An often cogent argument weakened by unnecessary repetition and vitriol—reads like a hybrid of a counterinsurgency manual...
This critique of the War on Terror calls on the United States to switch from primarily military to almost exclusively ideological operations against al-Qaeda.
Osama bin Laden not only wishes to restore the Caliphate abolished by Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk in 1924, writes longtime intelligence and combat veteran Nance, but he also desires to revert to pre-12th-century Islam, before it came under assault by Crusaders, Mongols and a hierarchy that tolerated impurity. Under “bin Ladenism,” Muslims must shun not just non-Muslims but also anyone not conforming to the most rigid customs of Islam. In this view, far from embodying the mainstream of Islam, “bin Ladenism” is one of the schisms that have splintered the religion since its founding. Unfortunately, the Bush administration, Nance contends, played into the hands of this cult leader by calling for a “crusade.” Allowing him to escape to Pakistan while concentrating instead on Iraq was “akin to stopping WWII after D-Day and ordering an invasion of Mexico.” Nance is at his best in analyzing a foe more decentralized since the fall of the Taliban—boosted, post-invasion, by successful recruitment; able to destabilize the Mideast, driving up oil prices to economically harmful levels; and masters of a viral “media campaign” involving audiotapes and the Internet. Nance’s extensive military expertise should lend credibility to his debates on terror, but he undercuts his authority with overly partisan invective: George W. Bush is likened to “a rampaging rhino destroying all in its path” and Barack Obama to “[t]he best tool in our quiver, next to the great character of the American people themselves.” Given the adaptable enemy the author summarizes, can his massive campaign of counter-ideology and debate, “CIRCUIT BREAKER,” really damage al-Qaeda “to the point of complete incapacitation in less than twenty-four months?”
An often cogent argument weakened by unnecessary repetition and vitriol—reads like a hybrid of a counterinsurgency manual and a consultant’s business plan.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-59249-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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