the48er

Nationalism and Imperialism

Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA by John Prados

This massive, comprehensive chronicle of covert actions by the CIA since its founding 60 years ago is the work of one of the nation's most senior and widely respected U.S. intelligence historians. He leavens necessarily large quantities of damning information about CIA misdeeds with convincing evidence that however misguided its operations may have been, they were often borne of a sincere desire to spread democracy. It seems doubtful, however, that such sincerity could mean much to the victims of CIA-backed coups in nations such as Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954) and Chile (1973). In addition to detailing familiar instances of CIA criminality such as those, Prados also closely examines scores of less well-known interventions, in a staggering array of countries around the world. And he shows how what Chalmers Johnson has famously referred to as "blowback" from CIA overzealousness and ham-handedness has given millions of reasonable citizens around the globe much more than sufficient justification to hate America to death.

Safe for Democracy ... published September 25, 2006 by Ivan R. Dee, Publisher

The Bush Agenda:
Invading the World, One Economy at a Time by Antonia Juhasz

A visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies explores the Bush administration's highly successful efforts to turn to the world over to multinational corporations such as Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, Chevron, and Halliburton. In Iraq, Says Juhasz, Paul Bremer implemented a series of directives that institutionalized the rape of that country by multinationals:

The Bush administration has succeeded in maintaining a stranglehold on issues such as public versus private ownership of resources, foreign access to Iraqi oil and U.S. control of the reconstruction effort -- all of which are still governed by administration policies put into place immediately after the invasion. The Bush economic agenda favors foreign interests -- American interests -- over Iraqi self-determination.

Amy Goodman interviewed Juhasz on Democracy Now!

The Bush Agenda ... published April 25, 2006 by Regan Books

Dark Ages America by Morris Berman

In the Berman's Twilight of American Culture (2000), he warned that America was going the way of ancient Rome. Now he thinks we've already entered a Dark Age due largely to the same selfish individualism that once made America powerful -- and because we've simply forgotten how to live. "The United States will be part of the future, but ... most of it will take place outside the United States." Says Berman,

[T]here are a number of developments that can be characterized as frankly medieval: the triumph of religion over reason, and a progressive rollback of Enlightenment humanism; a massive breakdown of education and critical thinking (the statistics of which will probably strike the reader as surreal); the actual legalization of torture, and its widespread use by the American government; and the growing political and economic marginalization of the United States on the world stage. Equally sobering is that the vast majority of Americans are either ignorant of these developments or actually approve of them.

Dark Ages America ... published April 11, 2006 by W. W. Norton

Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and
Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century by Julia E. Sweig

A senior fellow specializing in Latin American affairs for the CFR explores the worldwide spread of anti-Americanism. Particularly troubling is Sweig's observation that "anti-America" comprises more than merely our enemies. "[A]mong America's traditional friends and allies," she shows, "anti-American opinion has become especially reflexive."

Though the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq is obviously one of the main causes of America's plummet in the esteem of most of the rest of the world, the author reminds us that Bush has done a good deal more than that to alienate most of the rest of the world. Beyond Iraq, the worst of Bush's international transgressions include his withdrawals from the Kyoto agreement, the ICC, and the ABM treaty. Sweig says that if America wants to rehabilitate its standing, U.S. policies will have to "signal in many different ways, in many different forums, that the United States takes seriously the way other countries define their interests."

Friendly Fire ... published April 5, 2006 by Public Affairs Press

Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change
From Hawaii to Iraq by Stephan Kinzer

A veteran NY Times correspondent observes that there was nothing novel about America's having overthrown Afghanistan's and Iraq's governments; periodically overthrowing other governments has been an integral aspect of U.S. history. Among the already well-known examples that Kinzer recounts are The Philippines (1899), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and Chile (1973). Says he,

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not an isolated episode. It was the culmination of a 110-year period during which Americans overthrew fourteen governments that displeased them for various ideological, political, and economic reasons. Like each of these operations, the "regime change" in Iraq seemed for a time -- a very short time -- to have worked. It is now clear, however, that this operation has had terrible unintended consequences. So have most of the other coups, revolutions, and invasions that the United States has mounted to depose governments it feared or mistrusted.

Terry Gross interviewed Kinzer on NPR's Fresh Air.

