Review: Why Leaders Lie–The Truth About Lying in International Politics

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Communications, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Information Operations, Information Society, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Leadership, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

John J. Mearsheimer

Cornerstone, Not the Whole Building

January 2, 2011

By no stretch should this book be dismissed as a three. While I might normally have gone with a four, I am settling on five for balance and because the author not only covers an extraordinarily important topic in a sensible measured way, but his endnotes are another book all by themselves–I recommend all readers start there.

Where the author falls short is in lacking a strategic analytic construct for measuring the true costs of lying in blood, treasure, and spirit. He tends to ascribe pure motives to leaders (for example, not at all confronting the raw fact that Dick Cheney committed 23 documented impeachable acts (see my review of Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency for the itemization) and Dick Cheney also led the telling of 935 documented lies best covered by TruthDig but also in Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq.

The book disconnects grand strategy (global engagement) from domestic prosperity in a manner I find disconcerting, and while the author is most able in documenting the costs to a democracy of lies to the public, I do not see nor feel the deeper reality: lies destroy the Commonwealth. Lies allow a two-party tyranny to sell out to the Arabs (not just the Israelis), to Wall Street–lies permit the mortgage clearinghouse fraud, the derivatives fraud, and the Federal Reserve fraud on the one hand, while also fooling the public into a national security policy that is clinically insane, catastrophically costly, and ultimately a self-inflicted wound that could be fatal.
Continue reading “Review: Why Leaders Lie–The Truth About Lying in International Politics”

2011/01/02

Journal: Imperial by Design, Unethical by Choice

02 Diplomacy, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Threats

Imperial by Design

The National Interest

From the Jan-Feb 2011 issue

John J. Mearsheimer

December 16, 2010

Summary: The author discusses the intellectual but not the ethical underpinings of the failure of US foreign policy and national security since the first Clinton Administration. He touches on alternative policies such as isolationalism, offshore balancing, selective engagement, global dominance, and then settles on offshore balancing as the way to go: pulling back the Army and Marines from overseas, sharply reducing their budgets, and restoring budget to the Air Force and the Navy.

Read the article….

John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is on the Advisory Council of The National Interest, and his most recent book, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics, was published in January 2011 by Oxford University Press. He is also the co-author of the deeply practical The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy and The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

2011/01/022011/01/02

Journal: Detriot in Ruins–End of Empire From 1960’s…

03 Economy, 04 Education, 05 Energy, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, info-graphics/data-visualization, IO Sense-Making, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Waste (materials, food, etc)

Detroit in ruins: the photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

Guardian, Sunday 2 January 2011

Sean O'Hagan

Article

Photo Gallery Direct

In downtown Detroit, the streets are lined with abandoned hotels and swimming pools, ruined movie houses and schools, all evidence of the motor city's painful decline. The photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre capture what remains of a once-great city – and hint at the wider story of post-industrial America

. . . . . . .

Cumulatively, the photographs are a powerful and disturbing testament to the glory and the destructive cost of American capitalism: the centre of a once-thriving metropolis in the most powerful nation on earth has become a ghost town of decaying buildings and streets. There is a formal beauty here too, though, reminiscent of Robert Polidori's images of post-hurricane Katrina New Orleans. “It seems like Detroit has just been left to die,” says Marchand, “Many times we would enter huge art deco buildings with once-beautiful chandeliers, ornate columns and extraordinary frescoes, and everything was crumbling and covered in dust, and the sense that you had entered a lost world was almost overwhelming. In a very real way, Detroit is a lost world – or at least a lost city where the magnificence of its past is everywhere evident.”

. . . . . . .

The Ruins of Detroit tells the city's story so far in one starkly beautiful photograph after another, all of which add up to nothing less than an end-of-empire narrative. Or as Sugrue puts it: “The abandoned factories, the eerily vacant schools, the rotting houses, and gutted skyscrapers that Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre chronicle are the artefacts of Detroit's astonishing rise as a global capital of capitalism and its even more extraordinary descent into ruin, a place where the boundaries between the American dream and the American nightmare, between prosperity and poverty, between the permanent and the ephemeral are powerfully and painfully visible. No place epitomises the creative and destructive forces of modernity more than Detroit, past and present.”

2011/01/012011/01/01

Review: Cyberpower and National Security

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

Franklin D. Kramer (Editor), Stuart H. Starr (Editor), Larry Wentz (Editor)

Read Macgregor & Steele for the Other Half

January 1, 2011

I like the book and I like the authors and I do NOT like the fact that neither decision-support nor intelligence (decision-support) nor M4IS2* are in this book. Retired Reader's review–at five stars–is the review I would have written were I to read the book rather than just appreciate it via Look Inside the Book, and he and I have discussed the intellectual and leadership vacuum we all have in cyberspace where most simply have no idea what they are doing.

* Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2)

I must defer to Retired Reader and Bob Gourley on the good of this book, and hence five stars from em as well. However, and with proper regard for the the vastly experienced and well-intentioned authors, it troubles me that they do not include core concepts and context such as were developed by Robert Garigue, who died at the age of 55 before being able to produce his master work. His Preface to my third book, Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time and a couple of his briefings that I have featured at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, are all that we have to remember his towering genius. As with all my books, all free online.

