Military & Pentagon Power – Page 22 – Public Intelligence Blog

2006/10/072009/12/04

Review: Blind Into Baghdad–America’s War in Iraq

6 Star Top 10%, Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Amazon Page

The ONLY “Before and After” Book on the Iraq Mis-Adventure,

October 7, 2006

James Fallows

James Fallows is unique for giving us the only “before and after” book on Iraq. This book, while it consists of a collection of articles published in the run-up to the war on Iraq, is exemplary for showing what was known before the war, and how a combination of ideological bias, bureaucratic timidity, confusion, and general incompetence actually allowed this Nation to be led to an elective war of devastating consequence and cost.

The author provides both an introduction and a conclusion to the book that are unique to the book and set the articles in harmony as a whole.

There are other books that excel as retrospective reconstruction and finger-pointing, among which I would include HUBRIS, Squandered Victory, The End of Iraq, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and most recently, State of Denial, but this is the only book to focus on all that we knew prior to the war about the daunting difficulties facing us in making the peace, and why the political leadership of the Executive did not want us to think about that, and why the political leadership of the Congress refused to play its role as a co-equal branch with the power of both the purse and the declaration of war exclusive to it.

James Fallows documents how virtually every sensible element of the federal government, from the military to the diplomats to the commerce and treasury and agriculture and others, all KNEW that invading Iraq was going to open a Pandora's box of sectarian violence, ethic conflict over resources, a collapse of good order, the failure of infrastructure the US would not be able to repair quickly enough, and on and on and on and on!

Objective observers, including the British, considered the claims of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz with respect to the ease with which Iraq qould be liberated, to be the “ruminations of insane people.”

The author's bottom line is clear: the bureaucracy did its job and anticipated every single reason for not going to war, every single calamity that would befall us in Iraq. Where government failed was at the political level, with Dick Cheney closing out the policy process, spoon feeding the President lies from convicted thief and liar Chalabi, and with a full-court press backed by Wall Street and the media, to declare dissent to be treason–hence General Tony Zinni, former Commander in Chief for the Central Command, being called a traitor for sharing his knowledge.

The author and The Atlantic Monthly did not rely only on open sources. They sponsored a war game that came as close as possible to matching all that the US Government might be doing behind closed doors, using only open sources and overt experts, and here again, well in advance of the war, the conclusion was the same: don't do it!

The author concludes the book with several findings, all of which are completely consistent with the other non-fiction books I have read on Iraq and related blunders:

1) Corporations deciding on how to market a brand of toothpaste are vastly more meticulous and thoughtful that the political leadership in the Executive deciding to go to war on what proved to be whims, lies, and active mis-representation.

2) There was too little friction. The Administration got a “free ride” from the people, Congress, the media. Other than Senator Byrd, who shall long be my personal hero for his 80 speeches against the war (he alone among all the Senators stood fast on the matter of the Senate being equal to the Executive and having the right to question this idiocy–see my review of his book, Losing America), our Congress abdicated its responsibilities and failed the Nation. This was a bi-partisan failure, but the extremist Republican leaders were most to blame.

3) There has been no accountability. I remain shocked by the number of books and DVDs (see my list of Serious DVDs) that document the constant stream of lies and mis-representations from the political leadership and their tame uniformed members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who should be fired for confusing loyalty with integrity). It is a sad commentary on the Nation that the pedophile charges against Congressman Foley seem to carry more weight with the public than our 65,000 amputees.

I like this book very much. It is important for all Americans to understand that good minds working only with open sources of information easily anticipated the reasons why an elective war on Iraq was not a good idea. It is important for all Americans to know that the good people in State, Defense, and elsewhere got it right, but Dick Cheney shut them down, shut them out, and alone, bears responsibility for leading a young President ignorant of national security matters, on a very irresponsible and costly course of action.

Dick Cheney has a great deal to answer for–none of the others could have achieved their ill without him.

