|
Class of 1957 Book Review Site. ©2007. To add a Book Review, or to comment on a book already in this listing, send your material or review to Sam Coulbourn at Persnav@shore.net. Photo at top of each page shows ENS Arleigh Burke beneath 14-inch gun aboard Battleship USS Arizona, 1923. Revised 27 March 2008. |
![Text Box:
MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
The Middle East- A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years
By Lewis, Bernard, 1997
Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University. He’s written over two dozen books on the Middle East.
Lewis tells the history of Islam, from a western point of view, from the birth of Mohammad in Mecca in 571 A.D. and then the sweep of the new faith of Islam across the Arab world in the seventh century, the start of the caliphates, the involvement of Persians and Turks and the rise of Ali… the start of the Shi’a … civil war, murders, assassinations, the continuing prominence of Jerusalem, or al-Quds, or Bayt-al-Maqdis, or Baytha-Miqdash, or Aelia, as home base for the Jews, then a holy place for Christendom, and also for the Moslems. He relates the "Persianization” of Islam, and the shift of the capitol from Syria to Baghdad.
In spite of all the turmoil, the story of Islam is growth and expansion across the Middle East and as far west as North Africa, up into Spain and France, to Vienna, the Balkans and the Caucasus.
Then, in 1248 the Mongols come roaring down, all the way from Mongolia, and sack Baghdad. And – they all become good Muslims!
Then the Turks have their time in the sun, and we see the rise of the Ottoman empire, which reaches a high point in Europe, and then ends with the victory of the West in World War I.
At each step in these 14 centuries we see a marvelous continuum, at least in the way westerners view Islam, right up to the Cold War, when the United States and the USSR become the two cops on the block, and police the Middle East, at the same time that Israel is born, pushes the Palestinians out, and all that turmoil begins.
Review by Sam Coulbourn
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Charlie Wilson’s War
By George Crile, 2004 (Reprint Edition)
Publisher’s Review says “ . . . this covert-ops chronicle is practically impossible to put down.” No thriller writer would dare invent Wilson, a six-feet-four-inch Texas congressman, liberal on social issues but rabidly anti-Communist, a boozer, engaged in serial affairs and wheeler-dealer of consummate skill. Only slightly less improbable is Gust Avrakotos, a blue-collar Greek immigrant who joined the CIA when it was an Ivy League preserve and fought his elitist colleagues almost as ruthlessly as he fought the Soviet Union in the Cold War's waning years. In conjunction with President Zia of Pakistan in the 1980s, Wilson and Arvakotos circumvented most of the barriers to arming the Afghan mujahideen --- distance, money, law and internal CIA politics, to name a few. Their coups included getting Israeli-modified Chinese weapons smuggled into Afghanistan, with the Pakistanis turning a blind eye, and the cultivation of a genius-level weapons designer and strategist named Michael Vickers, a key architect of the guerrilla campaign that left the Soviet army stymied. The ultimate weapon in Afghanistan was the portable Stinger anti-aircraft missile, which eliminated the Soviet's Mi-24 helicopter gunships and began the train of events leading to the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and its satellites. A triumph of ruthless ability over scruples, this story has dominated recent history in the form of blowback: many of the men armed by the CIA became the Taliban's murderous enforcers and Osama bin Laden's protectors.”
Charlie Wilson was a USNA grad in the class of 1956 (some of you probably knew him). Though virtually unknown to the public at large, he and Gust Avrakatos probably had more to do with the downfall of the Soviet Union than most of the leaders who get the public acclaim. They may also have had more to do, however inadvertently, with the rise of terrorism in the Mideast and beyond. A superb book about two simply astonishing men.
Reviewed by Paul Roush.
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
India: Emerging Power
By Cohen, Stephen Philip, 2001.
Stephen Cohen has spent his life studying and writing about South Asia, and his knowledge of India seems impressive.
The book was originally published in 2001, but the paperback edition contains a preface that brings events up to 2003, and notes that 9/11 contributed to an India-Pakistan crisis that lasted over six months.
This is the story of India’s emergence, from the initial prime ministership (1947-1964) of Jawaharlal Nehru, a liberal, peace-loving man who eventually learned that in order to talk peace with adversaries, you need to have something else up your sleeve—even if you are very reluctant to use it.
His daughter, Indira Gandhi, was PM (1966-1977; 1980-1984) and she developed a very authoritarian leadership that gives us the idea that India might easily slide away from democracy, under the influence of the Hindu right.
Countless times in this book Cohen mentions the defeat of India by China in 1962. This seems to have burned a lasting impression upon the Indian conscience, lasting even today, and contributing to the country’s inferiority complex. However, since 9/ll, the broadening of Islamic terrorism across Asia has moved the threat of China back a notch, in India’s view, it appears.
