Military & Pentagon Power – Page 24 – Public Intelligence Blog

Earnest Officer Covers Bush, Rose-Colored Glasses, Useful,

August 29, 2004

General Tommy Franks

Edit 20 Dec 07 to add links.

Tellingly, the book opens with Sun Tzu on the importance of the art of war to the state, and fails to reflect, at any point in the book, the more vital Sun Tzu observation that “the acme of skill is to defeat the enemy without fighting.”

The author is justifiably proud of being able to take down Iraq with half the troops and half the armor and artillery needed in Gulf I. If you read this book in conjunction with Stephen Flynn's book on “America the Vulnerable,” where he cries out for 16,000 more Customs inspectors, you can see US national security is “inside out & upside down”–in the 21st Century we need half the uniformed military troops and half the military “hard power” acquisition, but we have failed to understand that we need ten times the manpower and ten times the acquisition within homeland security–we are still lying to America about this contradiction, one reason why I chose to tie these two books together with complementary reviews–Flynn is nothing short of brilliant as a counterpart to Franks.

Among the little gems in this book:

Franks got purple hearts in Viet-Nam only for the wounds that sent him to the hospital–minor wounds not requiring evacuation were ignored. What a contrast with Kerry! Page 114.

In the 1970's, when the information revolution was just started, artillery units did not have their own communications. Franks rightly earned a reputation as an innovator by buying CB radios such that his artillery pieces moved as if they could read the mind of the operators they were supporting. Today, not only has the information revolution largely passed by the intelligence community, but the “rest of government” including state and local law enforcement, and private sector partners vital to national security, are in precisely the same position, in the year 2004, as was military artillery 30 years ago. Page 125.

When General Franks was selected in the early 1990's to lead the creation of the 21st Century force, I find it absolutely riveting and fundamental that intelligence was not one of the domains or building blocks of the Army (one reason why the Stryker fraud was so easily perpetuated on Congress and the public). Page 173.

As of 2002-2003, Service “parochialism”, Service chiefs and staffs out only for themselves and their service, and completely unwilling to work jointly or even worse, procure systems and capabilities that worked jointly, remained the single largest cancer within DoD. Page 207, page 288, and passim.

Bin Laden's attack on the Cole “had the force of a cruise missile.” Page 220. See my review of Paul Williams, “Osama's Revenge”, where the bottom line is that individuals now have the power to deliver both nuclear and cruise missile effects inside of America, but our national security investments and priorities remain “upside down” and fail to protect us from an “inside out” perspective.

Both defense department and U.S. intelligence community counterintelligence and intelligence relevant to force protection failed miserably in the closing years of the 20th century. We were blind in part because we relied on Yemen to tell us about threats, rather than being able to penetrate groups in Yemen directly–hence the “surprise” of the USS Cole attack being so successful and so unconventional. Page 224.

Throughout the book there are references to capabilities that avoid discussing time lag issues–cruise missiles that take 2-6 hours to get to the target, B-2 bombers that take 40 hours to get to the target, all easily detectible. In my view, General Franks paints an overly positive picture of our “hard” capabilities, in part because he glosses over or ignores time-space-detection-avoidance issues that are vital. Pages 245, 259, and passim. This also applies to the movement of Special Operations Forces into denied areas. Page 296.

Rumsfeld evidently believed that invading Afghanistan would “finish” Bin Laden. How wrong was he? Page 285.

Franks and the U.S. leadership evidently believe that Special Operations Forces are “hidden” at K-2 Air Base in Uzbekistan. I personally think they will be rolled over and massacred at some point in the near term (2-4 years). Page 286.

Franks is brilliant in his creation of a Lines of Operations versus Target Slices conceptualization, this is the single best page in the book, a real keeper. Page 339, illustrated 340.

Franks fell for the myth that money will buy loyalty and action among the tribes of both Afghanistan and Iraq, a completely erroneous view. Page 332. He also fails to mention that Rumsfeld allowed 3,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda to be evacuated from the Tora Bora trap by Pakistan, with Rumsfeld's active permission (out of naiveté). Page 377.

Troubling to me is Franks' blindness to the cost, both in dollars and in opportunity cost (time, space, pol-econ, etc.) of using very expensive and very ineffective hardware to achieve marginal results. His approach to warfare is almost mechanical in nature, eager to send waves of aircraft against Stone Age tribal positions, without regard to cost and effect. Pages 379-381.