Here is Robert Garigue's bottom line: cyber-power–and cyber-security and what some would call today cyber-command (actually an oxymoron) are about TRUTH & TRUST. All this stuff about protecting legacy systems that are 90% rubbish or interdicting and interfering with the 10% of our enemies that have sophisticated system, is out of touch with reality. The Chinese have whipped our butts on both stealth and riding electrical circuits into NSA's computers and they did it because we pretend that spending money on contractor vapor-ware (SAIC's Trailblazer comes to mind) is somehow equivalent to being competent at something useful.

This brings me to the bottom line: cyber-power does not exist in a vacuum. It is, like a weapon, an extention of the humans that it serves or empowers. Right now US cyber-power is–to the extent it is even relevant or effective–being managed by gerbils (Madeline Albright's term, not mine) for utterly unsound and intellectually as well as morally bankrupt ends–and it is not doing a single thing to help infantry squads see over the next hill, survive improvised explosive devices that still cannot be detected (on behalf of the Marine Corps, my #1 requirement for MASINT in 1988 after seeing the wood-encased IED's in El Salvador in 1979-1980) and on and on.

Continue reading “Review: Cyberpower and National Security”

2011/01/012011/02/13

Who’s Who in Peace Intelligence: Douglas A. Macgregor

10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Alpha M-P, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Ethics, Historic Contributions, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Peace Intelligence, Reform, Strategy, Threats

Douglas_Macgregor — Douglas A. Macgregor

Top Web Hits

Wikipedia Biography with Many Links

The Macgregor Briefings: An Information Age Vision for the U.S. Army

NOTE 1: HTML versions work, PPT do not

NOTE 2: Cyber/IO is the enabler of all that he envisions.

Warrior's Rage: The Great Tank Battle of 73 Easting (2009)

Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights (2004)

Breaking the Phalanx: A New Design for Landpower in the 21st Century (1997)

2011/01/012011/08/28

Haiti Rolling Update from 20100120…CLOSED

08 Wild Cards, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Media Reports, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Threats

Peacekeeping - MINUSTAH — Click to Enlarge

1 January 2011

Haiti: One Year Later (TheNonProfitTimes)

Haitians live in a make-shift camp close to the airport. Port au Prince Haiti was rocked by a massive earthquake, Tuesday January 12, devastating the city and leaving thousands dead. Photo Marco Dormino

31 December 2010

FILE – In this Nov. 13, 2010 file photo, an ambulance worker prepares to remove the corpse of a man lying dead in a portable bathroom of a refugee camp in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear. Photo: Ramon Espinosa / AP

See other photos from the year….

Continue reading “Haiti Rolling Update from 20100120…CLOSED”

2011/01/012011/01/01

Journal: Hard Truths to Power–Anyone?

About the Idea, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Key Players, Officers Call, Policies, Threats

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends...

Phi Beta Iota: When did it go out of style for warriors to speak the truth and only the truth? Lies kill our own and dishonor our Republic. It is time for integrity to come back into being. Advanced Cyber/Information Operations (IO) are about truth & trust. No amount of courage at the tactical level can overcome a dishonest, unaffordable, intellectually-bankrupt strategy.

MACGREGOR: Afghan report 2010

Deluding ourselves from one failure to another

By COLONEL DOUGLAS MACGREGOR

American forces invaded Afghanistan more than nine years ago, and we still don't know whom we're fighting. It's hard to know who did the better job of playing us for fools a few weeks ago – the Afghan who passed himself off as the “moderate” Taliban leader, who was rewarded with American cash for his performance, or Hamid Karzai.

. . . . . . .

With the lion's share of Iraq‘s southern oil fields in Chinese hands and the Kurdish nationalists determined to control the country's largest oil reserves, more fighting in Iraq is inevitable. This sort of thing would almost be funny, in an insane sort of way, if such military leadership did not result in the pointless loss of American lives, undermine American strategic interests and erode the security and prosperity of the American people – the things the nation's four-stars are sworn to defend.

. . . . . . .

When the budget ax falls, many inconvenient facts will come to light, unmasking the great deception that America confronted a serious military threat in the aftermath of Sept. 11, a deception promoted and fostered by politicians and ambitious generals who sought to gain from it. It will horrify and discourage Americans to learn we've bankrupted ourselves in a fight that always was analogous to clubbing baby seals. From 2001 onward, we never confronted armies, air forces or capable air defenses. Bottom line: There was no existential military threat to the United States or its NATO allies emanating from Afghanistan or the Middle East. There is none today.

Read the entire righteous piece….

For the time being, no one will say these things. It's easier to go, in Winston Churchill's words, “from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm” and nurture the money flow to Washington.

Retired Col. Douglas Macgregor, a decorated combat veteran, is executive vice president of Burke-Macgregor Group. His newest book, Warrior's Rage, was published by Naval Institute Press. See also his earlier books, Breaking the Phalanx and Transformation Under Fire.

Why Can’t Europe Avoid Another Crisis? Why Can’t the U.S.?

By Simon Johnson (bio), Baseline Scenario, 30 December 2010

Our leading bankers looted the state, plunged the world into deep recession, and cost us 8 million jobs. And now many of them stand by with sharpened knives and enhanced bonuses – also most willing to suggest how the salaries and jobs of others can be further cut. Think about the morality of that one.

Will no one think hard about what this means for our budget and our political system until it is too late?