4 Star – Page 55 – Public Intelligence Blog

2003/10/092009/12/04

Review: Beyond Baghdad–Postmodern War and Peace

4 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Complexity & Catastrophe, Force Structure (Military), Future, Stabilization & Reconstruction, Strategy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), War & Face of Battle

Iraq a Mistake, Muslim Outlands More Important,

October 9, 2003

Ralph Peters

Edited 2003 review to add links and respond to comment.

I normally rave over Ralph Peter's books. He is America's Lawrence of Arabia and a brilliant intelligence analyst, especially on non-conventional threats. In this book (actually, a collection of clippings, most from the New York Post, which says something right off), he goes a bridge too far–on the one hand, he and his mentor, General McCaffrey) go several bridges too far in their praise for the “courageous” strategy of the Bush Administration (it's not a strategy, it's a mindless vendetta bought and paid for by Zionists), and on the other, he applies his superb mind to the realities of our global conflict with radicalized Islam.

The book is full of gems. I've said he is a soldier-poet before, and this book continues that tradition. The flashes of brilliance demand the purchase and reading of this book.

His most important point, one that merits its own book, is that America has misplaced its priorities in attacking radical Islam through Iraq (and passivity toward Saudi Arabia's sponsorship of terrorism, a neglect that will cost vastly more than the Iraq misadventure), and that it is the Muslim “outlands” from Central Asia to Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and India (with the second largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia) where America would be elevating women, nurturing secular states, and spreading the gospel of peace and prosperity.

The author takes the long-view, at least a 50-year view, and this is in sharp contrast to the “quick win at any cost (to the future)” of the current Administration. Indeed, when the author describes bin Laden as “ultimately a blasphemer against his own religion, having appointed himself God's instrument upon earth, assuming the license to kill by the tens or tens of thousands those who do not share his vision, to purge, to punish, to sanctify,” the author is in fact describing George W. Bush, not just bin Laden.

The author overcomes the limitation of New York Post hyperbole in many of his pieces. Among the most interesting is one on the five socio-psychological pools from which terrorists draw their membership: underclass, “course of conflict” joiners, opportunists, hardcore believers, and mercenaries. Also helpful is his coverage of monotheist cultures, including a subtle reference to neo-conservatism aligned with Zionism as a rising monotheist culture potentially capable of undermining American democracy and religious tolerance.

Deep in the middle of the book we find his discussion of a world divided into three strategic zones, apart from North America: the monotheist zone centered in the eastern Mediterranean; the Sino-Verdic(Indian) zone; and the postcolonial zone of Africa and Latin America. His discussion cannot be summarized and contains many brilliant insights, including a conclusion that China is not a regional threat, and China's greatest variable is not its external ambition but rather its potential for internal implosion. He is provocative in envisioning a huge “Afro-Latino-American” triangle of power emerging, with Brazil, South Africa, and the USA as the potential engines for this renaissance of the Southern Hemisphere.

The author joins Robert Baer, whose book Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude in calling for a complete withdrawal of US support for the despotic and sleazy Saudi regime that blatantly continues to support global terrorism and the radicalization of Muslim youth.

Where Ralph Peters falls short, I believe, and I say this with the utmost respect for this warrior-scholar who has placed his life on the line more than once, is in allowing his ultra-patriotism to shut out the discordant and sometimes dissenting view of other patriots who are perhaps more willing than he to acknowledge that we ourselves are part of the problem. This book is a one-man opinion piece with no reference to other works, such as those by Jonathan Schell The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, Mark Hertsgaard The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World, or Michael Hirsh At War with Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World, among the many other national security books I have reviewed here at Amazon. It falls prey, therefore, to the over-powering tuba effect, and loses some of its gloss in being so strident and so unabashedly “grind the bastards down, we are the light”–but then, we acknowledge that he was writing originally for the New York Post.

The author gets some big things right: Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, and Sandy Berger have much to answer for in their deliberate avoidance of the reality of terrorism and their failure to go to a war-footing as both Dick Clarke and George Tenet, among others, advised. He also gets some things wrong. He is wrong, for example, when he speaks on page 166 of Islam's failure to generate a single healthy state, to that we answer: Malaysia. He is half-right when he half-bakes the French, who welcome different dictators to their bosoms for different reasons, while opposing American unilateralism, and he is half-right when he dismisses all of the anti-war voices as ill-considered and cowardly. He is largely wrong in dismissing “Old Europe” as a voice of reason, and he is mostly wrong in assuming that all is right with U.S. intelligence and that everything U.S. intelligence produces is reliable. I realize he is writing hyperbole for the public and knows better, but the book must be judged on its substance.