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2006/10/042010/05/31

Review: State of Denial–Bush at War Part III

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Democracy, Diplomacy, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Impeachment & Treason, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

Stake in the Heart of the W Presidency

October 4, 2006

Bob Woodward

Here are the highlights I drew out that make this book extraordinary and worth reading even if it leaves one with a political hang-over:

1) The Federal Government is broken, and was made worse by a President who knew nothing of foreign policy, a Vice President who closed down the inter-agency policy system, and a Secretary of Defense who was both contemptuous of the uniformed military and held in contempt by Bush Senior.

2) My opinion of the Secretary of Defense actually went UP with this book. Rumsfeld has clearly been well-intentioned, has clearly asked the right questions, but he let his arrogance get away from him. Given a choice between Admiral Clark, a truth-telling transformative person, and General Myers, an acquiescent warrior diminished to senior clerk, Rumsfeld made the right choice for his management style, and the wrong choice for the good people in our Armed Forces. I *like* Rumsfeld's Anchor Chain letter as it has been described, and wish it had been included as an Appendix. Rumsfeld got the control he wanted, but he sacrificed honest early warning in so doing.

3) This book also improves my opinion of the Saudis and especially Prince Bandar. While I have no tolerance for Saudi Royalty–the kind of corrupt debauched individuals that make Congressman Foley look like a vestal virgin–the Saudis did understand that Bush's unleashing of Israel was disastrous, and they did an excellent job of shaking up the President. Unfortunately, they could not overcome Dick Cheney, who should resign or be impeached for gross dereliction of duty and usurpation of Presidential authority.

4) Tenet's visit to Rice on 10 July is ably recounted and adds to the picture. It joins others books, notably James Risen's “State of War,” “Hubris,” FASCO” and “The End of Iraq in presenting a compelling picture of a dysfunctional National Security Advisor who is now a dysfunctional Secretary of State–and Rumsfeld still won't return her phone calls…..

5) The author briefly touches on how CIA shined in the early days of the Afghan War (see my reviews of “JAWBREAKER” and “First In” for more details) but uses this to show that Rumsfeld took the impotence of the Pentagon, and the success of CIA, personally.

6) The author also tries to resurrect Tenet somewhat, documenting the grave reservations that Tenet had about Iraq, but Tenet, like Colin Powell, failed to speak truth to power or to the people, and failed the Nation.

7) Rumsfeld recognized the importance of stabilization and reconstruction (and got an excellent report from the Defense Science Board, not mentioned by this book, on Transitions to and From Hostilities) but he vacillated terribly and ultimately failed to be serious on this critical point.

8) This book *destroys* the Defense Intelligence Agency, which some say should be burned to the ground to allow a fresh start. The author is brutal in recounting the struggles of General Marks to get DIA to provide any useful information on the alleged 946 WMD sites in Iraq. DIA comes across as completely derelict bean counters with no clue how to support operators going in harms way, i.e. create actionable intelligence.

9) Despite WMD as the alleged basis for war, the military had no unit trained, equipped, or organized to find and neutralize WMD sites. A 400 person artillery unit was pressed into this fearful service.

10) General Jay Garner is the star of this story. My face lit up as I read of his accomplishments, insights, and good judgments. He and General Abizaid both understood that allowing the Iraqi Army to stay in being with some honor was the key to transitioning to peace, and it is clearly documented that Dick Cheney was the undoing of the peace. It was Dick Cheney that deprived Jay Garner of Tom Warrick from State, the man who has overseen and understood a year of planning on making the peace, and it was Dick Cheney that fired Garner and put Paul Bremer, idiot pro-consult in place. Garner clearly understood a month before the war–while there was still time to call it off–that the peace was un-winable absent major changes, but he could not get traction within the ideological fantasy land of the Vice Presidency.

11) Apart from State, one military officer, Colonel Steve Peterson, clearly foresaw the insurgency strategy, but his prescient warnings were dismissed by the larger group.

12) General Tommy Franks called Doug Feith “the dumbest bastard on the planet,” –Feith deprived Garner of critical information and promoted Chalabi as the man with all the answers.

13) The author covers the 2004 election night very ably, but at this point the book started to turn my stomach. The author appears oblivious to the fact that the Ohio election was stolen through the manipulation of 12 voting districts, loading good machines in the pro-Bush areas, putting too few machines in the pro-Kerry areas, and in some cases, documented by Rolling Stone, actually not counting Kerry votes at all on the tallies. Ohio has yet to pay, as does Florida, for its treasonous betrayal of the Republic.