Regional commanders-in-chief need to manage U.S. Intelligence Collection requirements, priorities, and capabilities. This one hit me with “wow” force. I actually agree, provided that the regional CINCs become inter-agency in nature. We are at war forever, and placing clandestine and technical collection as well as open source intelligence collection assets under CINC operational control makes sense to me, especially if DoD finally steps up to the plate and creates an intelligence component commander [this does NOT undermine the need to move NRO, NSA, and NGA out of DoD and into the DCI's management authority.] Page 234. Later on he alludes to the need for CINC budgets, and I agree–we need to change Title 10, and strike a better balance between acquisition and budget authority for type and regional commanders. Page 397.

My summary: Intelligence failed, heavy metal military did what it was asked to do under solid operational leadership, we are still losing strategically and in the long-term.

Better books:
The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's Power and Purpose
Battle Ready
The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)

2004/07/142009/12/04

Review: The Pentagon’s New Map–War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

4 Star, Insurgency & Revolution, Military & Pentagon Power, Priorities, Security (Including Immigration)

Young Man, Big Ideas Finally Refined in 2007,

July 14, 2004

Thomas P.M. Barnett

EDITED 8 July 2007 to add rave review of the author's newest incarnation, his presentation given to TED (URL in the comment). He has finally distilled and refined his ideas into a world-class presentation that is a fantastic stage-setter for more substantive and detailed presenations (see second URL in comment). His current (2007) brain is beyond five stars. I am so very pleased to see this brilliant development.

Old Review (Still Valid on the Book Itself)

This is another of those books that started as an article and should have stayed there. The author, who appears to be either unfamiliar with or unwilling to credit works from earlier decades as well as more recently that present ideas similar to and often superior to his, has essentially three good ideas that can be summed up as follows:

Idea #1: World can be divided into a Functioning Core and a Non-Integrating Gap. The disconnected gap is bad for business (risky) and the US military can protect its budget by getting into the business of exporting security so that Wall Street can do more business safely.

Idea #2: Connectivity or disconnectedness are the essential means of defining and influencing which countries are able to move into the Functioning Core and which remain in the Non-Integrating Gap [too state-centric for my taste, but a good point–my 1990's call for Digital Marshal Plan remains valid.]

Idea #3: Economic relationships have replaced military power as the essential attribute of relations among nations–for example, we cannot deal with China as a military power without first having a comprehensive economic strategy and economic tools with which to influence them.

There are many points where I agree with the author, and I give him credit for thinking of all of this on his own, without much attention to decade's worth of scholarship and informed professional opinion in the military journals. He is absolutely correct to note that we cannot fence the Gap, we must stabilize it. Of course, Joe Nye and Max Manwaring and Mark Palmer and Bob Oakley and Jonathan Schell, to name just 5 of the 470+ national security authors have made important points along these lines, but their work is not integrated here. This is one massive Op-Ed that should have remained an article.

The author has irritated me with his low-key but obvious assumption that he is the first to break out of the box and “get it.” On page 63 he goes on at length with the view that America has lacked visionaries, and the implication that he is the first to come forward. Not true. From John Boyd to Chuck Spinney to Bill Lind to GI Wilson to Mike Wylie we have had many visionaries, but the military-industrial complex has always seen them as threats. We tend to dismiss and shoot our visionaries, and I am truly glad that the author's personal relations with Cebrowski and a few others–as well as his fortunate association with a couple of naval think-forward endeavors–has given him some running room.

There is actually little of substance in this book. The article has been expanded, not with substance, but rather with very long descriptions of this young man's engagement in the process of the Pentagon and the process of strategic reflection. His discussions of the many forums that he found boring if not hostile to free thinking are excellent, and that aspect of the book takes it to four stars where it might normally have only received three.

Two weaknesses of the book, perhaps associated with the author's urgent need to “stay inside the wire” in order to keep his job:

1) All his brilliance leads to just two forces being recommended: the “big stick” force and the “baton-stick” (constabulary) force. In fact, were he more familiar with the literature, he would have understood that from diverse points we are all converging on four forces after next: Big War, Small War including White Hat/Police Ops, Peace War, and Cyber-Economic War. Inter-agency strategy, inter-agency budgeting, and inter-agency operations, with a joint inter-agency C4I corps under military direction, are the urgently needed next step.

