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
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
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