To end on a most positive note, Ralph Peters is completely utterly correct when he points out that America has, in the past 20 years, surrendered the battlefield to our non-state enemies in advance, for lack of attention and insight and will. Ralph is one of perhaps ten people I listen to with rapt attention–his voice, when integrated with the voices of others with different perspectives, is a lifeline to reality, a voice we ignore at our peril.

2003/09/242009/12/04

Review: The Great Unraveling–Losing Our Way in the New Century

4 Star, Economics, Politics

Read Preface and Introduction, Skip the Rest,

September 24, 2003

Paul Krugman

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add comment and links.

New Comment: the author was ahead of his time. See new links below.

The book is worth buying for the Preface and Introduction alone. The rest of the book is a somewhat irritating replay of every column the author has ever written, and not nearly as well done or as riveting as, say, Tom Friedman's replays in “Longitudes & Attitudes”. However, if you have not read the author's columns, his bite-size descriptions of irrational exuberance, crony capitalism, the failure of the Federal Reserve, fuzzy math, how markets go bad, and global spoilage, then they are all certainly worth browsing.

The Preface has three core ideas: 1) the elites are ruling badly and not beneficially for the majority of the population including all the voters and most of the stockholders; 2) politicians and corporation chiefs are getting away with blatant lies to the public because of a media that avoids critical inquiry; and 3) open sources of information–all that lies in the public domain–are more than adequate for anyone to get a grip on reality.

The Introduction is a bit scarier and more pointed. The author joins Mark Hertsgaard, author of The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World in suggesting that the radical right is creating nothing less than a Reichstag in America. In the author's view, and he quotes Kissinger in chilling terms, the radical right is a revolutionary power that is very deliberately and with malice at all times, rejecting and undermining the democratic rules of the game. In the author's words, the radical right is “a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system.” The author goes so far as to suggest that the radical right considers elections as “only a formality” and that they will do anything–including subversion of the Constitution–to “win” those elections and reap the domestic and foreign “looting rights.”

Disclosure: I used to be a conservative Republican and used to think such ideas were simply over the top. I have been radicalized by the last 200 books I have read (and reviewed on Amazon) and I have to say, while the third of the nation that is close-minded and ideologically-blindered on the right may give the author short shrift, the other two thirds–the drop-outs and splinter parties, and the failing Democrats–they should take Krugman very seriously. He is an economist, teaching at Princeton, not a journalist nor a sensationalist, and in my view, when one combines his book with that of Clyde Prestowitz, a Presbyterian elder and solid Reagan Republican and fiscal conservative (Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions), with that of William Greider, writing on the immorality and social costs of capitalism as we practice it today (The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy), one can only conclude that the Republic, and that for which it stands, have been hijacked, are being looted, and the American Democratic experiment is on very thin ice.

The index to this book is helpful in running down specific individuals, corporation, and organizations that have committed crimes against the Nation that the author has addressed in his many columns for the New York Times, as repeated in this book.

2003/09/242009/12/04

Review: Bin Laden–The Man Who Declared War on America

4 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Terrorism & Jihad

Over the Top in Iraq, Brilliant in All Other Respects,

September 24, 2003

Yossef Bodansky

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add comment and links.

New Comment: this remains a very important foundation document for understanding the complete failure of US intelligence to detect and monitor Saudi government funding of violent Islam and Wabbabism.

The author is a brilliant Arabist who has refined the art of acquiring and exploiting open sources of information on bin Laden and terrorism to a near science. His “MOSQINT” lectures draw packed houses of professional intelligence officers from over 40 countries.

The book is a hard read, but if one desires to understand the murky inter-relationships among the *governments* of Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, among others, the businesses and charities working actively to channel government and private funds to terrorists, and the global loosely-knit network of “fellow travelers” and jihadists, then this book is “Ref A.”

In my personal view, the author is a bit over the top in trying to link Iraq to bin Laden. This reminds of the Claire Sterling-Ollie North school of “anything goes” as long as you believe it. Having said that (and so has Vaclav Havel, President of Czechoslovakia, who personally dismissed a lie consistently told by the Bush Administration about a meeting in Prague between a terrorist known by the FBI to have been in Florida at the time, and an Iraqi intelligence officer), I give the book very high marks in all other respects.

