3 Star – Page 13 – Public Intelligence Blog

Primer on Liberal Internationalism, Nothing More,

November 16, 2006

Michael Lind

This work reflects the liberal internationalist perspective of the author, a fairly comprehensive reading of first-person and related materials from past presidents, along with Op-Ed types of materials, and a somewhat stunningly naive and delusiional view that the American way of strategy exists to “protect the American way of life.”

The author is clearly lacking in military experience or understanding, in strategic understanding, in contextual understanding such as can be found in books such as Derek Leebaert's The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World; Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project); Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People; or any of the hundreds of non-fiction books I have reviewed here at Amazon pertinent to devising and executing holistic national security and national competitiveness strategies.

Among other things, he naively assumes that most national security decisions have actually been intended to serve the public interest; he does not calculate in full measure the costs of unnecessary wars or unnecessarily oppressive wars; and he accepts at face value–for lack of broader reading–the conventional wisdom on why America entered specific wars. The author is, for example, sharply at odds with Gore Vidal, author of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace among many other works, and Vidal's documentation of the many undeclared wars that America has undertaken in the pursuit of empire. General Smedley Butler, USMC (Ret) agrees that War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It. For a really comprehensive understanding of the varied reasons Why We Fight see the DVD by that name, and first read the many many reviews of its content and meaning.

Among many subtle but telling errors, the author confuses the cost, size, and weight of the U.S. military with strength. The reality is that today we have a hollow military, and our heavy-metal military is relevant to only ten percent of the high-level threats to our security, and completely irrelevant to our more profound vulnerabilities with respect to national competitiveness and sustainability.

He makes a pass at including trade with security, and cites one book by my fellow moderate Republican, Clyde Prestowitz Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth And Power to the East but neglects the more important work, Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions. This book (“The American Way of Strategy”) is a review of history desperate to find good intentions and leverage them for the future, but so lacking in coherent detail about the substance of reality and strategy as to fail to be truly useful–and it is most certainly not even close actual reality, at least at the strategic level.

There are some gems and I certainly recommend the book for purchase and reading, but on balance I put it down as too replete with idealistic platitudes.

The four jacket blurbs (Nye, Hart, Kupchan, and Walt) would certainly carry weight with me if I were buying the book in a bookstore, but after actually reading it, I find that each praises the book for the one or two sentences that stand out (e.g. nurture democracy by example, not force). These are platitudes. Saying that we consistently fight for “the American way of life” is about as moronic as young Bush's saying that billions around the world hate us for our ideals and our morality and our “way of life.” Get real. This may be used to mobilize our youth and it may be why THEY fight, but it most certainly is NOT why our political and financial elites PICK fights.

Grand strategy, which Colin Gray discusses so ably in Modern Strategy requires a realistic appraisal of both domestic and foreign factors; it requires a balanced and transpartisan establishment of a national agenda, national goals, ways and means, and an explicit identification of desired outcomes. Its implementation requires a coherent inter-agency policy that is heard by both the public and the White House; endorsed by an activist Congress with the power of both the purse and the law, and executed by inter-agency leaders skilled at dealing with coalition leaders and at keeping the public informed, educated, and engaged.

This book is, in short, an appetizer, not the main course. The main course would require a full appraisal of the ten high-level threats identified by the High-Level Threat Panel of the United Nations (LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft as the US member); a coherent and reality-based budget plan for the next ten years across the twelve policies; and a deeply insightful understanding of the eight challengers (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, India, Russia, Venezuela, Wild Cards) such that our national security & competitiveness policies, budgets, and behaviors can both protect America in isolation, and also help those challengers avoid our grotesque mistakes that today consume one third of the world's energy and create one third of the world's waste. That level of strategic thinking is not to be found in this book.

I would endorse this book as a starting point, but urge the interested reader to consider using my lists (which Amazon does allow us to organize) and my reviews (which sadly can only be viewed chronologically) as a map to the thoughts of others. The next President does not need and will not benefit from a single advisor full of platitudes–the next President not only needs a robust team light on egos and armed with global rolodexes, but they need a team that can brief tradeoff decisions among the <ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers>.

The American way of strategy is yet to be defined at the strategic level (at the operational level it has tended to be about mass, at the tactical level hey diddle diddle up the middle). When it is defined, at a proper strategic plane, it will combine access to all information in all languages all the time; serious games for change that can project alternative scenarios based on real-budgets in relation to one another; and coherent inter-agency and coalition campaign plans that wage peace rather than war, with war being the exception. Intelligence & Information Operations (I2O) will be the foundation for that strategy, which will have three objectives:

1) The restoration of the middle class and unionized blue-collar labor;
2) The revitalization of civic duty, infrastructure, and English; and
3) The provision of free universal access to education in all languages, as the fastest means to elevate and harness both our own working poor (see the book by that title), and to elevate and energize the five billion poor at the bottom of the pyramid–each of whom we could have given a free cell phone to, for the cost of the Iraq war to date.