Today I issued a press release pointing toward the Pakistan treaty creating the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan as a safehaven for the Taliban and Al Qaeda as the definitive end–loss of–the war on terror, which is a tactic, not an enemy. As Colin Gray says in “Modern Strategy,” time is the one strategic variable that cannot be bought nor replaced. As a moderate Republican I dare to suggest that resigning prior to the November elections, in favor of John McCain, Gary Hart, and a Coalition Cabinet, might be the one thing that keeps the moderate Republican incumbents, and the honest Democrats–those that respect the need for a balanced budget–in place to provide for continuity in Congress, which must *be* the first branch of government rather than slaves to the party line.

It's crunch time. This book is the last straw. The American people are now *very* angry.

2006/08/112009/12/04

Review DVD: Why We Fight (2006)

5 Star, Military & Pentagon Power, Reviews (DVD Only)

Amazon Page

Foundation Film With Fog of War, Wal-Mart, and The Corporation,

August 11, 2006

Gore Vidal

This is a foundation film, a foundation for citizens restoring power to the people and removing it from the corporations. Other films that complement this one are the Fog of War (documentary with McNamara), the Wal-Mart video, and “The Corporation” on how corporations use their “legal personality” to keep their managers immune from accountabiity.

High points of this video:

1) General and President Eisenhower's son says on camara that his dad told him he wished we had never invented the nuclear bomb, when Truman used it it made him feel “low.”

2) Growing gap between the elite and the public. Still a general assumption by the public that the govenrment knows more than they do about the reasons for going to war.

3) Too many accept the premise that democracy can be imposed at gunpoint, and do not realize (see my review of book “The End of Faith”) that religious fanatism must be repressed before secular democracy can be adopted.

4) Huge segment on how the draft was our best defense against being manipulated, how the volunteer Army makes it possible for the elite to use the military for the wrong reasons while lying to the public.

5) Good references to how the rest of the world sees us as practicing economic colonialism combined with unilateral militarism.

6) Oil, oil, oil and lies, lies, lies.

7) Elite lesson from Viet-Nam was that death cannot be seen in US living rooms. The embedded media, far from being more useful is being distracted at the tactical level, and kept from focusing on the strategic question of “is this war necessary?”

8) Senator Byrd is featured as the lone adult voice against the war. Congress is widely perceived as having failed in every possible way because it is both beholden to the military-industrial complex and its bribes, and has (see my review of book “The Broken Branch”) abdicated its role as the “first” branch of government and accepted a subordinate role as “footsoldiers of the President.”

9) Perhaps most useful, as more and more voices call for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, is the clips of the lies told to us on television by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice, interspersed with interviews of military and other intelligence analysts who now can speak of the truth as it was known then. This DVD could be “Exhibit A” in any impeachment trial.

10) Hottest quote: “A terrible thing when Americans can't trust their President….the government exploited (my emotions and trust after 9/11)”.

11) Those interviews believe that we had no exit strategy from Iraq precisely because Cheney and Rumsfeld did not plan to leave, and they cite as proof the fact that 14 permanent installations have been built in Iraq, instead of the reconstruction and stabilization of the civil sector that would normally be the priority in an exit strategy.

This is a compelling objective film. Those who demean it by associating it with the Oliver Stone JFK conspiracy documentary are doing Amazon readers and the DVD a great dis-service.

2006/07/202009/12/04

Review: The End of Iraq–How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (Hardcover)

Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Iraq, Military & Pentagon Power, Stabilization & Reconstruction, War & Face of Battle

Amazon Page

Lack of Balance,Good Detail, First-Rate Personal Perspective,

July 20, 2006

Peter W. Galbraith

I recommend the other reviews, including the negative ones, for they accurately depict a lack of balance that might normally cause me to give this book one less star. However, because it has first-rate personal perspective including extraordinary travel that most US officials and journalists cannot claim, it gets the full five stars. I especially liked the “cast of characters” at the end, with names and titles and dates. A fine review.