2) The author is delusional when describing and praising our operational excellence in defeating well-armed enemies. Were he more familiar with the after action reports from Iraq, particularly those done by the Army War College (clearly on a different planet from the Navel War College), he would understand that Iraqi incompetence was the foremost factor in our success, especially when Rumsfeld insisted on throwing out the sequence of force plans and sending us in light and out of balance. He also ignores the vulnerability of complex systems and relies much too heavily on University of Maryland and CIA unclassified publications that are completely out of step with European conflict studies and other arduously collected ground truths about the extent of state and sub-state war and violence.

I disagree with his concluding recommendations that place Africa last on the list of those areas to be saved. His overall recommendations are simplistic, focusing on the standard litany for Pentagon go-alongs: Iraq, Korea, Iran, Colombia, Middle East, China, Asian NATO, Latin American NATO, Africa.

I note with interest his use of the term, “the military-market link.” I believe this refers to an assumption, matured by the author in the course of his Wall Street wargames, and certainly acceptable to the neo-conservatives, to wit, that the U.S. military exists to export security so America can do business. I would draw the reader's attention to Marine Corps General Butler's book, “War as a Racket”, and his strong objection to having spent his career as an “enforcer” for US corporations.

I do want to end with a note of deep sympathy for the author. On the one hand, he overcame a period of time when his sanity was questioned by ignorant Admirals and other “lesser included” Captains of limited intellect. On other he is trapped in a system that does not like iconoclasts but rewards those who innovate on the margins. His book is most useful in describing this environment, where people who rely on secrets are completely out of touch with reality, and service chiefs focus on protecting their budgets rather than accomplishing (or even defining) their mission. He appears to have discovered the Catholic mafia within the naval services, and his several references throughout the book lend weight to my belief that we need to do religious counter-intelligence within the government.

2004/06/212009/12/04

Review DVD: The Fog of War – Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

6 Star Top 10%, Biography & Memoirs, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Insurgency & Revolution, Military & Pentagon Power, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Reviews (DVD Only), War & Face of Battle

Every Miltary Person, and Ideally Every Citizen, SHould View,

June 21, 2004

Robert McNamara

This is the only documentary film to make it on to my list of 470+ non-fiction books relevant to national security & global issues. It is superb, and below I summarize the 11 lessons with the intent of documenting how every military person, and ideally every citizen, should view this film.As the U.S. military goes through the motions of “transformation” while beset by the intense demands of being engaged in a 100-year war on six-fronts around the world, all of them against asymmetric threats that we do not understand and are not trained, equipped, nor organized to deal with, this film is startlingly relevant and cautionary.

LESSON 1: EMPHATHIZE WITH YOUR ENEMY. We must see ourselves as they see us, we must see their circumstances as they see them, before we can be effective.

LESSON 2: RATIONALITY WILL NOT SAVE US. Human fallibility combined with weapons of mass destruction will destroy nations. Castro has 162 nuclear warheads already on the island, and was willing to accept annihilation of Cuba as the cost of upholding his independence and honor.

LESSON 3: THERE'S SOMETHING BEYOND ONESELF. History, philosophy, values, responsibility–think beyond your niche.

LESSON 4: MAXIMIZE EFFICIENCY. Although this was McNamara's hallmark, and the fog of war demands redundancy, he has a point: we are not maximizing how we spend $500B a year toward world peace, and are instead spending it toward the enrichment of select corporations, building things that don't work in the real world.

LESSON 5: PROPORTIONALITY SHOULD BE A GUIDELINE IN WAR. McNamara is clearly still grieving over the fact that we firebombed 67 Japanese cities before we ever considered using the atomic bomb, destroying 50% to 90% of those cities.

LESSON 6: GET THE DATA. It is truly appalling to realize that the U.S. Government is operating on 2% of the relevant information, in part because it relies heavily on foreign allies for what they want to tell us, in part because the U.S. Government has turned its back on open sources of information. Marc Sageman, in “Understanding Networks of Terror”, knows more about terrorism today than do the CIA or FBI, because he went after the open source data and found the patterns. There is a quote from a Senator in the 1960's that is also compelling, talking about “an instability of ideas” that are not understood, leading to erroneous decisions in Washington. For want of action, we forsook thought.