The war metaphor DOES NOT WORK. We must wage peace, coherently, affordably, morally, and constantly.

On creating stabilizing wealth:
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization

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2006/09/032009/12/04

Review: Intelligence Failure–How Clinton’s National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11 (Hardcover)

3 Star, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq

Amazon Page

Half Truth, Half Distorted, Largely Uninformed About Reality,

September 3, 2006

David N. Bossie

1) The book is worth buying for the half that is truthful. Yes, Clinton was responsible for nurturing not only Al Qaeda, but an incompetent intelligence community as well. Woolsey could not get in to see him, Deutch was a raving ego-maniac disdainful of security, and Tenet was first a pandering sychophant and later (under Bush) a world-class intelligence prostitute. Madeline Albright and Tony Lake, however, bear most of the blame–the Department of State has long abdicated its respopnsibility for being the *primary* collector, evaluator, translator, and disseminator of real-world unclassified information in all languages bearing on our national security and foreign policy. On Madeline Albright's watch, not only did State not pay attention to reality, they also actively repressed classified reports from the intelligence community on terrorism emergent. Tony Lake is something else–a well-intentioned individual with no clue about the complexities of the real world (Google for our “ten threats, twelves policies, and eight challengers”)–it was only as he was leaving office that he “discovered” the “six fears.”

2) The book is also half distortions and mis-representations. This is a hatchet job in advance of the 2006 elections. I am a moderate Republican (and the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction). The dirty little secret of the Bush Administration is that Dick Cheney was given both the terrorism and the intelligence portfolios from day one, and in his arrogance chose to ignore them both despite the fact that the Clinton Administration “woke up” at the end of its term and issues strong warnings. George Bush is also arrogant and ignorant–CIA tried desperately to warn him in person on 6 August 2001 and he dismissed them with a cavalier “OK, you've covered your ass now.” Between a mendacious Vice President and an ignorant little bully of a President, America was completely unprotected in the months when intelligence actually had good cause for alarm and tried desperately–as did Richard Clark–to sound the alarm. Cheney chose instead to focus on secret meetings with Enron and Exxon, and to plan the invasion of Iraq, for which he welcomed a terrorism attack as a “pretext for war”.

The reality is that the truth can be known, but one needs to search for it. There is no better way to scan the literature than to spend a couple of hours with all my reviews (sadly, Amazon allows us to make lists, but not to sort our reviews, so either use the lists or be patient in going through my reviews. They cover information society, intelligence, emerging threats, strategy and force structure, anti-Americanism, and the negative impact on national security of domestic U.S. politcs).

A few specifics:

1) any book endorsed by Woolsey and Novak, for divergent reasons, cannot be trusted to be objective.

2) The author is oblivious to the many books on intelligence from Allen, Baeur, Berkowitz, Codevilla, Gentry, Goodman, Gerecht, Fialka, Godson, Johnson, Levine, Odom, Riebling, Steele, Treverton, Wiebes, Zegart and more. This is a hatchet job with some nuggets, not a balanced piece of research with a historical perspective. Not a single one of these authors is in the bibliography.

3) The author's most grevious error is to confuse reduced presidential attention with incompetence. Clinton was very competent, it was the U.S. Intelligence Community, like the lightbulb in the psychologists joke (“how many to change a bulb? Irrelevant, the bulb has to want to change”), that chose to ignore General Al Gray, myself, and many others who from 1988 were agitating for improved coverage of terrorism and instability, and improved attention to open sources of information.

4) The author makes the usual mistake of failing to note that CIA and FBI failures were not from lack of funding, but from internal myopia and mis-direction. FBI, for example, redirected money appropriated by Congress for information technology, to pay for more travel by chiefs; CIA cut back on its clandestine service, and relied more heavily of foreign liaison lies, and completely failed to heed the 1999 NIMA Commission Report that demanded attention to sense-making and analytic desktop toolkits.

5) The author provides an unbalanced but useful review of the embassy bombings, Khobar Towers (which was sponsored by Iran), and the USS Cole, but in his epilogue, he appears brain-dead in thinking that Bush-Cheney's redirection of the military from Afghanistan to Iraq was brilliant. It was not. It was the most expensive catastrophic, corrupt, ignorant, and mendacious abuse of presidential power in modern history.

