Reviews (Books & DVD) – Page 281 – Public Intelligence Blog

2006/04/272009/12/04

Review: Who the Hell Are We Fighting?–The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars (Hardcover)

6 Star Top 10%, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power

Moving, Brilliant, Superb Nuance, Ethics of Intelligence,

April 27, 2006

C. Michael Hiam

Edit of 15 Jun 09 to add the following additional links:
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
On the Psychology of Military Incompetence
Pathology Of Power

There are other books on this issue of “cooking the books” and the strategic consequences of falsifying or prostituting intelligence, but this book by a first-time author, C. Michael Hiam, jumps to the head of the line. This is one of the most exciting and absorbing books on intelligence it has ever been my privilege to read. It is not a substitute for Sam Adams' own book, War of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir nor for George Allen's None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam or Bruce Jones' War Without Windows or Jim Wirtz The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War (Stemme) or even Orin de Forest's book Slow Burn: The Rise and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam.

I am especially moved by this book because it treats Sam Adams, who was reviled as often as he was a hero, in a gentle fashion, and makes it clear that the bottom line was that Adams was right and Adams had integrity. The book is superb at explaining why General Westmoreland had to back down when he threatened CBS with libel because too many witnesses were prepared to say that it was Westmoreland who ordered that the number of “enemy combatants” never go above 300,000. The military officers who loyally but stupidly followed that order, and the CIA bureaucrats who unethically “folded” on this important issue of “who are we fighting and how many” are tarred and feathered by this book, and right so, as it applies to the run up to war in Iraq and the planned bombing of Iran.

There are other CIA heroes in this book, notably Ed Hauch who got it right on the first day–he and others who actually knew Ho Chi Minh knew him to be a nationalist and knew we could not win, but it would take us 10 years to figure that out. Same same Iraq only we did not have any CIA people with both the knowledge and the integrity to speak out, just George “slam dunk” Tenet, the world's greatest intelligence prostitute.

As we consider tactical nuclear weapons for Iran, it is instructive to read in this book that the military planned for nuclear missile batteries to be inserted into Da Nang and Nha Trang.

As we reflect on how the Army Chief of Staff was ignored when he spoke of the need for major land forces to stabilize Iraq, only to be ignored, it is instructive to read in this book that Walt Rostow and others knew full well the standard rule of thumb for insurgencies, the need for a 27:1 ratio.

McNamara was deceived by Westmoreland–fast forward to Iraq and we have on the one hand a prostitution of intelligence, and on the other a series of truthful wise Army generals whose advice was ignored by civilians.

The author has done a really first rate job of capturing the nuances of the CIA and the military. His discussion of the hours spent on chit-chat unrelated to work reminds me of the AIM system today, where CIA has discussion groups on everything from teen-age drivers to menopause–in my experience, most CIA headquarters people are actually working only half the time.

The author will be long admired for this book, and on page 122 he delivers the coup de grace in citing Sherman Kent, speaking to Sam Adams, and asking “Have we gone beyond the bounds of reasonable dishonesty?” What an incredibly good job the author has done with this book.

I have been energized by this book, which validates my long-standing fight to induce intelligence reform. I was called a lunatic in 1992 when General Al Gray and I gave up on four years of internal appeals and publicly brought up the need for emphasis on open source intelligence. 18 years later we finally have a few well-meaning but impotent individuals without a program, without money, without staff, and without a clue. We will march on, and the intelligence reform will be imposed now rather than induced. I anticipate legislation on an independent Open Source Agency soon–unlike secret intelligence, public intelligence cannot be manipulated nor ignored.

The book gave me new insights on Sam Adams and on the entire order of battle methodology. Those trying to understand the Global War on Terror and the issues of foreign fighters versus home guard insurgents would do well to read this superb volume.