The book can be quickly summed up by a quote from page 7: “Insurgency, civil war, Iranian strategic triumph, the breakup of Iraq, an independent Kurdistan, military quagmire.”

As the Administration continues to deny that Iraq is in a civil war, the author is compelling in citing the Iraqis themselves saying that they are–and that America lost it when it turned from liberator to occupying power. Two people come out of this book looking colossally ignorant: George Bush, who never heard of the Sunni-Shiite split before the war, and Paul “Jerry” Bremer. The author's basic proposition is that the American Republic has been undone by extraordinary arrogance, ignorance, and political cowardice.

The author is a good writer with a gift for clear phrases. He concludes that the White House and the Pentagon's politically-appointed leaders consistently “ignored inconvenient facts.” He concludes that Iraq may actually be better off in the long run, but the US is clearly not–we have gored ourselves near fatally.

I agree with the critics that suggest the author is in love with Kurdistan and overlooking some of their less rosy realities. The book is a clearly partisan document that admires the Kurds and makes the case for a free Kurdish state within Iraq (three states, one nation, not a division of Iraq as some critics loosely interpret). He is considerate of Turkish concerns and how a Kurdistan inside of Iraq but independent within Iraq, can meet their needs for a secular buffer.

There are some gems in this book that I have not found elsewhere, including a detailed accounting of the atrocities committed by Hussein against the Kurds, the Kurds rebuilding including English-speaking universities and doctors certified by the British Medical Board.

I was shocked to learn that the White House employs a CANADIAN speech-writer (who may well be one of the new Canadian clandestine case officers they are starting to field), and that this CANADIAN inserted the “axis of evil” line (which the author points out is ignorant both geographically and historically).

Overall the author could help inspire the impeachment of the Vice President. His book complements that of Ron Susskind, “The One-Percent Doctrine” and is replete with lines like “logic and facts did not stop the Bush Administration…” (page 80), “wishful thinking substituted for knowledge” (page 88, describing Undersecretary Feith), “contrary views were not just rejected, they were banned” (page 89), and “the ignorant are always surprised” (page 101).

In terms of historical documentation, the author is strongest in his detailing the incompetence of the Bush Administration in failing to plan for the war, and he lays much of the blame on Cheney for falling prey to Ahmad Chalabi's lies. The author says on page 86 that Chalabi's role cannot be overstated.

He trumps that with detail on the idiocy and arrogance of Paul “Jerry” Bremer who decided to run Iraq as his own fiefdom, and in his first two decisions, banned all Baaths from leadership positions, and dismembered the army and all security services. If there is one man to blame for all the American dead and disabled since the war “ended,” it is this well-intentioned but contextually inept person, who acted against the specific advice of the senior Army generals then serving in the field.

From an intelligence perspective, the author is credible when he points out that in the aftermath of the war and before the break-down of all order in Iraq, neither the Pentagon nor the CIA seemed to be aware of, nor interested in, the treasure trove of intelligence materials scattered in various locations throughout Iraq. This tracks with my own intimate knowledge of civilian and military intelligence, both preferring to stay in the Green Zone and not miss their evening cocktails, Robert Bauer and a few others excepted.

On page 118 the author absolutely floors me by pointing out that the Department of State spent an entire year creating a blueprint for securing the peace in Iraq, but the Department of Defense, which insisted on controlling “diplomacy” in Iraq, did not tell Bremer the detailed plan existed until a year after he arrived on the job. On page 117, the author details how the US inter-agency bureaucracy was and is out of control, with rival US factions pursuing policies that are diametrically opposed. He is particularly caustic in slamming the grotesquely incompetent manner in which the Administration threw together the nation-building team, including six young people from the Heritage Foundation who ended up running a $13 billion a year budget.

The author condems Bremer's gratuitous humiliation as having broken Iraq apart and spawned the insurgency. In the author's view, Bremer blew it in that he was a naked Emperor hiding in the Green Zone, and neither the Shiites in the south nor the Kurds in the north ever gave up their militaries or their power over their own terrain.

The book ends by stating that the US needs a strategy based on reality, not wishful thinking or ideological fantasy, and he concludes that three states comprising one nation, is the fastest way out of Iraq. I agree.