*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD

Overthrow ... published April 4, 2006 by Times Books

The Ruling Caste:
Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj by David Gilmour

Drawing heavily on the papers and letters of the men of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), The Ruling Caste delivers a detailed and scholarly history of the ICS that's neatly punctuated with lots of entertaining and illuminating anecdotes of those mere thousands who oversaw a region peopled by hundreds of millions. While the existence of Anglo imperialism may have been an abomination, the lives and accomplishments of many British administrators were highly laudable. Gilmour doesn't lose sight of the fact that the Brits ruled by force, but he does go a long way toward rehabilitating the reputations of a "caste" and a web of traditions that may have been excessively tarnished in recent decades, particularly by Said's Orientalism and the movie made of E.M. Forster's A Passage To India. This is not a dubious paean to the British Empire's benevolence (as was Niall Ferguson's Empire), but a reasonably fair and balanced look at some fascinating people.

The Ruling Caste ... published February 7, 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Cousins and Strangers: America, Britain, and Europe
In a New Century by Chris Patten

While Chris Patten, the last British Governor of Hong Kong, qualifies as a conservative in the UK, his distaste for American neoconservatives is probably even keener than that of most American progressives. Likewise his horror at American imperialism and unilateralism, which he says would have been unthinkable during the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations. Chides Patten,

Does America still believe in the world it created? The world it encouraged and led the rest of us -- to our vast benefit -- to accept? Has the great republic which ruled our hearts and destinies with such accomplished imperial ease, partly because it eschewed the prerogatives of the emperor, now risked its safety and its standing by today claiming for itself imperial rights? ... [U]nder American tutelage we in Europe turned our back on the bellicose nationalist politics of the 19th and early 20th centuries. ... America seems intent on going back to the politics of the century we were previously urged to abandon -- back to the gunslinging Theodore Roosevelt, but with precision-guided missiles.

As edifying as what Patten has to say is the way he says it; his intellect and command of the language can make reading or hearing him a real pleasure.

Cousins and Strangers ... published January 10, 2006 by Times Books

State of War by James Risen

NY Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau uncovered the NSA domestic spying scandal; this is Risen's solo recounting of that and other BushCo blunderings and depredations. This book's strewn with political bombshells, and the NSA domestic spying matter may not be the gravest transgression that Risen documents. Three additional candidates: (1) six months prior to the Iraq invasion, the CIA obtained extensive, credible, corroborated and current evidence that Iraq's WMD programs had been virtually nonexistent for years; (2) a bungled CIA operation -- that both Clinton and Bush approved -- gave Iran American A-bomb blueprints; (3) a 2004 CIA screw-up outed most or all of the agency's Iranian contacts. As a result, the U.S. now has virtually no intelligence "assets" in Iran.

NPR's Steve Inskeep interviewed Risen.

*Also available, in abridgement, on Audio CD.

State of War ... first published January 3, 2006 by Free Press

The Devil's Game by Robert Dreyfuss

America's would-be empire in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central and South Asia was designed to rest in part on the bedrock of political Islam. At least that is what its architects hoped. But it proved to be a devil's game. Only too late, after September 11, 2001, did Washington begin to discover its strategic miscalculation.

With that, a veteran national security reporter (whose affiliations have included those with Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and The American Prospect) traces the roots of American dalliances with radical Islamists back to 19th-century British imperial machinations. Dreyfuss details how the unholy alliances shifted to American policy makers who struck Faustian bargains with Osama bin Laden's predecessors (and, of course, with bin Laden himself) throughout the 20th century. Particularly intriguing are sections dealing with opportunities America missed -- such as those with Mossadegh and Nasser -- to get on the sane side of history. Dreyfuss concludes,

[T]he Bush administration is pursuing a strategy in the Middle East that seems calculated to boost the fortunes of the Islamic right. The United States is counting on the Shiite fundamentalists in Iraq to save its failed policy in that country, and a major theoretician of that campaign explicitly calls for the United States to cast its lot in with the ayatollahs and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The devil's game continues.

The Devil's Game ... first published October 13, 2005 by Metropolitan Books

The New American Militarism by Andrew J. Bacevich

Bacevich calls himself a conservative, but this book suggests a conservative with whom progressives can find common ground. A Vietnam veteran and retired U.S. Army officer now teaching international relations and military history at Boston College, Bacevich traces the development of America's (mis)understandings of its military from the mid-20th century to the present.

The nation's armed forces have come to mean too many things to too many people who too often see it as a quick fix for stubborn problems, Bacevich contends. As a result, America's military has grown unsustainably huge and the U.S. has been involved in nine major military interventions since the Cold War. He's also concerned by the popular media's romanticization of soldiering and by the conflation of America's greatness with its armed might. Bacevich is critical of leaders left, right, and center who, he asserts, have helped fuel the notion that U.S. military can and should re-create the world in America's image and likeness.

The New American Militarism ... first pub'd April 1, 2005 by Oxford University Press