The Conclusion, appropriately Chapter 13, is titled “What Next.” The book is worthy of purchase and recurring reference for this chapter alone. Especially troubling is the documentation of how many terrorists are moving around the world on legitimate passports from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Turkey, Kuwait, Algeria, Albania, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and other countries. The book adds confirmation to the many other references I have seen (many posted to OSS.Net news and reference section) regarding the active involvement of the Pakistani intelligence service in funding and training and facilitating travel for bin Laden personally, for his top lieutenants, and for terrorists in general.

The author's focus in the conclusion on the potential for Central Asia (all former khanates, all Muslim, all angry separatists from the Soviet Union) is especially interesting, as we see the beginnings of a “third front” there, with India-Pakistan being a fourth front, and South Asia a fifth front. Latin America and Africa are the sixth front. In brief, the author is one of those documenting the depth and scope of a global terrorism threat that the Bush Administration has unwisely chosen to attack with conventional military means, on six different fronts, none of which is sustainable in the medium or long term.

The author anticipated terrorist attacks against the UN and NATO when he discusses, on page 403, the Muslim declarations that include the UN and NATO in the fatwas against the USA, because the Muslim world “is being deceived by [these organizations], because they are hostile to Muslims and are responsible for all the massacres being perpetrated against Muslims in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, Albania, and Kosovo.” The UN in Iraq has been hit twice. I expect NATO in Afghanistan to be hit several times between now and the end of 2003, and I expect US special forces units to be massacred in detail in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

Bin Laden, dead or alive. Right. Bin Laden could not, in his wildest prayers to Allah, have imagined a better partner for fostering terrorism around the world than hip-shooting cowboy and unilateralist George W. Bush. Bin Laden created a global system of terrorism, the fire if you will, and George W. Bush and his neo-conservatives are blindly pouring $250 billion worth of tax-payer funded gasoline on that fire.

The author has recently been the recipient of the Golden Candle Award from the international open source intelligence committee. His citation reads:

“For his global multi-lingual open source investigations into terrorism, and his extraordinary professional achievement in writing and publishing “BIN LADEN: The Man Who Declared War on America”, years before the 9-11 World Trade Center demonstration of what well-funded suicidal terrorism can achieve when intelligence and policy both fail to focus on the threat.”

Whatever research or opinion flaws might be contained in this book, it is an essential reference in understanding both the dangers of terrorism, and the futility of the current US “strategy” for defeating terrorism by hammering and then abandoning Afghanistan and Iraq.

More recent books relevant to this one:
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)
The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the 21st Century
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

2003/09/012009/12/04

Review: At War with Ourselves–Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Complexity & Catastrophe, Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Problems), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Insurgency & Revolution, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation

Useful Supporting Views for Prestowitz' Rogue Nation,

September 1, 2003

Michael Hirsh

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add comment and links.

New Comment: I am distressed to see so many important books no longer available. Even though it makes my summative reviews valuable as a trace, I have tried to get Amazon to realize that it should offer such books electrionically, micro-cash for micro-text, and Jeff Besoz just doesn't want to hear it. I predict that Kindle will fail.

The author has provided a very informed and well-documented view of the competing “axis of thinking” (unilateralism versus multilateral realism) and “axis of feeling” (isolationism versus engagement). The two together create the matrix upon which a multitude of ideological, special interest, and academic or “objective” constituencies may be plotted.

The endorsement of the book by the Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs is a very subtle but telling indictment of the unilateralist bullying that has characterized American foreign policy since 2000–indeed, the author of the book coins the term “ideological blowback” as part of devastatingly disturbing account of all the things that have been done “in our name” on the basis of either blind faith or neo-conservative presumption.

The book received four stars because at the strategic level, Clyde Prestowitz' book, Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions is better in all ways–easier to read, more detailed, more specifics. Historically, I would bracket this book with the collection of Foreign AffairsThe American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World Essays from 75 Years of Foreign Affairs articles, , and I would add Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century by McNamara and Blight, Kissinger on Does America Need a Foreign Policy? : Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century, Boren et al on Preparing America's Foreign Policy for the 21st Century, and finally Joe Nye's, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone There are many other books I have reviewed on these pages, and one could make a fine evening of reading only the reviews, as they are summative in nature.

In any event, and the reason I mention other books above instead of in the last paragraph, is to make the point that everyone–other than a few obsessive neo-conservatives who happen to hold the reins of power–is saying the same thing: America must engage the real world, in a multilateral fashion.