This is a solid professional account. I disagree with those critics who consider the author to be self-serving, embellishing, or otherwise deceiving the public. While he emphasizes some things more than others, and would clearly like an independent Kurdistan, on balance I consider this to one of the better first-person stories, right up there with “Squandered Victory.”

2006/06/202009/12/04

Review: Seven Sins of American Foreign Policy (Paperback)

5 Star, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Society, Military & Pentagon Power, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

Instant Classic, for Students and Experts Alike,

June 20, 2006

Loch K Johnson

In 1983, Dr. Loch Johnson, arguably the Dean of the intelligence scholars who is also unique for having the deep insights that could only come from service on BOTH the Church Committee in the 1970's and the Aspin-Brown Commission in the 1990's, published “Seven Sins of Strategic Intelligence in World Affairs (Fall 1983, v. 146, no. 2, p. 176-204). I still remember that article, which informed me as a (then) clandestine case officer, and helped inspire my own critical reformist writings over the years.

This book is a completely new work on a grander scale and the seven sins (listed in the editorial information) are applied to foreign policy in all its forms.

The following quote reflects the rich content of the book:

“A foreign policy initiative is considered questionable (‘sinful') if it is based on a false or sharply limited understanding of the region of the world it pupports to address; if it violates the bedrock constitutional tenet of power-sharing between the legislative and executive branches of government; if it too quickly or unnecessarily resorts to forcein the resolution of global disputes; if it runs counter to the established norms of contemporary international behavior accepted by the world's democracies; if it signals a withdrawal from the international community; if it exhibits a lack of concern for the basic human needs of other nations or projects a haughtiness in world affairs indicative of an imperious attitude toward others.”

The rest of the book, including useful figures showing successs and failures across diplomatic, military, economic, and covert action fronts from 1945 to date, fleshes out the above quote in a very thoughtful manner.

Interestingly, deep in the book, the author points out that ignorance of global reality by the public is directly related to their choices of elected officials. If they are disengaged and uninformed, they will elect individuals who give short shrift to global affairs. I am reminded of the number of Senators and Representatives who used to brag that they did not have a passport “because nothing that happens abroad matters to my constituents.” Those individuals are still in office.

I know the author, who in his courtly manner and gracious ability to discuss all sides without rancor, while still being harshly critical, represents all that is good about informed academics who are also, from time to time, called on to serve the Nation. I put the book down thinking that this author would make a magnificent Secretary of State.

2006/06/012009/12/04

Review: House of War (Hardcover)

5 Star, Military & Pentagon Power

Amazon Page

First Class Personal Reflections, Solid and Thoughtful,

June 1, 2006

James Carroll

The author is the son of General Carroll, the first Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a former FBI special agent who entered the military with the rank of brigadier general with the mandate to create the Office of Special Investigations for the U.S. Air Force. The author is also a former Catholic priest, sympathetic to the Berrigans and those of the Catholic left who opposed the war in Viet-Nam. The book is in consequence not only an extraordinary reference work, but also a labor of love and a labor of conscience. I read it and appreciated it in that vein.

I was surprised to not see in the otherwise excellent bibliography any reference to Lewis Mumford's Pentagon Of Power: The Myth Of The Machine, Vol. II and this confirms my impression that each generation reinvents the wheel, and discovers persistent truths for itself. The author does quote Dwight Eisenhower to good effect–apart from the normal quote warning us of the military-industrial complex, General and President Eisenhower is quoted on page 206 “National Security over the long term requires fiscal restraint,” and on page 387, “People want peace so much, that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it.” I point to General Smedley Butler's book, 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 and to Jonathan Schell's book, which the author acknowledges, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People as excellent complements to this book.

The core concept throughout the book, very ably discussed, is that smart people can be trapped in stupid paranoid bureaucracies. The author takes great care to single out the chain of paranoia from Forrestal to Nitze to Schlesinger to Rumsfeld, Carlucci, and Cheney, with Wolfowift and Perle playing key roles as the apostles of the Cold War and the expansion of Pentagon power and money.