LESSON 7: BELIEF & SEEING ARE BOTH OFTEN WRONG. With specific reference to the Gulf of Tonkin, as well as the failure of America to understand that the Vietnamese were fighting for independence from China, not just the French or the corrupt Catholic regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, McNamara blows a big whole in the way the neo-cons “believed” themselves into the Iraq war, and took America's blood, treasure, and spirit with them.

LESSON 8: BE PREPARED TO RE-EXAMINE YOUR REASONING. McNamara is blunt here: if your allies are not willing to go along with you, consider the possibility that your reasoning is flawed.

LESSON 9: IN ORDER TO DO GOOD, YOU MAY HAVE TO ENGAGE IN EVIL. Having said that, he recommends that we try to maximize ethics and minimize evil. He is specifically concerned with what constitutes a war crime under changing circumstances.

LESSON 10: NEVER SAY NEVER. Reality and the future are not predictable. There are no absolutes. We should spend more time thinking back over what might have been, be more flexible about taking alternative courses of action in the future.

LESSON 11: YOU CAN'T CHANGE HUMAN NATURE. There will always be war, and disaster. We can try to understand it, and deal with it, while seeking to calm our own human nature that wants to strike back in ways that are counter-productive.

For those who dismiss this movie because McNamara does not apologize, I say “pay attention.” The entire movie is an apology, both direct from McNamara, and indirect in the manner that the producer and director have peeled away his outer defenses and shown his remorse at key points in the film. I strongly recommend the book by McNamara and James Blight, “WILSON's GHOST.” In my humble opinion, in the context of the 470+ non-fiction books I have reviewed here, McNamara and Bill Colby are the two Viet-Nam era officials that have grown the most since leaving office. He has acquired wisdom since leaving defense, and we ignore this wisdom at our peril.

2004/05/152009/12/04

Review: Endgame–The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror

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

THE Most Ignorant Book of 1080+ Books I Have Reviewed,

May 15, 2004

Thomas McInerney

Edited 20 Dec 07 to promote from third most ignortant to THE most ignorant, and also the most dangerous. Lunatics in power believe this.

Better books (and two DVDs), with reviews:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Why We Fight
The Fog of War – Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

Edited 23 August 2007 after a visit to the Middle East, and additional reflection on how Nations turn stupid. FOX News is, as we speak, leading a massive campaign to deceive Americans into thinking that we must attack Iran. Iran is Persian. They are running circles around us as our Army hollows out and our four carriers steam within range of Iranian Sunburn missiles. Adding two images and several hot links to books that make it quite clear that this book is by, of, and for idiots.

Edited after over a year to reflect the deep impression that “Civilization and Its Enemies” by Lee Harris has made on me. Amazon does not allow edited reviews to increase the star level, so I will say that after Harris, I would raise this book to two stars with the following obervation: having the right instincts–wanting to go after Iran in particular, and Syria–does not justify lying to the public or failing to do your homework.

Of the 3,000 or so volumes in my current library, I have only reviewed 950. I do not write negative reviews as a rule. This is my third exception to the latter rule. The most ignorant book was one on predicting revolution, the second most ignorant book was one on sources of conflict, and this is the third.

The authors, who demonstrate how far one could get in the Cold War military without reading or thinking, call this a military assessment. It is not. It is a one-track discourse on why we need to use our heavy metal military to wipe out Syria and Iran and intimidate Libya and Pakistan. It avoids discussing Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Central Asia, Muslim Africa, and Muslim Pacifica. This is not analysis, this is flim-flam.

By way of context in my specific criticism of this book, let me just note that the bibliography does not reflect any appreciation for strategy, e.g. Colin Gray's “Modern Strategy”, or Col Dr. Max Manwaring and Ambassadors Corr and Dorff's “The Search for Security”, or Willard Matthias “America's Strategic Blunders” or Adda Bozeman's “Strategic Intelligence & Statecraft” or Jonathan Schell's “Unconquerable World.” I looked in vain for any sign the authors might comprehend the strategic context in which their specific beliefs and recommendations can only be seen as ill-advised. For example, a reference to Shultz, Godson, and Quester (at least one of whom is a neo-conservative), “Security Studies for the 21st Century”, or Robert McNamara and James Blight “Wilson's Ghost”, or Dean Jeffrey Garten's “The Politics of Fortune”, or Republican and conservative Clyde Prestowitz's “Rogue Nation”, or Ambassador Mark Palmer's “Breaking the Real Axis of Evil”. No cognizance of Kissinger, even.