This leads to my final general comment: as unethical and incompetent as some individuals might have been in both the Clinton and the Bush Administrations, it is the “system” not the individuals that is broken. Congress is out of the game–incumbents shake down lobbyists for cash, not the other way around; both parties demand “party line” votes instead of conscience votes on behalf of specific constituencies; and the extremist Republican leadership of the House and Senate have abdicated their Constitutional responsibility to be the FIRST (Article 1) Branch of government, and instead chosen to serve as foot-soldiers for the President. This is treason and impeachable mis-behavior. The Executive is no better–Dick Cheney has swept aside the policy process, and it is now documented (see my review of “One Percent Doctrine”) that he has experimented with isolating the President since President Ford, and under Bush, directed policies that were neither cleared by the bureaucracy, nor reported to and approved by the President. Cheney, not necessarily Bush, is clearly impeachable.

So buy and read this book, but do not stop there. We the People now have a digital memory, and we are being aroused from our slumber. Justice will be done, eventually. Both Administrations failed America, but only because the public failed to stem the corporate take-over of Washington, D.C., and failed to exercise its ultimate right to hold everyone accountable day to day, not just on election day.

2006/08/182009/12/04

Review DVD: Fahrenhype 9/11

3 Star, Misinformation & Propaganda, Reviews (DVD Only)

Amazon Page

Deceiving and Insubstantial,

August 18, 2006

Dick Morris

After seening and reviewing Fahrenhyte 9/11, I chanced upon this film and watched it. It is deceiving and insubstantial. As the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, including most of the important books about national security, 9/11, oil, and terrorism, I have to state there are exactly TWO points of truth in this shallow stupid little film:

1) the photo of Bush reading a book upside down was a fabrication, Bush was actually listening.

2) Clinton blew it. Correct. Madeline Albright will go down in history for refusing to let her staff report terrorism honestly, and Tony Lake will go down in history for failing to get it right. It bears mention that then Commandant of the Marine Corps Al Gray did get it right, in his article “Global Intelligence Challenges of the 1990's” published in the fall of 1988, but no one wanted to listen.

I am impressed by the teacher of color who was in charge of the classroom that day, recounting how she felt Bush was truly presidential, and wise not to add to the panic by rushing out of the room. Absolutely. Good point.

The rest of this extreme rightist propaganda tract is totally disconnected from reality and the truth. The movie claims that Gore lost because of Nader, and completely ignores the hard documented proof that the Florida leeadership acted to disenfranchise over 35,000 people of color, one reason that the Bush family was so confident, in advance, of victory in Florida. This trashy film fails to address the many angry Representatives and the inert Senate, including Gore, who failed to use the power of Congress to redress the impeachable wrong done to America in 2000 (and again, this time in Ohio, in 2004).

Anything that features snap-shots of Ann Coulter is very likely to be loosely related to the truth, reality, or the public interest.

I am glad I watched this film, because it reconfirms my gravest fears–the extreme right in America now has a propaganda machine more powerful that Hitler's, and a brainwashed following more lethal than the Hilter Youth. This is seriously troubing stuff.

I gave Moore four stars, one star down for being too glib by half. That's an honest assessment. This shallow little movie gets two stars, and both of those are for reflecting what is in the small minds of the nutty right.

2006/06/012009/12/04

Review: An Inconvenient Truth–The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It (Paperback)

3 Star, Environment (Problems)

Watch the DVD First. Up to Four Stars if You Do That…..,

June 1, 2006

Al Gore

Note: Although the DVD is mostly Al Gore and Powerpoint slides, interspersed with views of the adoring audience, it is a VERY effective briefing, and after seeing the DVD, my appreciation for the book went up. It is still over the top on fonts and graphics–the next edition should be toned down–but if viewed together with the DVD, the book goes up to four stars.

I actually read The Global 2000 Report to the President: Entering the Twenty-First Century as published in 1982 and still in my library, and I follow the excellent work of Lester Brown, whose “State of the World” publications are extremely pointed, pertinent, and professional.

In that context, this book is a real disappointment. It is a superb “coffee table” book, with glorious photographs, some really excellent time phrase photos (showing melting ice and increased drought at the same place over three period. The writing is thoughtful, but the composition of the book makes it very inefficent at communicating the ideas in structured form. This is an artist's rendition, with what for me at least was an annoying jumble of mixed big font sizes, constantly changing lay-outs, and no tables or substantive “here are the ten threats, here are the ten solutions.”