Pakistan is the eternal bête-noire. From the days of Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1875-1948) who led the drive at India’s separation from Great Britain, to create East and West Pakistan. From 1947 onward, India’s enemy has been Pakistan. Indira was responsible for giving the Bengalis the push they needed to break East Pakistan free of the rest of Pakistan. Kashmir has always been the elephant in the room of any conversation about India and Pakistan. Presidents from Truman onward have tried to help solve this problem, but today, as our policy supports Pakistan and aims to improve relations with India, we leave that issue on the shelf.
From the time of Nehru, Indian politicians have wished that Pakistan would simply wither away, but today, with raging Islamic extremism and Islamabad’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, a weak and failing Pakistan could be a greater threat to India than a coherent Pakistan. [p.307]
Cohen examines the India-United States relationship over the years. India has traditionally been very leery of the United States. This became most acute during the Cold War when India found ties with Moscow more to her liking. The U.S. supported Pakistan, in one of those countless “either-or” matchups that the Cold War created.
In 1971 India went to war with Pakistan. President Richard Nixon sent the nuclear carrier Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal to demonstrate American support for Pakistan, and to show our flag to China and India. This event is also burned into the memories of Indian leaders as a show of American hostility.
India, after much agonizing, became a “nuclear power” in 1998. During the 1970s American policy toward India was all about non-proliferation. Jimmy Carter, according to Cohen, made non-proliferation the centerpiece of his foreign policy–until 1979, when the USSR invaded Afghanistan.
Americans and Indians have not done well with their relationship since 1947, but the author has great hope for improvements as the United States recognizes the economic and military importance of India; in the world of 2006 the presence of a strong, secular democracy in this part of the world is of vital importance to us.
President George W. Bush demonstrated this importance when he traveled to India and met with PM Manmohan Singh in March, 2006.
Review by Sam Coulbourn, May, 2006.
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Kissinger: Years of Upheaval
By Henry Kissinger, 1982; Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1281 pp.
Kissinger takes 1281 pages to tell the story of a whirlwind two years in the history of our nation. He begins with Nixon’s victory in 1972, taking all but one state, when the voices of opposition to the War in Viet Nam were muted for a time with the January 1973 Ceasefire. The book begins with a pleasant time around the swimming pool at Nixon’s San Clemente White House in August, 1973 when Nixon asks Henry to become his Secretary of State. The story ends with Nixon’s resignation a year later.
I was commanding a destroyer in the Tonkin Gulf when the Viet Nam war ended, and then the next year, commanding an ammunition ship carrying bombs, bullets and rockets, missiles and nuclear weapons to our forces in the Mediterranean, as we looked for all hell to break out in the Yom Kippur War of 1974. This makes reading Kissinger’s account of that time so fascinating for me, because it explains what he and others were thinking, and what they were doing, as we went from a shooting and bombing war in Southeast Asia to the surprise attack on Israel by forces from Syria and Egypt.
During the Cold War, no matter who was involved in the many regional conflicts, somehow there was a connection to Moscow and Washington. Nothing that Washington did in Viet Nam was just to oppose the drive of North Viet Nam into South Viet Nam. It involved China and the Soviet Union, and Kissinger was just the man to take us through that maze of relationships and entanglements.
It was Kissinger who engineered the marvelous breakthrough when we restored diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Here’s a neat little bit:
Kissinger notes that he and Zhou En Lai had achieved a sort of camaraderie. When they met one time Kissinger said, through an interpreter, that he was especially intimidated by Zhou’s presence.
Zhou: Why?
Kissinger: Because I read his remark to the press that I am the only man who can talk to him for a half hour without saying anything.
Zhou: I think I said one hour and a half.
In his chapter, “Persian Gulf Interlude” Kissinger discusses the very strong support the U.S. received from the Shah, an effective counterweight against the Soviets to the north.
Why did the Shah fall? Kissinger says “The single most important factor in the Shah’s collapse was the policy he learned from the West: the modernization of a feudal, Islamic society, the rapid economic development that absorbed far more of Iran’s revenues than did arms purchases.” ….. “Western liberal maxims caused the Shah to build a secular, modern state in the reformist mold of Kemal Ataturk and to force-feed industrialization that had barely left the feudal age.”
“What overthrew the Shah was a coalition of legitimate grievances and an inchoate accumulation of resentments aimed at the very concept of modernity and at the Shah’s role as a moderate world leader. The Shah was despised less for what he did wrong than for what he did right. He was brought down by those who hated reform and the West, who were against absolute rule only if it was based on secular principles.”
Review by Sam Coulbourn, May, 2007.
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
The Looming Tower: AL-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
By Lawrence Wright, 2006.
The best book written about the origins of Al Qaeda and new details of what happened prior to 9/11.
