This is a world-class film with subtlety that may be lost on some. It is easily five stars for its blend of real-world filming of Bush and Cheney, its use of “interviews” supposedly after the fact, and its extremely subtle ending: without appearing, Dick Cheney gets to be President and passes Patiot Act III which finishes trashing the Constitution and our concept of “Liberty & Justice for All.” Nailing a passing Muslim for the crime, even after a black man committed suicide, left a note, and had a copy of the detailed schedule that could only have come from Dick Cheney or Scooter Libby, one can only ponder the near term.
I abhor the death penalty, assassination, and secession, but I also abhor war crimes and what is being done in our name, all of which give Vermont and others serious grounds for secession. It will take a quarter century to undo the damage done by Dick Cheney and his witless “decider.”
See my varied lists on serious DVDs, impeachment, Iraq after action, and evaluative books on Dick Cheney, the best two of which are listed below. In my reviews, mostly in the second, I itemize 25 high crimes and misdemeanors that Dick Cheney should be facing charges on as I write this. He has, virtually alone, destroyed the Republic.
Misses Long-Term, Green, and Bottom of Pyramid, Superb Otherwise
June 22, 2007
W. Chan Kim
I am not deducting one star for the gaps listed above, because on balance the book is one of a handful of business books that is serious as opposed to the pap that one generally sees.
There are other in-depth reviews, so I will summarize only what mattered to me. The bottom line here is create new markets and woo new customers, rather than compete. With this in mind, I am stunned that they do not examine more carefully C.K. Prahalad's wisdom as communicated in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. He teaches us that capitalism (never mind the immoral predatory part) focuses on the billion at the top who can afford new sub-zero refrigerators and disposable goods. He teaches us that unlike this group, worth one trillion a year, the five billion at the bottom of the pyramid represent four trillion a year, but their refrigerator needs are different: for $2, an African “refrigerator” is two ceramic vases with broad bases and necks, one inside the other. Buried in the ground, they keep meat fresh for five days.
Their key principles:
1) Reconstruct/cross market boundaries
2) Focus on big picture not numbers
3) Reach beyond existing (and I would add, illiterate) demand
4) Get the strategic sequence right
The heart of their book is “first to market” and “create new markets.”
They address three customer groups for study:
1) Soon to be customers (e.g. young, international)
2) Refusing customers
3) Non-customers for whom new attractive value can be created
I especially like the discussion, two thirds of the way through the book, on six blocks to buyers utility:
1) Customer Productivity
2) Simplicity
3) Convenience
4) Risk (reduction)
5) Fun and image
6) Environmental friendliness (a scant mention).
This is a seriously useful book, a fast read, and worthy of note. The books below will provide additional context and insight as we all begin to demand an end to corporate “personality” and a restoration of public ownership and public accountability and utility.
I confess to being uncomfortable when I bought this book, which addresses in a very comprehensive way the degree to which the US Government and the US military as well as intelligence, mercenary, and corporate personnel, are committing war crimes.
I want to say up front, that as best I can tell; our brave and professional troops are in fact making lemonade from lemons, and doing the best they can. However, they all realize that they and all the world was lied to by the Bush Administration, that this is about oil, and that they are killing civilians and many children for no good reason, due to the horrible circumstances that we have created by remaining there. According to this book, suicides are up 40%, there are 6000 deserters, and seamen recruits are *winning* when court-martialed for refusing to obey illegal orders to go to Iraq.
The editors have done a superb job of bringing together a collection of proven individuals including President Jimmy Carter, Senator Robert Byrd, Daniel Ellsberg, Sy Hersh, a group of US Generals (retired) protesting the White House mandated torture, and a wide variety of individual experts on war crimes.
