack of ‘certainty’ in deterrence. He actually thinks that ambiguity and uncertainty supply the ingredients that deter war. This is a chicken and egg argument. Normally, states get scared if there is a certainty of destruction. Pakistan tested in 1998 to actually remove doubts about its ability to strike. To further strengthen certainty through depth of delivery, accuracy of targeting, etc, Pakistan has to get into arms-racing which promises to be open-ended as it would be controlled by India.

Author Basrur relies on economic ties and trade to get the two states out of their warlike clinch. Both the states are likely to converge to the identity of market states, which means Pakistan could forget ‘parity prior to war’ and adopt a benignly parasitic role, benefiting from India’s big market. The vision is there in the papers the nations have signed under SAARC. In that vision Pakistan realises its geopolitical importance, not by blocking trade routes, but by allowing them, and becoming rich in the process. In that case, its nuclear weapons will be its guarantors of peace and no one will think of ‘taking them out’.

[svinayak]

Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich
by Robert Frank (Author)


# Hardcover: 277 pages
# Publisher: Crown (June 5, 2007)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0307339262
# ISBN-13: 978-0307339263

Robert Frank is a reporter at the Wall Street Journal who, a number of years ago, began a column on what it's like to be rich in America. This soon became a very popular and he was tasked to work on it full time. This book represents the synthesis of his experiences over the past few years.

"Richistan" is a colloquial term Frank uses to describe the booming numbers of wealthy. Starting in the late 1980s, there has been a doubling or tripling of the number of wealthy households in the US, currently at over 9 million with $1 million or more in net assets. Within this "nation within a nation" there is a class system, with the "lower class" rich (or "merely affluent") in the 1-10 million net worth range, the "middle class" rich in the 10-100 range and the "upper class" rich in the 100-1 billion range. The billionaires, estimated to be about 1000 strong in the US, are in a separate group entirely. Each of these groups have distinct spending patterns and investment goals. 90% of these new rich came from middle or lower class backgrounds and everything about them is different from the stereotypes of the "old" rich: how they made their money, how they spend it, how they give it away.

Frank's book is both easy reading and hard to put down. I listened to the audiobook version, going through the 7 hours in "no time". Although educational, this is also a very funny book. The audio greatly enhances the humor as the narrator has perfect timing and change of voice, many times I was laughing out loud, yet at the same time going "ah-ha!". A rare treat.

Greenwich, Connecticut, a town featured in Robert Frank's great new book, "Richistan", is my hometown and a place where I have spent my entire life. As the author points out, Greenwich used to be known as a place of old money but the new money that has flown into town over the past decade or so makes it a spot of even more enormous wealth, capturing all levels of the super-rich as Frank describes. As in many cities in America the new money is most evident in the McMansions that have sprung up. (as some people call it, "Vulgaria") I wonder if every new McMansion has to have Greek-like columns.

Frank does a comprehensive job in explaining how the rich live, but it is of note that so many Richistanis, when asked if they have enough money, say "no". If you have $20 million you think you need $40 million. He offers another excellent chapter on how many of the rich aren't any happier with all their money, with many of them being more miserable. But his best point is that the super-rich have created a class unto themselves, and towns like Greenwich, which has a sustainable middle class, will itself, in the future, become even more separated between rich and poor. It's a sobering look. I highly recommend "Richistan".... it's a terrific exposé and an eye-opener as well.


The "new rich" have been around for a few years now, but beyond the nonsense to be seen or read about in the tabloid realm, we've never had the opportunity to take a look at what the lives of these people are really like - until now.

The people of Richistan did not inherit their wealth, it was earned, sometimes quite quickly, for others it was a steady rise to billionaire status. What this book gives its readers are sharp and humorous obervations on how they made their money and how it has changed their lives, for better and/or worse. For instance, read why it now takes five people to kill a renegade mouse in a big house instead of one...

Similarly, the author then takes a look at the different industries and jobs that so much money in the U.S. has spawned. For example, the founder of the Starkey Institute for Household Management (aka: Butler School) wouldn't be where she is today if it weren't for the labor shortage of 20th century butlers. Then there's the need for private chefs, an army of nannies, housekeepers, pilots and executive assistants.

And where does a mega-billionaire go on vacation? How does he find a spot that will guarantee his total security and privacy? Richistan will tell you about the man who answered these questions and built a quasi "time share" business for islands instead of condos...plus you'll read about the billionaires who go there and how they spend their vacations.

It really is addictive stuff and a great beach book for the Summer. For self-confessed business junkies who enjoy reading about mega-successful business people, and how they got to where they are - this is a must-read, because you get all of that and so much more.

[Prem]

SEA OF POPPIES
The first in Amitav Ghosh’s new trilogy of novels, Sea of Poppies is a stunningly vibrant and intensely human work that confirms his reputation as a master storyteller. At the heart of this epic saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean to the Mauritius Islands. As to the people on board, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval in the mid nineteenth century, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed village-woman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited European orphan. As they sail down the Hooghly and into the sea, their old family ties are washed away, and they view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers, who will build whole new lives for themselves in the remote islands where they are being taken. It is the beginning of an unlikely dynasty.

http://www.penguinbooksindia.com/amitav ... poppies.ht