The author points out that Tet was a huge military failure, one that could have been exploited by the US military had they not been so deficient in intelligence about small units and the guerrillas (immortal paraphrase: “here we are in a guerrilla war and no one is counting the guerrillas”). The author educated me on the work that Sam Adams did on the Khemer Rouge in Cambodia, and saddened me when he discussed how Sam Adams' next project was going to be Chinese strategy–now wouldn't that have been something?

For the Information Operations folks, the book briefly but ably covers the Viet Cong “Military Prothlesizing” corps that was responsible for POW conversions into agents, for running psychological operations against the Saigon regime, and for penetrating the South Vietnamese Army and government, with a success rate of 30,000 or 5%. When combined with what Jim Bamford tells us on Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency about North Vietnamese Signals Intelligence, we can only marvel as the manner in which they beat our ass in the intelligence war, in part because of our lack of ethics in both the military and at the highest levels of the CIA.

Viet-Nam unraveled the Johnson presidency; I fully expect Iraq and Iran to unravel the Bush presidency. This book could not have emerged at a better time, and I recommend it very strongly to all intelligence, military, and policy professionals.

2006/04/142010/12/20

Review: The Battle for Peace–A Frontline Vision of America’s Power and Purpose (Hardcover)

5 Star, Diplomacy, Strategy

THE Common Sense “Primer” for Everyone Including Bozo,

April 14, 2006

Tony Zinni

I was initially inclined to give this book four stars because it does not “name names” and have footnotes or a bibliography, but as I got deeper into the book I realized that what Tony Zinni has produced is a world-saving “primer” that ANYONE can appreciate, including Bozo the Clown. This is not a dumbed down book as much as it is “straight talk” with no gobbly-gook.

I have known over fifty flag officers in my time, and only a handful have actually been world-class, including Zinni, Gray, Stackpole in the USMC, Clapper and O'Lear in the USAF, Studeman in the Navy, and of course Schoomaker in the Army. No doubt there are others, but in my experience most flag officers have simply won a beauty/etiquette contest, and they do not acquire any additional strategic vision upon being promoted from the lower ranks. Zinni is incontestably the one general we have that has done three things brilliantly:

1) been a foxhole Marine with grievous wounds and innovative leadership at the company and field grade levels (see my review of his book “Battle Ready”);

2) been a general deeply experienced in Operations Other than War (OOTW–what a stupid former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff once said of “Real men don't do OOTW–which is about as stupid as the DNI still saying (we paraphrase) “we're in the business of secrets for the President, the hell with open sources and everyone else”); and

3) been a true inter-agency Commander-in-Chief (CINC) able to make full use of *all* the inter-agency capabilities, not just the military, and done so diplomatically and personally. He is the George Shultz (himself a former Marine) of the current warrior class.

With that as pre-amble, here are the highlights of the book that demand its reading by every citizen in time to challenge their light-weight (and generally corrupt) Members of Congress prior to casting a vote in November 2006:

1) Chapters 1-7 are essentially an overview of reality and why global reality impacts on America's security and fortune. This is required reading for all but a handful, and needs to be read very slowly and carefully by those encumbered with ideological filters. As the author notes, very often perception is reality, and when an ideologically-biased perception conflicts with actual multi-cultural reality, what you get is a catastrophe such as Iraq.

2) The heart of the book is the author's prescription for achieving both an unbiased view of the real world, and the ability to fully plan for and leverage all the sources of national power as represented by the varied agencies, through three simple and elegant “hubs”:

2a) At the national level, a National Monitoring and Planning Center (NMPC) that is able to integrate both intelligence (less than 20% of the relevant information) and operational inter-agency information (the other 80%), and to then plan, coordinate, and guide the execution of long-term inter-agency campaign plans.

2b) At the operational level, the modification of the currently planned Joint Intelligence Operations Commands or Centers (JIOC) to turn them into more of a Joint Inter-Agency Collaboration Center (JICC) such as SOCOM has developed in concept. Although JFCOM's Joint Inter-Agency Coordination Group (JIACG) is the example used by the author, I believe that we actually need to bring together the JFCOM and SOCOM concepts with those emerging in the NORTHCOM inter-agency directorate under Bear McConnell, and the Global Innovation and Strategy Center (GISC) at STRATCOM, which not coincidentally also has the lead for getting a grip on all open source information in all languages all the time, something the DNI cannot provide.