The book opens with a discussion of three kinds of war crime:
1) Wars of aggression, i.e. unprovoked, pre-emptive, unjustified
2) Violations of humanitarian law
3) Crimes against humanity
You can read the book for the details. Suffice to say that they set the stage with objective factual discussion, and then proceed to document, most ably, the reality that the United States of America is now a war criminal in the larger context of humanity. What is being done “in our name” is immoral, reprehensible, unconstitutional, impeachable, and–to my great dismay–largely ignored by the majority of our adult population.
A few highlights from this easy to read collection of relatively short (2-4 page) pieces:
Ellsberg: Loyalty to the Constitution must take precedence at all levels. Like Viet-Nam, we are now realizing that the current regime cannot be trusted and can blunder strategically because the balance of power is out the door. Only We the People can demand a restoration of liberty & justice for all, with respect for the Constitutional limits to federal power.
Carter: Iraq war is an unjust illegal war. He says this as a President and as a Christian and as a loyal American who reveres the Constitution.
Herbert: Pentagon is “shopping for wars” even as Iraq hollows it out. They have even discussed surprise unprovoked military attacks whose only justification is the possibility of collecting intelligence. As an intelligence expert, I can afford that the secret intelligence community is largely worthless and costs over $60 billion a year, but I can also assert that for less than $5 billion a year, I can not only provide 96% of all the intelligence we need from open sources in 183 languages, but I can also provide free online education and free cell phone answers from reachback help desks in India.
Hersh: we and Israel plan to invade Iran regardless of what the facts are and regardless of what the American people believe or desire. Talking to Pentagon sources, Hersh sees us funding and training death squads around the world, turning the world into what one senior official called a “global free fire zone.”
Retired Generals: Torture was “top down” decision and command, not a few bottom up “rotten apples.”
Various: US using illegal weapons, including depleted uranium and napalm, in Iraq and elsewhere.
FBI emails (redacted): Military interrogators practicing torture impersonated FBI special agents, meaning that the FBI instead of DoD would be nailed in the public eye. FBI appears to have honored its own higher standards and not followed the idiot Gonzalez (then White House Counsel).
Center: detailed case against Donald Rumsfeld for ordering, funding, and knowing of war crimes at all levels of command. Why they did not go after Bush and even more so, Dick Cheney, whose 25 high crimes and offenses have been itemized in my reviews of ONE PERCENT and VICE.
Roberts: No one left to stop them (within the government)
Falk speaks about accountability.
The book ends with four recommendations:
1) Halt the war crimes
2) Bring the war criminals to justice
3) Draw the lessons (the most obvious: don't throw stones if you live in a glass house)
4) Establish barriers to future war crimes.
A one-page appendix lists 22 relevant substantive web sites containing additional information.
Sadly, as good as this book is, it is a cry in the wilderness. It is not being used by any major transpartisan organization (such as Reuniting America and its members Moral Majority, the ACLU, MoveOn, and others totaling 110 individual members in all).
I truly grieve over how low our Nation has gone. The Republic no longer exists–every politician–every single one–is in violation of the Constitution and impeachable for their dereliction of duty in allowing Cheney and his puppet Bush to wreak havoc on the world and on our own citizens, whose loss of moral standing, national treasure, and an assured future will take at least a quarter century to remediate.
See my lists for a fast survey of books relevant to impeachment, to judging Cheney, to the good and the bad of religion within affairs of state, on why they hate us, and so on. If there is one slim chance for our future, it is that on this 4th of July we will all declare our independence from this illegal White House, demand the immediate resignations of these two war criminals (who, not incidentally, stole two elections in a row), and reconstitute the government by forcing all those now in Congress to either pass Electoral Reform prior to November 2008, or be recalled and “ordered home.”
The monkey is now on our backs. What are we going to do?
This movie got me through a long delay while waiting for air transport. It is utterly brilliant, chock full of world class actors and actresses, not least of which are Peter O'Toole and Vanessa Redgrave.
This is some of the most serious gifted acting I have seen. O'Toole brought nuance to this role that was unexpected and all the more appreciated for being so.