Never mind all those *democratic* thought leaders, like Senator David Boren et al (and including Bob Gates), “Preparing America's Foreign Policy for the 21st Century”, or Joesph Nye on “The Paradox of American Power” or William Shawcross (a Brit) on “Deliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict”, or Paul Krugman's “The Great Unraveling.”

I did not expect to find, but mention as a final setting of the stage for a very critical review, just a sampling of books relevant to getting the war on terror right: books like Chalmer's Johnson, “The Sorrors of Empire” or Derek Leebaert's “The Fifty Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory” or Ziauddin Sardar and Merry Wyn Davies on “Why Do People Hate America” (which could be sub-titled, most relevantly for the authors under review, “and why doesn't America understand the real world”), or any of the last 100 non-fiction books on national security that I have reviewed here, generally to very favorable judgements by Amazon visitors.

Finally, I contrast this book with Richard Clarke's book “Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror” which I recommend very highly. Clarke is real, these people are not.

I finally figured it out. This is a puff piece of, by, and for FOX Cable News viewers.

There are no footnotes in this book. It is a rambling opinion piece. Let us not confuse rank with brains, or opinions with thought. This is a double-spaced book that could probably be distilled to 30 pages of core reading, all summed up as “we're always right, no matter the cost.” This book also adopts the Richard Perle neoconservative game plan of using terrorism as a pretext to invade Syria and Iran. I assure each and every one of you, a universal draft is planned for after the election. Your sons and daughters will be sacrificed to the lack of strategic thinking that this book represents.

The book ends on two false notes. Although the authors demonstrate a semblance of balance in calling for better public diplomacy and especially the restoration of the US Information Agency, they continue to emphasize money for guns and the early use of the military in expeditionary mode, rather that a truly transformative strategy that begins with understanding the full range of threats facing us (bacteria are more dangerous than terrorists), devising a strategy for dealing with those threats by using *all* of the instruments of national power, and then a balanced budget that achieves all of that without sacrificing the earning potential of future generations.

Finally, we have thirteen pages of photographs where the authors proudly display their field trip photos, and what leaps out to the veteran's eye is that they were always in air-conditioned rooms and cars and never broke a sweat. As my good friend Robert Young Pelton likes to say (he is author of “The World's Most Dangerous Places”–you should all read it), these guys live and think in a bubble–they don't get into the gutter, they don't smell the shit, and they have no idea how close their fantasy world is to destruction from forces that are beyond their comprehension.

Iraq, and the planned war on Syria and Iran, are indeed a recurrence of Vietnam in the sense that ignorance and arrogance among the elite in power, and apathy among the public and within Congress, are creating a most costly global quagmire that will shortly explode in Australia, Thailand, Central Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The authors have learned nothing from history nor from the many non-partisan American strategists and scholars available to advise them.

I don't think this book is worth the purchase price, except as an example of the kinds of books, and kinds of people, that place loyalty to ideology above and apart from the public interest.

The authors have one thing right: this is a battle of wills. They do not appear to realize that there are not enough guns on the planet to execute their strategy, and that legitimacy is an intangible value that was lost to America from 2001 to date. This book is a blueprint for a nuclear winter in which America self-immolates. An Israeli tactical nuclear attack on Iran will kick off the end of the American Empire, and that may well be the best thing that could happen, to awaken the somolent Republic. We must indict and impeach Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Rudy Gulliani, and we must indict and sentence to death Larry Silverstein for his role in the controlled demotion of the World Trade Center including WTC 7 which was not hit by anything, it was also brought down to destroy evidence and complete the highly profitable elimination of asbestor at the cost of thousands of NYC lives. I am quite certain the insurance companies were part of the scam, because I have read and viewed more than enough evidence to be certain all the buildings were brought down by Larry Silverstean and his despicable little band of murderers.

2004/04/292009/12/04

Review: The Choice–Global Domination or Global Leadership

4 Star, Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Strategy

End of An Era–And About Time….,

April 29, 2004

Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski is considered by the Chinese to be one of America's top strategists (along with Steve Metz from the Army War College), and that is entirely his due. He is brilliant when it comes to state-centric strategy, but falls short with respect to emerging threats, sub-state threats, intelligence reform, and the roles of non-governmental organizations including religions, and civil networks instead of government-driven “command and control.”While it used to be fashionable, when confronted with a choice between, say, market economies and controlled economies, to cleverly say “some of each” and earn the top grade, today things have changed and the answer is more often than not, “none of the above.” This estimable author, whose wisdom must certainly be taken into account at all times, does not actually present a choice, only an opinion as to how a state-centric system–largely irrelevant in the 21st Century–might best be managed.