There is substantive morality in this book, as the author reviews the implications of the U.S. unilaterally over-ruling Churchill and Stalin and demanding unconditional surrender of Germany in WWII. The author reviews the manner in which the U.S. took what he calls “terror bombing” and fire bombing of Germany to new immoral heights, causing Churchill himself to ask if we had gone too far. Napalm was developed for that war, and in one compelling vignette the author discusses how in the final days of the war the U.S. sent over 1,000 aircraft to drop napalm on a hapless village because that is how much napalm they had to use up.

The Tokyo fires, killing 900,000 and leaving 20 million homeless are discussed, as is the use of the atomic bomb as a “signal” to Russia. The author is poignant in quoting McNamara as accepting responsibility for two great war crimes–the fire bombings in WWII, and the failed bombings on North Viet-Nam. See my review of the superb DVD documentary with McNamara, The Fog of War – Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara where I itemize the 11 lessons this great man shares with us.

The other two themes that drive this book, apart from self-interested paranoia and the suppression of individual conscience to the “tide” of bureaucratic politics, are the manner in which the Pentagon in general, and the services in particular, have deliberately ignored good intelligence and manipulated the threat in order to increase their budgets, at the same time that the domestic political process has found that corrupting intelligence in order to feed the military-industrial complex leads to more bribes to Congress to pay for more television ads which keep the same individuals in power over the years–as Ronald Reagan pointed out, there is less turnover in the Congress than in the Politburo, and this author makes it clear that the American public cannot trust the Pentagon, the White House, or the Congress to be honest about the threat or prudent with the taxpayer dollar. Right now, today, the National Ground Intelligence Center, the Army's intelligence center, is under investigation for having an officer specifically assigned to manipulate, modify, and exaggerate the “official” database on ground force threats so as to justify bigger more expensive systems that are not actually needed nor affordable. The Air Force and the Navy are guilty of similar lies. Our military leaders are normal honorable human beings, but “the system” sweeps them along in ways that would shock any citizen.

Another major theme in this book, and it is especially timely as we confront Iran, is that the US has consistently failed to understand normal nationalism, and instead chosen to interpret the Soviet Union, Iran, China, Islam, and the African nations as part of a grand conspiracy. Institutionalized paranoia, and bureaucratic politics (see my review of Morton Halperin's Bureaucratic Politics And Foreign Policy in which one “rule” is “lie to the President if you can get away with it”) lead to pathological budget-driven decisions that REDUCE national security as well as the integrity of both the nation's policy process and the nation's budget, over time.

The author quotes General Lemay, who demanded the U-2 program for himself, as saying that he would launch a pre-emptive war without Presidential authority, if he felt America was threatened. As the Pentagon consolidates its total control over all U.S. national intelligence agencies, we can but lament the very high probability that we will see Iraq times ten as the Pentagon “manufactures” or “perceives” threats that would not be validated by a truly independent intelligence authority.

The author is very careful, as am I, to avoid confusing the “malevolent impersonality of forces they cannot control” (page 302) with the essential goodness and honor of the individuals that serve in the Pentagon and the services. He quotes McNamara on page 303 as saying “Wars generate their own momentum and follow the law of unanticipated consequences.”

The author ends on a positive note. He praises Jonathan Schell, and MIT PhD Student Ms. Randall Forsberg, the latter responsible for The Freeze campaign that ultimately influenced President Reagan and the Congress.

This is a very fine book. Good notes, index, bibliography. This book has soul.

2006/05/022009/12/04

Review: Failed States–The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (American Empire Project) (Hardcover)

4 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power

Preventive Wars Don't Work; Democracy Deficit in USA,

May 2, 2006

Noam Chomsky

Within the 900+ non-fiction books about information, intelligence, emerging threats, and national security that I have reviewed for Amazon, I count many of Noam Chomsky's books. As with others, there is some repetition here, and he could have done a better job of reviewing the function and purpose of the state before labeling the U.S. a failed state. I will say, before my concluding comment, that all of my reading bears out Chomsky's inherent correctness.

Among the points that earned a note on my flyleaf:

* US began with the genocide of the Indians, moved on to slavery, and now condones genocide across Africa and elsewhere.