The author of this book differs from other authors in that he explicitly recognizes, in his preface and then throughout the book, the fact that a coherent U.S. foreign policy cannot be achieved without the U.S. public's first understanding what is at stake, and then making its voice heard.

The author is also noteworthy in detailing the hypocrisy and ignorance of existing U.S. national security policies. Although Prestowitz does this in a more useful fashion, this book is very valuable and has many gifted turns of phrase. Consider this one, from page 10: “Despite a century of intense global engagement, America is still something of a colossus with an infant's brain, unaware of the havoc its tentative, giant-sized baby steps can cause. We still have some growing up to do as a nation.”

A third aspect of this book that I found compelling was the author's continued emphasis on the need to change mind-sets and emphasize *awareness* over “guts”–as he tells this compelling tale, Americans are too quick to show “toughness” when they perhaps should slow down, orient, observe, decide, and then act on the basis of a fully-informed appraisal of all the linkages and potential consequences of their actions.

A fourth valuable feature of this book is the author's focus on one chapter on American vulnerabilities in the age of globalization and super-empowered angry men. He quotes the incoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in explaining to Congress the military's incapacity to intervene on 9-11, as saying “We're pretty good if the threat is coming from outside. We're not so good if it's coming from inside.”

This leads to the fifth and final aspect of the book that I found noteworthy: the author's discussion of the mismanagement–even lack of management–of the broad spectrum of the varied instruments of national power. As Suzanne Nossel, a top Holbrook aide puts it, “Today, when it comes to U.S. diplomacy, one hand rarely knows what the other is doing. The U.S. government has no central ledger in which bilateral relationships are tracked. There is no place to turn to find out what the United States has done for a particular country lately, or what a country may want or fear.” The book clearly supports what appears to be an emerging consensus within the Senate that some form of “Goldwater-Nichols Act” for civilian and joint civilian-military national security management.

The endnotes are good, the index useful but annoyingly below 8 font type (possibly as low as 6) which is a very foolish act on the part of the publisher. A readable index would have increased the reference value of this book by at least 10%. The book lacks a bibliography, and here we urge the author to consider one for what we hope will be a second printing: books on realism, books on unilateralism, books on blowback (e.g. The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World, or Why Do People Hate America?), etcetera.

2003/08/312009/12/04

Review: Non-state Threats and Future Wars

4 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Future, War & Face of Battle

Rehash of Old “New” Ideas–Preface is the “Must Read”,

August 31, 2003

Robert Bunker

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add links.

The authors, with the exception of those writing about intelligence, are world-class, and if you have not read many books about 4th Generation Warfare, non-traditional threats, and non-state actors as forces in their own right, then this is a superb single book to obtain and read.

If, on the other hand, you have read most of the books and articles written by these talented individuals, you will find the book irritatingly “old”–most of these ideas were published ten years ago, and the book is a superb undergraduate publication well-suited for those who have not done the prior reading.

The book is a reflection of its institutional provenance, and brings together a mix of defense writers and the current crop of transnational crime academics and practitioners. It does not adequately discuss the non-violent traditional threats (water and resource scarcity, mass migration and genocide, pollution and corruption, inter alia), and it does not really discuss the future in creative ways.

There is no index and the bibliography is marginal.

There is one bright spot, and it alone makes the book worthy of purchase: Phil Williams, a top academic with superb law enforcement and national security connections at the working level, provides a preface that is concise and useful. He begins by pointing out that Clinton as well as Bush to date have ignored non-state threats, specifically including terrorism, and failed to understand the gravity and imminence of the asymmetrical threat. He lists five realities and three solutions:

Reality #1: International security is more complex. It is not sufficient to focus only on states.

Reality #2: Distinction between foreign and domestic security is gone–one cannot have homeland security in isolation from global security, and vice versa.

Reality #3: States are not what they were–the balance of power now requires that states, corporations, and organizations find new means of coordinating policies, capabilities, and actions.

Reality #4: Non-state enemies are everything that states–and especially the USA–are not. They are networked, transitional, flexible, learn from their mistakes, can embed themselves invisibly into existing financial and other communities, and possess a capacity for regeneration that national policy-makers simply do not appreciate.

Reality #5: Globalization has down and dark sides. It is imposing costs that lead to “blowback” and it is diffusing technologies and capabilities to non-state actors to the point that the complexity of Western infrastructures is now the greatest vulnerabilities of all of these state-based societies.