It struck me as a wonderfully new and refreshing mix of Pygmalion (My Fair Lady), My First Mister, and Love Story, with just a hint of Debbie Does Dallas without the sex.
It makes very good use of fast forward “life in review” in a couple of places.
It addresses love at multiple levels, including old men platonicly loving one another in old age; old men discovering their love for their old wives, and of couorse Peter O'Toole as an old man discovering platonic love with a rough younger woman who is brought out of ugly duckling status by his attentions and coaching. They teach each other how to get the most out of the lives they have.
Robert Dreyfuss interviewed me once, for a piece in WIRED or Mother Jones, and I remember him as a serious, methodical person. It is no surprise to find him producing this meticulously documented and objectively constructed history, a perfect complement to Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush, on whose Amazon page I have a more detailed review of the overall topic.
The author captures the essence in his own introduction: the US was so focused on anti-communism and anti-Soviet campaigns that it deliberately chose to sponsor extreme rightist Islamic fundamentalists, fascists in their own way as the extreme right in America is today (see American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America).
The author is very specific in addressing how the US feared “nationalism, humanism, secularism, socialism” in its obsession with countering the Soviets, and so it chose to aid Islamic fundamentalists who opposed those more rational and publicly-oriented altneratives. In essence, the premise of the invasion of Iraq, that we are doing it to spread democracy, is yet another big lie–we have been denying democracy to the Arabs every since Roosevelt met with the Saudi king and formed a pact with the devil himself.
I totally agree with the author as he documents and sums up his own view that “A war on terrorism is precisely the wrong way to deal with the challenge posed by political Islam.”
The author offers four prescriptions for US action, and at the end here I list some relevant books that provide a broader context:
1) Remove the grievances–US troops in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, support for Israel's genocide against the Palestinians, support for Israel's plans to attack Iran
2) Abandon imperial pretentions in the Middle East
3) Refrain from seeking to impose preferences–political, economic, cultural, or religious, on the region
4) Stop making bellicose threats against Islamic nations from Iran to Sudan (and I would add, to Algeria, Morocco, Nigeria, and others)
I am reminded by this book of the common sense prescriptions in Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. The raw fact is that the global literature is coming around to three points of view that are inter-related:
1) Bin Laden is largely right and on firm grounds in taking on both the debauched Saudi regime and the amoral unilaterally invasive US
2) Dick Cheney has committed so many high crimes and misdemeanors, with similar high crimes at the operational level (warrantless wiretapping on Americans, rendition and torture of all others) that America has lost all moral legitimacy both at home and abroad
3) We have the wrong global strategy, indeed we have no global strategy–we are trying to put out a forest fire with a hammer.
Some of the reviewers jump to conclusions, for example, the CIA was NOT really trying to ramp up the war in Afghanistan, until Congressman Charlie Wilson made it his personal vendetta. There is a much larger context within which American incompletence at world affairs can be judged, and it includes the shortcomings of the US educational system, the corruption of the US electoral system, and the grotesque dysfunctionality of the “winner take all” US system of governance. I hope some of the books below–or at least my reviews of them–will provide addtional context for this excellent work. See Web of Deceit for detailed comments I choose not to repeat here–the two books are a good combination with some overlap.
The American Empire Project has produced some really first-rate books on their chosen theme, and for this they are to be praised.
Clever Not Pretentious, Useful and Focused–Valuable to All
June 20, 2007
Scott Ritter
This is a clever useful book. I *like* it. It is not pretentious nor is it convoluted. It does a very fine job of explaining to the non-military average activist or leader of activists the utility of Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and John Boyd in developing a national and global strategy, national and global campaign plans, and local discrete tactical “events” that can achieve impact *only* if done in the context of a strategy and a campaign plan.
The author does a fine job of gently and respectfully pointing out that the current anti-war and pro-environment movements, projects, and individuals have a severe handicap in not understanding the connection between a strategy, and operational campaign, and tactical events planned and executed in the larger context.