Especially troubling to me was the almost complete lack of attention to substantive books published in the last ten years, including those, most recently, of George Soros (abusive capitalism), William Greider (immoral capitalism), Herman Daly (ecological economics), Jonathan Schell (unconquerable world), Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs), Thomas Stewart (the wealth of knowledge as an alternative to violence), and so on. The author is not alone in this oversight–Joseph Nye, whose book on Soft Power I am also reviewing today, bases his work on Op-Eds, many of them not written by the people signing them, and has almost no substantive references either. The think tank culture has lost touch with true scholarship.

The author's claim that Washington, D.C. is the center of the earth (pages 131-132) reflect in my view the last gasp of the Reagan-Smart Bush-Clinton era. While the author alludes to New York as the “other center”, I and my colleagues think instead of a loose network on “nodes”, some financial (Tokyo, London, Kuala Lumpur), some religious (Jerusalem, Rome, Salt Lake City, points in India), and so on. The author's emphasis on the Trilateral Commission and the now-dying World Economic Forum (Davos) as the bastions of a global elite that is in agreement struck me as being astonishing insular and inaccurate. The author says that “This elite is fostering the emergence of a global community of shared interest in stability, prosperity, and perhaps eventually democracy.” I do not think so. All the other books I have reviewed for Amazon suggest that this elite is doing all it can to plunder the world by enriching micro-elites through corruption, while disenfranchising the broader publics (e.g. Canadian companies displacing villages in Peru to loot the gold, French companies buying up the water in Brazil to increase charges to the public for the water they used to own, etc.).

The author is to be commended for at least recognizing that America is losing its moral standing in the world, and this is an intangible value that cannot be easily purchased nor replaced.

In passing, footnote 4 on page 38 is inadvertently incorrect. There are 175 violent internal political conflicts, not 38. There are also 32 countries engaged in complex emergencies, 66 with millions of displaced refugees, 59 with plagues and epidemics, 33 with massive starvation, and 18 genocides now on-going.

The book ends somewhat quietly, suggesting a transatlantic convention and what one other reviewer very appropriately called “baby steps.” My bottom line: Brzezinski is a solid citizen with a big mind and an old framework. He *must* be consulted for his wisdom as we move forward, but it falls to others now to define the bold new steps–faith-based diplomacy, ecological economics, public intelligence, global accountability of leaders–that are essential is we are save the world for our children.

2004/02/142009/12/04

Review: The Mission–Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military

5 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Military & Pentagon Power, War & Face of Battle

Ground Truth Reading About Failure of US Policy Process,

February 14, 2004

Dana Priest

I did not buy this book at first, having read and thoroughly enjoyed the many long articles the author contributed through The Washington Post, all of which comprise the middle two thirds of the book. However, at the recommendation of a retired Army Special Forces Colonel, I finally did buy it, and I am glad I did.Unlike the articles, which focused on the questionable use of Special Forces to train forces within repressive regimes around the world, from Colombia to Indonesia to Central Asia, the book more properly focuses on the complete lack of a US inter-agency planning process, the complete lack of a US means of coordinating actions and spending by all US agencies, and consequently, the complete lack of a US national security and global engagement strategy that is so vital to protecting America from attack and protecting American interests in a coherent and sensible fashion.

While many critics read the book as if it were a glorification of the theater Commanders-in-Chief (CINC), and complain about the militarization of US foreign policy, a proper reading of this book clearly documents that the militarization occurs by default, as a consequence of the abject failure of the White House and the Department of State, neither of which, under either Clinton or Bush, are serious about global engagement.

The military *works* (when it's not being frittered away by elective wars and occupations). What I see in this superb book is a solid foundation for thinking about three essential reforms to American national security: 1) the creation of a Presidential level inter-agency strategic planning and operational coordination process–no, the National Security Council is *not* capable of doing that; 2) the redirection of theater commands and staffs to become truly inter-agency, with men of the caliber of Bob Oakley and Mark Palmer serving as Peace CINCs with military four-star deputies; and 3) the doubling of the Special Operations Forces through the creation of a “white hat” “armed peace corps” that can deliver sewing machines, water purification, and the myriad of other things, including law enforcement under combat conditions.