* Quotes CIA Bin Laden analyst with appreciation in noting that all the US has to do to stop the problems in the Middle East is wean itself from dictators and cheap oil, remove its forces from the Muslim lands, and stop predatory capitalism. Hmmmm. There just might be a moral point in there someplace!

* Chomsky asserts that history documents that preventive wars usually bring about the outcomes they ostensibly seek to stop, and does very very well in detailing how the US invasion allowed hundreds of missile and weapons sites to be looted, moving many of the components of weapons of mass destruction into unfriendly insurgent hands–precisely what we allegedly sought to prevent.

* The author recounts the varied facts that have emerged on how the US specifically sought regime change, the British (at least those with integrity like the Foreign Minister who quit) refused to go along with that, so Blair and Bush together concocted pretexts.

* Chomsky confirms in this book what I have seen myself, which is that the only part of the US Government that is “at war” is the U.S. Army and select portions of the U.S. Air Force. The rest of the government is NOT at war, and simply pursuing business as usual. Our war on terrorism is ineffective in the sense of capturing specific terrorists, and counter-productive in the sense of producing tens of thousands more–as Chomsky recounts in the book citing RAND and other studies, 85% of the “foreign fighters” in Iraq were mobilized and radicalized by the US invasion of Iraq.

* Chomsky is provocatively on target when he anticipates the emergence of a Shiite regional power based on Iran that includes the Shiite controlled regions of Iraq and Saudi Arabia–and in the latter, that happens to include the most productive oil fields–in short, the extremist Republicans' worst nightmare.

* Chomsky harps, no doubt with reason, on the long record that the US has in sponsoring crimes against humanity including regime changes that are against democracy (Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Haiti, the list goes on) and in favor of dictators who will protect US private investment as the expense of the public interest in their own countries.

* Chomsky focuses a portion of the book on the crimes by Israel against the Palestinians, although he does not appear to balance this by noting how ill-treated the Palestinians have been by all the Arab nations. He emphatically and deliberately identifies Bush with Hitler in that the two share a strain of “demonic messiaism” and rely on “the big lie” that (if repeated often enough) will fool the people. Goebbels would be proud of his kin in the White House, Karl Rove.

* Chomsky concludes the book by discussing the “democratic deficit” in the USA, and while he is very much on point, he wanders somewhat. For a better appreciation of why we allowed the extreme right to take over and ruin the country, I recommend Jacob Hacker's OFF CENTER: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy as well as other books on my democracy list. As a moderate Republican, I can certify that the Republican party today is run by thieves, lunatics, extremists, and — in the case of John McCain — born again Bushophiles.

This book is, like, most of his books, a very long Op-Ed but with good footnotes. We need to move toward more analysis and toward finding solutions. Inspired by Chomsky and others, I am in the process of developing a monograph that takes the top ten threats to global and national security identified by the High-Level threat panel of the United Nations (with LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft as the US representative), and showing that 80% of the information we need to understand and address those threats is open source information (OSIF), not secret information, on which we spend $60 billion a year. At the same time, we are spending $500 billion a year on a heavy-metal military and missile defense, when in fact inter-state conflict is only one of the ten threats, or 10%. We are not, as a nation, trained, equipped, nor organized to do poverty, infectious disease, environmental collapse, civil war, terrorism, or translational crime. America is in effect, two Americas: a nation of sheep living for their next six pack, and a very small exclusive group of perhaps 10,000 really rich people dominating Wall Street, the energy companies, and a handful of other major corporate networks. They are busy looting the Republic on the false assumption that they will be able to retire to gated enclaves. They simply do not understand that within twenty years there will be no place for them or their heirs to hide, and this will all come back to haunt them.

I would also say that I am more optimistic than Chomsky. Collective Intelligence and a Citizens Party (as a second home party, non-rival) are emergent, and technologies are coming out that will help eliminate poverty and infectious disease while stabilizing the environment and population. What we lack right now is moral strategic leadership. It is my hope that Bush-Cheney have radicalized enough of the world so that we might thank them in 2008 for making possible the return of balanced centrist coalition leadership.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
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