The author does a tremendous job of clearly and concisely describing how the extreme right has managed to define its ideological war plan as “Guns, God, and Gays,” while none of the thoughtful but complex, lengthy and somewhat disjointed progressive messages stand a chance.
The author understand that the war for the soul of America and for the stability of the rest of the world is about belief systems, and about capturing as many individual minds and hearts as possible. The extreme right is winning with ideological fantasy while the extreme left is losing in detail for lack of a message that can be adopted by the mainstream, which remains largely apathetic.
The author goes on to articulate a distress that I myself have experienced, politely pointing out that most progressive movements have too many self-named leaders, not enough disciplined followers (for lack of a strategy and campaign plan), and are generally too focused on feel good events or actions. I myself respect all these people, but think of them as the huggy huggy tea party set. They don't know how to bring an enemy system–a domestic enemy system–to a screeching halt in a showdown over time and space.
The author is brilliant–utterly brilliant–in pointing out that there is only one message that can win over the mainstream and the apathetic middle, and that message is “uphold the Constitution and the sovereign power of We the People, with liberty and justice for all.” He *nails* it. I am moved by this book. It is *not* a clever marketing book to add to anyone's financial kitty, this is a book by a patriot, for patriots, and it is useful–actionable–and therefore priceless in value to all of us.
In the middle part of the book, after describing Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB), an Army standard, but not discussing the intelligence cycle, the author emphasizes the importance of both psychology, and intelligence: the progressives must “be able to accurately track what an opponent is doing on the battlefield.” I tried to explain this to Howard Dean's staff back in the day, and could not get anyone to listen. Our politicians running for President are not only not qualified to be President, they are not even staffed to offer the voters a coherent range of policies within a balanced sustainable budget. All they can do with all their tens of millions is fire broadsides of platitudes at one another. This is one reason I created the Earth Intelligence Network, in order to both teach the progressives how to create intelligence and policy matrices (the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers) and to do so in a very compelling manner using serious games with embedded reality-based budgets. All this is free, so please; do not interpret this as advertising for profit.
The author draws to a close with three hugely important points:
1) The only message that will resonate with *all* of us is upholding the Constitution (Romney, to his eternal disgrace, has refused to sign the pledge to uphold the Constitution–all others need to be pressed on this point).
2) The progressives need training in both leadership and followership, and I am hugely impressed by the author's provisions on pages 75-77 of specific URLs for specific Incident Command System (ICS) training courses as well as leadership courses. He is very complementary of these materials provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Wildlife Coordination Group (funded by taxpayers, naturally, but not now in the active service of taxpayers).
3) The author's third important point in closing is that activism must be global, not just local or national. Most activists understand this intuitively, but the *only* group to actually do something along these lines is the World Index of Environmental and Social Responsibility (WISER) under the conceptual leadership of Paul Hawkin and the technical leadership of Peggy Duvette. Indeed, combining the author's advice and concept of organization with my own vision for the “six bubbles” (see image) of the Earth Intelligence Network is in my mind a useful starting point for the yet to be developed WISER (Self) Government module.
The author offers other useful tidbits in passing, including a definition of how the progressives could organize administrative, intelligence, operational, planning, logistics, communications, and public relations teams with proper training and recognized leadership. He may not be familiar with all the training that is being done along these lines by some, for example those taking on the World Trade Organization, but in general his observations are helpful.
The book ends with two appendices, the U.S. Constitution and the United Nations charter. The author is NOT Jane Fonda on steroids. He sees, quite clearly, that the Republic is in the battle of all time for the soul of democracy and the soul of (moral) capitalism. He understands that the center of gravity is the huge disengaged apathetic “middle” and that until that middle understands that what is being done in our name by the U.S. Government is illegitimate, illegal, immoral, and imprudent, we will not be able to mobilize effectively.
This is a truly fine book, of, by, and for We the People.