Wright's research into the background of the terrorists and the players in the FBI and CIA is very impressive. This is groundbreaking look at the people and ideas, the terrorist plans and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence Wright's remarkable book is based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States.
The book is very well written and a "Must Read".
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Mao And China: From Revolution to Revolution
By Stanley Karnow, 1972.
Stanley Karnow started his career of covering Asia in 1959 for Time-Life, and obviously studied all that an observer could find about the People’s Republic of China during the turbulent years of The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution.
“This is a book about a man in collision with a country” MaoTse-tung was already in his declining years when he sought to cleanse the Communist Party of China. He saw it as excessively bureaucratic, with all the traces of Chinese bureaucracies of earlier eras. He decided to give the country a giant enema, by turning radical youth against the communist establishment. His dream was to create true communism—something resembling the Paris Commune of 1871. He seemed to have an almost childlike desire for “rule by the masses.”
If it were not for the fact that in the upheaval of the earlier Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution thousands lost their lives, some of it was ludicrous.
As the Great Leap gained momentum, Mao blessed an offensive against pests—flies, sparrows, mosquitoes and rats. “Not even Confucius called for wiping out the four pests,” Mao said.
In the drive against flies, families were issued swatters and appeared each Sunday morning to fill large sacks with flies they had killed during the week. Party officials, mindful of targets, counted each dead fly as it was transferred with tweezers into the large sack.
As they tried to eliminate sparrows they began to see trees covered with whitish webs and soon there were millions of caterpillars, falling into your hair and down your neck. At work, workers would carry their food across the courtyard and so many caterpillars would fall into your soup and get mixed up with the noodles.
The Cultural Revolution unleashed young radicals in factories, schools, on farms, empowering them to attack the establishment, and that they did. All over China, youths struck out, “arresting” officials accused of being counterrevolutionaries, etc.
One group of young rebels demanded that traffic lights be “revolutionized” so that red would signal “go” and green “stop.”
The Cultural Revolution was tremendously disruptive to China, but it did change the social fabric of China. As youth rampaged, only the Red Army stood stalwartly to keep the country together. However, 30 years after Mao died in 1976; it’s questionable if it really had a positive effect at all.
Review by Sam Coulbourn
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Release 2.0 Updated and Expanded
By Thomas L Friedman, 2006.New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. Cloth on board, 8vo. 600 pp.
Friedman puts his hands all over the amazing phenomenon that is taking place all over the world today: The world is getting flat. Our boundaries are fading, the floor beneath us is disappearing, and so is the ceiling.
Just as the Berlin wall came down on 11/9/89, the Windows went up, Friedman writes. Communism was in ruins in Europe, and everywhere people began to communicate in ways that were never possible before. “While we were dancing on the Wall, savoring our Apples, opening up our Windows…. Bin Laden was turning his gunsights on America.”
The author lists ten things that are flattening the world, including this new connectivity, Uploading (now anyone can publish, without the need of a big publishing house.); Outsourcing (smart workers in India or China can do the work that companies paid Americans to do before, and these workers can do it better, and for less cost.); Off-shoring; Supply-chaining; Insourcing; In-forming (Google, Yahoo, etc.); and The Steroids (Digital, Mobile, Personal and Virtual).
So, now a small portion of Indians are able to raise their standard of living; the same with some Chinese; there is promise that this phenomenon will spread all over the world as we learn to work together better than ever.
For a while, the idea of a flattened world looks nothing but good. But wait…. While we are able to inform ourselves better, communicate better, trade better, do work with people all over the world better, and more and more millions can join the middle class-- there are some forces that will work to unflatten the world.
The “unflatteners” are those hundreds of millions who are too sick, or who have no hope, of making it into the middle class. There’s the AIDS epidemic, and the spread of SARS. There’s malaria. Then, there are those millions who are too frustrated, or too humiliated at their plight. Osama bin Laden and his followers have learned very well how to use all the good of this new flat world to spread the world of their cause; much of the coordination of September 11, 2001 was done on the internet. Al Qaeda are able to send their message to the world, as well as to potential recruits, through the internet. They someday soon will acquire the capability to use nuclear weapons to spread their terror, and that is a huge unflattener. Finally, there is this: Too many Toyotas. What happens when all those people who were content to walk or ride bicycles now are able to buy cars?
We are already seeing the hints of the dark side of too much prosperity in the world, with terrifically increased demand for fossil fuels. What if billions more want to use oil like Americans do? And wood for building houses? And clean drinking water? And all the other materials of the earth? How long can our planet sustain a flat world?
Friedman gives us prescriptions for living in this new flat world, and for dealing with the new challenges, so, in spite of the caveats and pitfalls, he portrays a bright future.
Review by Sam Coulbourn, June, 2007.](image423.gif)