2c) At the tactical level the author is right on target when he proposes the civil affairs model (as does Congressman Rob Simmons, R-CT-02 from the HASC and Homeland Security Committees) as the focal point for inter-agency application of resources in-country. The author does not dismiss the U.S. Embassy, which was supposed to play that role, but his book is a clear demarche with respect to the incapacity of the Department of State to provide a leadership role, a planning role, or an inter-agency management role in-country. The Embassies are simply not working the way they are supposed to our could be made to work.

3) The author concludes his work with an analogy of cobras being killed by the death of a thousand stings from bees. Exactly right. The threat to America is NOT Iranian nuclear power (just as it was NOT Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction) but rather a global concerted effort to destroy Americas economy through the simple expedient of putting oil prices up to $300 a barrel, something that can be achieved very inexpensively with tiny but potent attacks on key oil pipelines and pumping stations in Nigeria, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia.

Tony Zinni is one of my heroes. He not only understands asymmetric warfare and the urgency of getting serious (that is to say, professional, which we are not at this time) about global instability in the intangible non-military dimensions, but he is a clear-headed diplomat and warrior-philosopher who knows how to make big bureaucracies do his bidding.

I hope the day comes when we have a chance to work together to save this great Republic from the morons that have broken the piggy bank, cost us all moral legitimacy in the eyes of the world, and started a 100 year six front war we did not need and were not ready for.

BRAVO ZULU and GUNG HO.

Admin Note: If you select “see my other reviews” and bookmark that page, you can, over the course of several hours, receive a free graduate education in reality and non-fiction about global issues. If Zinni *had* had footnotes, most of the books I have reviewed would have been in his book as supporting elements for his personal and professional essay.

2006/04/142009/12/04

Review: The Big Wedding–9/11, the Whistle Blowers, and the Cover-up (Paperback)

5 Star, 9-11 Truth Books & DVDs

Fifteen Distinct Instances of FACT–a Major Contribution,

April 14, 2006

Sander Hicks

This is one of a number of 9-11 truth movement books that I have reviewed. The bottom line is clear and supported by other books: the U.S. Government had fore-knowledge of 9-11; the FBI and the CIA are a combination of inept and corrupt; and the 9-11 Commission was a deliberate cover-up.

Two of the facts the author cites, while brought out by others, have a special cachet in this particular book:

1) John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial in June 2001; and

2) The 9-11 Fund for victims was managed by a quasi-compromised individual whose task was to get them all (at least 90%) to sign up, because the acceptance of compensation came with a quit claim against the US Government and any further legal action, a compelling indicator, in my mind, of guilt by implication.

Here are a few things that stayed with me from this author's worthy effort:

1) Summary of what we lost on 9-11 from Dr. Hecht: “3000 New Yorkers, half the Constitution, and most of the Republic.”

2) Key people like Dave Frasca at FBI that blocked all efforts to stymie the 9-11 attacks, and Francis Taylor at Department of State, director of security (with Ambassadorial rank) and party to special deals with Pakistan, were never forced to testify in detail.

3) 9-11 Commission deliberately started its review in 1996 to leave out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing where evidence exists that the FBI built the bomb and it was all part of an operation that went bad.

4) Both the 9-11 Commission and other reviews have failed to go back to the BCCI Bank scandal, where the BCCI was a joint Pakistani-CIA bank to channel funds to Afghanistan (and not incidentally, to jihad terrorists in the making)

5) The BCCI was the bank that bought George Bush II's stock in Harkin when he was a failure and needed help.

6) Sixteen (16) reporters and investigators died under mysterious circumstances while investigating the BCCI story.