The book also does for Marine Corps General Tony Zinni what Ron Suskind's book “The Price of Loyalty” does for Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neil–it gives us some deep insights into Tony Zinni as one of the most extraordinary men to ever serve the American people, and a man who is clearly well-qualified to be one of the top five to ten people in any future Administration. Although I am a former Marine and know Zinni's reputation among Marines as both a warrior's warrior and a thinking general (there are very few of those, even in the Marine Corps), I had not realized the depth and breadth of his brilliance until I read this book. In particular I was moved by his intuitive demand for tribal-level intelligence, his focus on nuances and context at all times, and his insistence that a major aspect of US national security policy must be on the delivery of water, electricity, and the kinds of basics that can rescue failed states, legitimize governments, and create future democracies.

I recommend that this book be read together with Kissinger's book on “Does America Need a Foreign Policy”, Boren's edited book on “Preparing American Foreign Policy for the 21st Century”, and Halperin's 1980's but still relevant book on “Bureaucratic Politics & Foreign Policy.” Bob Oakley's edited work on “Policing the New World Disorder” and Mark Palmer's recent book on “Breaking the Real Axis of Evil” (44 dictators), and Joe Nye's two most recent books, will round out any intelligent person's feel for what needs to be done. This is a very high quality book, fully meriting five stars, because it explains both the harsh world we must engage, and the failure of our national policy process–regardless of who is President–in this regard.

2004/02/132009/12/04

Review: Secrets and Lies–Operation “Iraqi Freedom” and After: A Prelude to the Fall of U.S. Power in the Middle East?

Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

Most Scholarly Documentation of Bush-Blair Deceit,

February 13, 2004

Dilip Hiro

In some ways, this book is a great deal more distressing than the various pundit books slamming Bush (Moore, Hightower, Frankel, Krugman, Carville, etc.) because there is not a single caustic turn of phrase, not a single line of satire, not a single double entendre in the entire work. This is a brutally straight-forward, earnestly researched, ably footnoted, totally credible review of all of the secrets and lies that led to the war in Iraq.It did not quite bring me to tears, it did very nearly make me want to throw a chair through the garden window.

According to this book, and its incontrovertible documentation, we were lied to. We were deceived. Untold fighting men and women, not just from the US but also from other countries, have died and been wounded and according to this book the number of wounded is CLASSIFIED. It is a secret, an official secret from the American public, how many of their sons and daughters have died to support this ideological conquest, this extremist religious crusade. We must also acknowledge the thousands of dead Iraqis and the hundreds of thousands of displaced and impoverished Iraqis.

Another official secret from the American public are the results of the open survey by the Department of State of how the Iraqis feels about the US invasion and occupation–classified AFTER we discovered that Chalabi had lied to Cheney and there were no hearts and flowers, only hostility.

Yet another official secret from the American public is the estimate of the damage done by US forces to the Iraqi infrastructure, and how much it will cost the US taxpayer to pay for this mindless destruction in the heart of the Middle East.

Not discussed by the author, but very much on my mind, is the jungle drum word from the retired veterans with access to Bethesda and other military hospitals—on the basis of the 250,000 disabled veterans from Gulf 1, and the “word” filtering out from the wards, we are looking at upwards of 25,000, perhaps as many as 100,000 disabled veterans from this war–all from depleted uranium, a killer of our own making. Worse, this disability is multi-generational and will lead to blind and maimed children among those veterans who are able to have children.

This book is a cold-hearted look–so cold-hearted it ignites a flame of righteous anger in any careful reader–at how America has destroyed its credibility and its ability to have a positive influence in the Middle East.

If I have one small criticism, it is that the author, a stellar authority with solid sources to call upon, did not do an appendix that laid out an entire timeline of what Bush and Blair said that was false, and then the counter-vailing truth. Although the author makes a number of these points clear throughout the book, for example, the UN never passed a resolution calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power, an opportunity has been lost here.

Truth matters. Paul O'Neil is correct to speculate that we will heal ourselves, and equally correct to point out that this will happen only if we speak and hear the truth about these grievous circumstances in which great evil was done “in our name.” This book, more so than the others that I cited above, is perhaps the first serious building block toward righting our ship of state.

Category: Military & Pentagon Power

Review: American Soldier