I am waiting for the video, and I suspect that the movie will be ten times more valuable as both an educational and mobilization tool, much as the Wal-Mart video is superior to the Wal-Mart book.

I admire the author very much, and believe that his commitment to the environment and to doing the right thing is genuine.

The best part of the book is the end, which lists a number of things that one can do personally to help with the environment, and also puts a number of “myths” into boxes (e.g. melting of cold ice at the Poles is good), but sadly, the choice of fonts, colors, layouts, and so on make this book a 50% success, at best. “art” or COSMETICS triumphed over substance and seriousness, and the Vice President has lost, yet again, a chance to make a larger difference. I will pray that the movie makes this review, and this book, irrelevant.

This is certainly a book that is worth buying to support the Vice President, to appreciate the photos and content, but this book missed a great opportunity to provide America and the world with a more digestible serious document that could have led to action. In its current form, it is nothing more than a “what nice pictures, quite right, something must be done” and then it goes back on the coffee table and achieves nothing. Sorry, but that is my hard-nosed evaluation.

2006/04/302009/12/04

Review: How Democrats Can Take Back Congress (Paperback)

3 Star, Politics

Platitudes without a Balanced Budget–Not Tom Paine at all,

April 30, 2006

“Tom Paine”

This book reads like the last gasp of the old guard Democratic staff weenies who think that soundbites (one for every issue in this book) and platitudes will make up for ineptness. This book, for example, proposes programs such as eliminating social security taxes for 94% of the workers and paying for everyone's college tuition, without in any way suggesting how the Federal budget might be balanced. There is, in short, no tax reform focused on eliminating subsidies and loopholes and corporate fraud combined with corporate exclusion from the tax base.

Sorry, but on balance, this book is very loosely thought through, and I personally resent anyone using Tom Paine's great name in vain.

The only thing in this book that I think is right on target (sure, the issue positions are acceptable, but any high schooler could have put this list together) is the emphasis on the need to get back in touch with American labor, support the unions, and restore the vitality (the opposite of disposability) of the American worker.

This books makes no mention of Matthew Miller's The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love or Rabbi Michael Lerner's The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right or any of a myriad of good books on Cultural Creatives, New Progressives, Ecological Economics, Immoral Captialism, etc.

Bottom line: YUK. The author gets the third star for good intentions, otherwise this would have a been a two star vote.

At 57 pages, this book is light-weight in every possible sense of the word. It does not achieve its objective. See the image I am loading, if Amazon works today, for an idea of a policy framework that can then be costed out.

2006/03/292009/12/04

Review: Cobra II–The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (Hardcover)

3 Star, Iraq, War & Face of Battle

Fascinating Authorized Details, Missing Core Information,

March 29, 2006

Michael R. Gordon

EDIT of 11 Dec 07: my original comments have been validated. Adding links now that this feature is available, and a few additional references.

The index in this book is *terrible*, my first clue, as the #1 Amazon reviewer of non-fiction about national security, that something is amiss. There is no bibliography. That's my second clue. The footnotes are solid on interviews and Op-Eds, and abyssmal on books by other people–we'll give them a bye on that one, considering this a primary reference that is a partial picture.

The one theme that comes across, and it is partly motivated by a proper sense of restoring honor and reputation for the Army, is the constant degree to which Army officers gave the civilians good advice, only to see it ignored. The Army Chief of Staff got it right on post-conflict nation-building and needed manpower; the Army flags got it right in telling Bremer that that single dumbest thing he could do was disband the Army and put 100,000 pissed off Iraqis with guns on the street–but by golly, Bremer went ahead and did it.

Overall I do not find this book worthy of four stars (not even close for five) for the following reasons:

1) It is largely a white-wash, granted with lots of excellent detail, but it tells the story from the CINC and DCINC points of view, and I have previously reviewed those books and found them lacking in complete candor and full detail.

2) The book completely ignores all the negatives that have long-since been documented–the fact that Charlie Allen at CIA did send in 35 line-crossers and proved conclusively there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction; the fact that Chalabi was a thief and a liar fired by CIA and then used by Iran as an agent of influence to lick the ears of the neo-cons and persuade Rumsfeld (with help from the Mossad, which knew a coincidence of interest with the Iranians when they saw one) that it would be roses in the streets and a cheap war. The book completely ignores the peak oil imperatives that drove Cheney and the ugly post war realities including Paul Bremer “losing” $20 billion in loose cash, and Afghanistan becoming the source of 80% of the world's heroin (turned into #4 quality by our ally Pakistan).