7) Mueller may have been rewarded with FBI Director post for his role in blocking BCCI investigation.

8) 9-11 may have originally been planned as a nuclear attack under the direction of the Pakistani nuclear genius now allegedly under house arrest, and “downgraded” to the WTC [note: there are numerous allegations that all the gold and other valuables in the WTC were evacuated in advance, and the most important allies of the Administration were not in the building that morning–it was, in other words, expendable, and also valuable as pretext for war (Jim Bamford's term, see my review of that book). NOTE: The author suggests that the Pakistani's not only made the point to the Bush Administration that an attack would be good for the Administration, while relieving some pressures in Pakistan, but also negotiated the down-grade, receiving in turn further assistance toward their nuclear arms race with India. Lest anyone doubt this, please note that Zbigniew Brezinski specifically gave the Pakistanis a nuclear bye in return for help against the Soviet in Afghanistan. Regardless of the party in party, the political leadership in America is clearly willing to sell its soul and sacrifice American lives for what it perceives to be strategic gains for its own selfish elite).

9) Israel and Egypt warned the US in strong terms, as did Germany and Russian, within weeks prior to the actual attacks. The US Government chose not to act on those warnings, perhaps because it wanted the attacks to succeed.

10) Al Qaeda and the Neo-Conservatives actually share some viewpoints and have a symbiotic relationship.

11) The Muslim Brotherhood is close to the CIA, and goes back many decades with the neo-Nazis. as both share an abiding hatred for the Jews and Israel (this suggests that the many stories about US skin-heads supporting Al Qaeda terrorists are plausible).

12) Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff is dirty as sin. He defended terrorist financier Dr. Magby Elamir, is a “dishonest bastard” who went along with Vince Foster suicide cover-up, and was fast-tracked to the top and via the judge's circuit as part of the overall deal between those who sin and those who condone.

13) Governor Jeb Bush PERSONALLY showed up to confiscate flight school records in Florida days after 9-11, and then took action to make them forever irretrievable.

14) Florida is called by some in the know as “Terrorland” where two Floridas co-exist–a normal Florida (that is to say, the walled city/golf courses with water features of the well to do, and the slums of the poor), and a second Florida consisting of CIA training camps, banks approved by the Government to launder drug money for Wall Street, and flight schools and airports for discreet arms-drugs-money transfers–and even Miami International Airport, where world-class assholes can be “pre-cleared” for entry to the US “at the convenience of the U.S. Government.” Indeed, the connection between Florida, drugs, and the U.S. Government is so strong that in one uncoordinated inter-agency assault on an arriving Lear Jet loaded with drugs, DEA senior executive Mike Brasseltine was in the co-pilot's seat. [Ugly side note: Henry Kissinger is on record as supporting Third World eugenics or “depopulation,” there is mounting evidence that the white wealthy elite consider drugs an excellent albeit totally racsist means of “de-colorizing” of America.

15) In passing the author points out that the 9-11 Commissioners, with one exception, did not meet the Congressional mandate that they all be free of any association with the Bush Administration.

The author also does magnificently in discussing “suppressed histories” as a “standard” U.S. Government operating procedure. Lest you think this is fanciful, see my reviews of Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'. The FACT is that the U.S. Government and its corporate partners and its international criminal allies is routinely deceiving the American people and mis-serving We the People.

I have reviewed a number of 9-11 books and DVDs, and I stake my personal integrity on the following statement:

We cannot prove conclusively that Dick Cheney, Rudy Gulliani, and Larry Silverstein conspired to not only let 9-11 happen, but use a missile on the Pentagon and controlled demolitions to murder thousands, destroy evidence (of missing 2.3 trillion in Pentagon, SEC investigaions in NYC), and commit multiple counts of insurance fraud. I am however convinced beyond a shadow a doubt that America needs a Truth and Reconcilation Commission, a Public Invetigation, and that all those who were not properly interviewed (most) or interviewed at all (even more) must be brought into the open. I believe this to be the crime of the century, treasonous in every respect, and I do not want Dick Cheney to have the pleasure of dying before we can investigate and if proven, convict and incarcerate.