He concludes with three solutions: get intelligence right (a draconian challenge); change mind-sets (an equally draconian challenge); and revitalize and revamp the entire institutional archipelago through which national security policy, acquisitions, and operations are planned and executed (also a draconian challenge).

This is an excellent and reasonably priced undergraduate paperback, and a fine primer for those who are not already steeped in the literature. It does not significantly advance the literature in and of itself.

2003/08/312009/12/04

Review: Cicero–The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician

4 Star, History, Philosophy, Politics

Fine Book, Not a Substitute for Broader Reading,

August 31, 2003

Anthony Everitt

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add links.

This is a fine book. It has one really great sentence that most of those reading the book have undoubtedly passed over quickly, on page 37: …although fighting continued for some time at a terrible cost in human lives and suffering, Rome emerged the military victor–and the political loser.”

As I contemplate all of the other non-fiction books, and especially those with national security wisdom relevant to our times, it is, I must say with all candor, a little irritating to see this book in the top ten. This is what loosely-educated wonks read to appear educated and “steeped in history.” This is a fine book, but if policy wonks don't understand that they need to be putting Schell (The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People) and Greider (The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy), among others that I have reviewed, above this book, then they are demonstrating their myopia.

In addition to Schell and Greider, and much more relevant to the challenges at hand are a few of the following (the entire list can be seen in my lectures on books relevant to national security at OSS.Net): Colin Gray's Modern Strategy; Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Charles Kupchan's The Vulnerability of Empire (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs); Dr. Col. Manwaring et al on The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century….the list goes on. If you want history, there is always Will and Ariel Durant's The Lessons of History: The Most Important Insights from the Story of Civilization, or the more recent and truly elegant work by John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past…vital “to interpret the past for the purposes of the present with a view to managing the future.”

This is a good book. If, however, it is the best the policy world can do in terms of selection, then we have a classic illustration of how random and ignorant policy wonks can be–meanwhile, 1400 Middle East scholars and professors throughout the land go unhead, while a handful of talking heads quote Cicero and pretend to be learned.

2003/08/302009/12/04

Review: Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)–A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right

4 Star, Politics

LOTS of white space, good detail, funny and sad,

August 30, 2003

Al Franken

One star is taken off because this book has way too much white space–125 pages of text stretched to 372.It is a good thing to see this book ranking at this time as #1 in Amazon sales. America *needs* to read this book because the Republic has lost its soul–only by reading about reality and then voting accordingly, can this Republic be saved.

I recommend the book be read together with “Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq”, and the much older but seminal work by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, “Manufacturing Consent: The Polical Economy of the Mass Media.” The bottom line is clear: there is a constellation of power in America that integrates the incumbents of the White House right now, the mass media, and the major corporate interests–oil, electrical and water utilities, finance, fast food and military systems–that is both corrupt and using blatant lies to get their way with the public.

As I have personal experience with a certain class of people whose worldview is shaped by the Pat Robertson 700 Club, intense readings of the Bible in isolation from global realities, and a deep, deep feeling that America is perfect and anyone who does not agree is a traitorous moron, I really have to commend Franken for the humorous but well documented manner in which he skewers both the “front fluff” (Ann Coulter, Bernie Goldberg, Bill O'Reilly, Paul Gigot, and the entire Fox “News” Team) and the “backroom mean” (George Bush Junior, Mama Bush–aka in the book from several sources, “Queen Bitch”–and the really really dangerous and unethical Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz) as well as the lesser evils–Rumsfeld chief among them).

The author's use of transcripts for “hard fact” documentation is superb, as are the endnotes. Indeed, the truths that he uses as his raw working material are so powerful that I found some of his satirical untruths or exaggerations to be off-putting–either they should be clearly marked (even put in little boxes so the publishers can add another 25 pages and charge even more for the paperback version) or even eliminated. Put bluntly, this book has so much important stuff to communicate, that the satiracal untruths detract from the value of the endeavor.

The book should have an index. I wanted to look up all references to Dick Cheney and could not.

Special for Fox “News” devotees: If you read just one book *other* than the Bible, this is the one for you. It just might shake you out of your death grip on a cocaine-based, crime-based presidency, and allow you to consider the possibility that all Americans–including those in la-la-land–need to wake up to the difference between manufactured lies and real-world truths that will determine the future of our children and our grand-children. God is *not* amused by the present state of affairs. He just told me so, himself, right after telling Dubya his time is up.