2) The book ignores technical details that are my litmus test for full veracity. The fact that the White House and the military refused to put a Ranger battalion in to block Bin Laden's ground escape, tracked by CIA for four days (see my review of Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander), the fact that Rumsfeld very stupidly gave the Pakistani's an air corridor to evacuate their officers and they instead evacuated 3,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda from Tora Bora in one night)….the list goes on.

The book gets the high points right (misreading of the foe, dysfunction of US military bureaucracy, over reliance by Rumsfeld on technology, the failure to recognize reality once in (insurgents instead of parades), and the Bush disdain for nation-building) BUT the authors also soft-shoe all the other issues, of which I see three:

1) The Administration lied to Congress, the American People, and the United Nations. A memo is now out in Lawless World that shows clearly that Bush and Blair agreed to go to war and all that followed was posturing–certainly an impeachable offense if ever there was one. See Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq.

2) Tommy Franks did not give a rat's ass what the Joint Chiefs thought, and Franks was chosen to do exactly that, while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was chosen because he would accept the role of floor mat rather than doing what any self-respecting officer should do, which is resign and be noisy in public.

3) The book fails to do as good a job as The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill or State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration in showing just how mendacious and dysfunctional was the Cheney-Rumsfeld coup d'etat within the White House. David Ropkoph's Ruling the World, several other books, make it quite clear that Condi Rice and Colin Powell were rolled, George Tenet was a raving sycophant, and our military was too eager to please, while Congress was pathologically absent without leave (AWOL).

The authors really would have done a vastly superior job had they actually read and integrated the varied books, e.g. Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, the various books readily available on the web of lies that led to war, on the incompetence of George Tenet, etc.

In all of this we do not see an adequate assessment of the role of Iran in carrying out what may be the greatest strategic deception of modern history, nor do we see any evaluation of the political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, or techno-demographic cost to America. This book closes as if the war is virtually over, the Army is reconstituted rather than hollow, and its time to discuss the lessons learned over a double scotch. Not so fast, bubbas.

In 2007 we have, apart from multiple books detailed how and why Bush and Cheney should be impeached, an entire literature on their alledged high crimes and misdemeanors on 9-11, and the follow gems:

Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders

This is not all on Cheney and the neo-cons. Any Congress stupid enough, limp enough, to allow Paul Wolfowitz to contradict the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army on a topic about which Wolfowitz remains copmpletely ignorant, is not a Congress fulfilling its Article 1 responsibilities. The whole lot of them should be dismissed in 2008, and we should start over with Independents in charge and leadership psotions in both the Congress and the Cabinet aportioned across at least five distinct parties.

2006/03/172009/12/04

Review: Strategery–How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats, and Confounding the Mainstream Media (Hardcover)

3 Star, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Politics, Strategy

Useful Apologia, Disingenious and Misleading,

March 17, 2006

Bill Sammon

This book is a useful apologia for the President, and provides a superb context for understanding how the extreme right can see their man as “doing no wrong.”

This book is, however, shockingly hateful and disrespectful of those who seek out the truth of any matter. I was absolutely stunned to see the manner in which this author treats the initiative of the reporter and the integrity of our Armed Forces person who in combination gave our nation the photos of the Abu Gharaib attrocities.

This book is inflammatory, delusional, and glib. The author labels Seymour Hersh, one of the most extraordinary and accomplished investigative reporters in American history, as a “leftwing polemicist.” Perhaps the author did not like it when it was Hersh who revealed that Rumsfeld gave the order allowing the Pakistani's to evacuate 3,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda personnel from the Tora Bora trap. This author probably thinks the CIA officers who went into Afghanistan in advance of our troops (“First In,” and “JAWBREAKER”) were left wing pinkos for not being happy when the military refused to close the trap and let Bin Laden and key aides walk out to Pakistan after being tracked on the ground for four days.

The author repeats known falsehoods, such as Bush saying that no one in government ever envisoned anyone flying airplanes into buildings, when anyone who reads knows that this is precisely what was envisioned in the Hart-Rudman report over a year earlier. Fast forward to Hurricane Katrina, and Bush saying no one told him, and presto, a video is leaked of someone doing precisely that.

If you are an extreme rightist, you will love this book. If you are a moderate Republican (as am I), an Independent, Green, Libertarian, conservative Democrat, or moderately well read, there is one reason and one reason only to buy this book: to completely understand the depth and breadth of the ideological fantasy land that these extremists inhabit.

Category: 3 Star

Review: The American Way of Strategy–U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life