In DVD's, “Loose Change” is an absolute must but not offered on Amazon.
See also:
9/11 Mysteries Part 1: Demolitions
9/11: Press For Truth
9/11 – The Myth and the Reality
Aftermath: Unanswered Questions from 9/11
Improbable Collapse: The Demolition of Our Republic
The Toxic Clouds Of 9/11: A Looming Health Disaster
Fahrenheit 9/11

2006/04/122009/12/04

Review: The Vermont Manifesto (Paperback)

5 Star, Democracy

Leading Voice for Non-Violent Secession from the Union,

April 12, 2006

Thomas H. Naylor

The US federal government is failing to serve the people, and according to the precepts of the American Republic, that gives the people the right to abolish the government. In the case of the Second Vermont Republic, the author and his very thoughtful colleagues are proposing instead to succeed from the Federal Union that is not Federal anymore–the federal government is now a “hired hand” for Wall Street and a servant to dictators of Saudi Arabia as well as the Israeli lobby.

Professor Naylor, also a successful software businessman many years ago, is a citizen-philosopher and by no stretch of the imagination could he be labeled “fringe.” In his case, radical is the opposite of reactionary, and exactly where we need to be.

The elements of the Vermont Manifesto are ten in total: political independence; grass roots democracy; nonviolence; environmental integrity; sustainable development; regional trade; sustainable agriculture; rail revitalization; quality education; and wellness.

The premises of the Vermont Manifesto, apart from recognition of the corruption and immorality that prevail on Wall Street and the energy industry and their servants in Congress and the White House, is that big is bad and small is good. This is totally consistent with the end of Peak Oil and the need to get back to localized sustainable energy and food production that does not need to be transported great distances. The Vermont Manifesto also recognizes that evil done by the American Empire “in our name” ultimately comes back to pillage and loot the state-level commonwealths.

Lest anyone think this book is “fringe” I would point to my many other reviews (I am the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction about foreign policy–I would not be reviewing this book if it were not fundamental), but especially to my review of, and the book itself, Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America and more recently, a swath of books on the Iraq blunders and the immorality of George Bush and Dick Cheney, such as:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
Why the Rest Hates the West: Understanding the Roots of Global Rage

It is clear to me that sanity is re-asserting itself in the Pacific Northwest and the far Northeast. This specific book would be useful to every single state in America, and I have a specific question that every single state should put on its 2008 ballot:

“Should we join a Constitutional Convention to discuss the abolishment of the present government and the reconstitution of the Americas as a new Republic that restores representative democracy and moral capitalism?”

There are 27 secessionist movements in the USA, among which Vermont and the Pacific Northwest are the strongest and most reasoned. No President can take office in 2009 without fully understanding the legitimate grievances represented by this book and the varied secessionist movements.

There is another angle from which to appreciate this book as well. The federal government has failed to adapt, as Katrina and other disasters have shown us. The some of the following books on how a combination of Ron Paul's restoration of Jeffersonian diplomacy and a regionalization of America might increase our resilience, especially if combined with an end to absentee landlords and a greening of America.

The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology)
Catastrophe & Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster (School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series)

2006/04/102009/12/04

Review: Spying on the Bomb–American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (Hardcover)

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Best of Intentions, As Flawed as Its Subject,

April 10, 2006

Jeffrey T. Richelson

The author does good work, within the limits of what can be known, and I have to recognize his diligence with five stars, but this is one of those books that is maddening in three ways:

1) It documents how bureacratically pedestrian the U.S. Intelligence Community has been. Spying on the bomb has not been a “calling” it has been a routine job using pedestrian means, and with zero accountability for faliing to be successful.

2) The book is maddening in other ways. In 2004 the CIA gets a walk-in with a thousand pages on the Iranian nuclear program, and two years later they are still trying to determine if the documents are fake–or is it that they provided the documents in the first place (see my review of “State of War”) and are now confronted by their own returning paper?

