Plenty of ammunition here for those who believe a “campaign of lies and distortion” accounts for the U.S. presence in Iraq.
A former 60 Minutes producer exposes 85 years of Western recklessness and fecklessness in Iraq.
As Saddam Hussein stands in the dock, it’s no accident, argues Lando, that the special tribunal passing judgment on his 25-year reign of terror may charge and subpoena only Iraqi citizens. Before an international court, or any kind of independent inquiry, the brutal dictator might have been permitted to call other witnesses in his defense and thereby expose a sordid Western history of betrayals, reprisals and manipulations that have mightily contributed to Iraq’s misery. Relying on a few scholarly sources, many recent journalistic accounts and a bit of original reporting, the author supplies the argument Saddam’s defense attorneys only wish they could employ. For Lando, the original sin may be traced back to the end of World War I, when the British, needing military bases and easy access to the region’s vast oil deposits, carved out the artificial state of Iraq from the tattered remains of the Ottoman Empire. This cobbling together of peoples and tribes to suit the requirements of Western powers ensured a “nation” that would be perilous to govern. And so it has proven, from the British-installed King Faisal and his son Ghazi to a line of military dictators culminating in the Baath Party’s Saddam. Lando devotes the bulk of his narrative to the West’s complicity in Saddam’s regime, whether through leaders like Thatcher, Chirac, Brezhnev and Gorbachev or a succession of American presidents (especially those named Bush) and a series of foreign-policy and military experts who did their bidding. Though he stoutly maintains that his piling up of detail, incident and anecdote in no way absolves Saddam, Lando’s highly tendentious argument—who else, any longer, unquestioningly accepts the testimony of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson or arms-inspector Scott Ritter?—and unremitting focus on the misdeeds of the West leaves the reader grasping for equilibrium.
Plenty of ammunition here for those who believe a “campaign of lies and distortion” accounts for the U.S. presence in Iraq.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2007
ISBN: 1-59051-238-3
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