3) Most maddening of all is the complete failure of this book, and its subject the US Intelligence Community, and the policy leadership of the USA, to come to grips with reality. The nuclear bomb or nuclear power in the hands of North Korea or Iran are about as great a threat to the USA as Fidel Castro deciding to invade Miami with 10,000 doctors. 1000 car bombs in the right places (most overseas, such as in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela), 1000 det cords with C-4 around the right choke points (port cranes, bridge struts, railroad loading yard circles) are vastly more threatening to the US. A nuclear bomb might take out a city–an asymmetric attack by highly motivated suicidal terrorists will not only bypass all of our defenses, but it will take out our economy. Our wages are already back where they were in 1962 (sixty two). Hurricane Katrina had the force of a nuclear exploision and not only is the White House ignoring that disaster, but it has not impacted on the rest of the country. The USA has no strategy and no grasp of reality–our policies right now are a combination of ideological fantasy, deep insider corruption, and pedestrian bureaucratic “going through the motions.” Shame on all of us.

By way of example:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security

Incidentally, terrorism is #9 on the list of high-level threats to humanity, poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation are 1-3, above war. Our government now resembles the DVD Idiocracy. The only good news is that CIA discovered its integrity on Iran and many of us appear to have stopped the lunatic intentions of Dick Cheney to carry on with the Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror.

2006/04/092009/12/04

Review: Overthrow–America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (Hardcover)

5 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback

Timely, read with Zinni, Leebaert, Butler, and Johnson,

April 9, 2006

Stephen Kinzer

EDITED 27 June 2007 to add thoughts from second reading (accidental). While at the beach, ran out of books, bought this not remembering I had already read it, and found new value. Using the new link feature to insert links to the books originally listed.

This is a timely review, although the facts are well known to those who follow international affairs.

In this second (as if new) reading, the following quote stayed with me from page 317: “Most American sponsored ‘regime change' operations have, in the end, weakened rather than strengthened, American security.”

I list the countries covered by this book: Hawaii, Cuba, Nicarague, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Guatemala, Iran, Viet-Nam, Chile, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq.

I focus more on Hawaii, in 1893, the first of a new range of intrusive overthrows (beyond the land expansion actions the author chooses not to cover). I am struck–moved–by the duplicitious immoral actions of both the white landowners and the white US government representatives against the people of Hawaii.

The author discusses how Hawaiians were at the time bound by obligations, ritual, and a reverence for nature. I am reminded of how we and the Spanish genocided the native Americans, north and south, individuals who had decades if not centuries of refined knowledge on how to shape and nurture the Earth in harmony with their needs.

This time around, the author's emphasis on how the legal right to buy land led to the loss of local indigenous control and rights. I now firmly believe that foreign and absentee landlords should be eliminated.

This time around, I note the author's emphasis on how corporations are a form of national army, capturing wealth in different ways from an armed force.

This time around, I think of how Dick Cheney has raped the American dream, in so violent and so public a fashion, that America's “lost innocence” can not longer be denied.

This time around, I discover and reflect (being at the beach) on the superb bibliography.

For a broader and perhaps more disturbing overview of the costs to America of corporate-driven foreign policy, see
The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's Power and Purpose
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
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
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
Why We Fight
The Fog of War – Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption

2006/04/092009/12/04

Review: The Lucifer Principle–A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (Paperback)

5 Star, America (Anti-America), Complexity & Catastrophe, History, Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Time to Dust This One Off–Anticipated Radical Islam and Offers Core Ideas for Surviving,

April 9, 2006

Howard Bloom

Buy and read this book if for no other reason than that the author foresaw the global radicalization of Islam against the West in terms much starker than Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations and much broader than Yossef Bodansky's brilliant tome on “Bin Laden: the Man Who Declared War on America.

Leon Uris is quoted on the cover as saying that this book is “an act of astonishing intellectual courage,” and I will say that the author has pulled together an extraordinary collage of details in an intricately assembled “story” in which he challenges the assumptions of a number of major conventional intellects. There are 58 “parts” to this book, each part between two and six pages long, with an astounding array of multi-disciplinary quotes and footnotes. No scared ox goes ungored.

Some of the history in this book, of the origin of Mohammed as a possible lunatic and then a vengeful warrior using religion to grab real estate, and of the early split between Sunni and Shiite over the issue of the succession, is very useful today.

The author centers the disparate and very broad-ranging pieces of the book on three core ideas: Earth as a superorganism within which a tribe or religion is itself a superorganism; memes as unifying ideas that create us versus them for the sake of changing the pecking order and feeding off weaker tribes, and–in the only optimistic note in the book, at the end, of collaboration and information sharing as the only means to break out of the pattern of dog eat dog.

He specifically slams religion, and especially fundamentalist religion, as a false god that substitutes faith for control, and as a tool of controlling elites who need to keep the impoverished masses from waking up to the raw fact that masses of people can indeed “take over” factories and estates.

On page 94 the following quote struck me as applying equally to George Bush and Osama Bin Laden: “Leaders like Orville Faubus and Fidel Castro have skillfully manipulated a few basic rules of human nature: that every tribe regards outsiders as fair game; that every society gives permission to hate; that each culture dresses the demon of hatred in the garb of righteousness; and that the man who channels this hatred can rouse the superorganism and lead it around by the nose.”

There are numerous gifted phrases throughout this book, and I can understand the frustration of some in absorbing this dizzying array of data points, but it is surely worth making the effort.

He makes much of the evolution of the brain from reptile (survival) to mammalian (social) to primate (individual) and emphasizes that even the most advanced humans still have all three brains in some form, with the lower forms subject to arousal.

Overall I rate this book one of the ten most useful books relevant to understanding and defeating radical Islam, which the author says is “a meme growing ravenous,” a sleeping giant that has been awakened. He goes back in time to look at how the US, in forcing the French and English to give up the Suez Canal, actually helped inspire Arabia to plan for a day when the West might be sent packing. Similar, the first Gulf War, when the Coalition defeated Iraq, undermined secular Moslem regimes, and further inspired Islamic fundamentalists.

In the author's view we erred gravely in not understanding the asymmetric scope of the threat of Bin Laden and post-Taliban Afghanistan, and we appear to have erred in a truly gigantic way in not seeing that the second Gulf War was in fact doing Iran's bidding and accomplishing something Iran could never have done on its own. The author views Bin Laden as having replaced Russia as a “friend” to the Third World, and anticipates both a rapid spread of Islam among the poor, and a plague of animosity toward to the USA specifically.

The book includes a fascination discussion of psycho-social aspects of nations and tribes and other social groups including religions. While some have been derisive of his discussion of “pecking orders” I believe–having lived overseas most of my life–that he nails it. Not only does instability cause the accepted pecking order to go out the window, but prosperity actually destabilizes established pecking orders. When we eventually implement the grand vision of Jeffrey Sachs (see my review of “The End of Poverty” we will need to be very mindful of the animal force that will be unleashed at the same time, and not make the mistake we made in Iraq, of failing to plan for stabilization and reconstruction.

The last two ideas in this book that really grabbed me are from page 292, on how America began a perceptual shut-down and decline from 1973 onwards, culminating in the cheating culture and lazy obese children and parents that are the bane of most teachers' lives today. America is in “slow” mode and has lost its competitive drive.

The book was hugely ambitious, and it is easy to be snide, as some reviewers are, but I for one found this as close to genius and as close to breath-taking intellectual derring-do as any book I have read in a while. If America is to survive the multiple threats to the Republic, it will take leaders capable of reading and understanding this book, and implementing a 100 year strategy for winning the six front war, beginning on the home front with a draconian reform of our educational and information sharing and distance learning environment.