Robert Dreyfuss: Reading Bob Woodward. I still haven't been tempted to read any of Woodward's four Bush books, but whatever they lack in critical consciousness they evidently make up for in dish. Dreyfus writes:

Still, much of it is astonishing. And I don't just mean the juicy tidbits that Woodward gives us -- that the United States spied on Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, that a supersecret, high-tech assassination program killed large numbers of militants beginning in May, 2006, and so on. I'm talking about the dangerously sycophantic advisers surrounding Bush, the ones who stroked the ego of a know-nothing president as The Decider doubled-down on his failed war in Iraq. And I'm talking about the machinations of a rogue general named Jack Keane and his rump staff of strategists at the American Enterprise Institute who worked with Steve Hadley, the national security adviser, to promote the January, 2007, escalation called "the surge." [ . . . ]

What Woodward unfolds, page after horrifying page, is the story of how Hadley, Keane, John McCain, and the gang from AEI rode roughshod over the widespread establishment opposition to the surge. Keane, in particular, emerges as the principal advocate and facilitator of the surge strategy and as a sneaky, back-channel operator working at the behest of Dick Cheney's office and General Petraeus. [ . . . ]

During 2006, Woodward makes clear, the overwhelming consensus, both among the public and in Washington was to end the war, to start the drawdown of U.S. forces. That was the belief of General George Casey, the U.S. commander in Iraq, General John Abizaid, the CentCom commander, and nearly all of the uniformed military. It was the view of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, the State Department, and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. In 487 pages, Woodward details how all of them were steamrolled. Consider this: had they not been rolled over, today, two years later, the war would largely be over.

The picture of Bush that emerges is not a flattering one. He is portrayed as a man convinced of his utter righteousness. "Not one doubt," says Bush. And: "We're killin' 'em. We're killin' 'em all." Yet at the same time, Bush is blissfully detached, relying on Hadley for everything. His decision to order the surge, taken in November-December, 2006, was a tough one, Bush told Woodward. "Now, this is a period of time where I've got, I don't how many, holiday receptions."

Note the prominent role of McCain in promoting the surge. He, of course, would be first in line to claim credit there. Dreyfus is right that the main purpose of the surge was to stretch the war out at least through the end of Bush's term. That's its real success: the quality that allows Bush to wrap himself in commander-in-chief garb, thereby preserving the slim following he gets from those who continue to rally around the bloody flag.

Another batch of notes on new/recent books of possible interest. I've been collecting these, and spitting them out in batches of 40. Last one was Aug. 7. The whole batch are here.

Tariq Ali: Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope (revised/expanded, paperback, 2008, Verso): Originally published in 2006, focusing on Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia, with Ecuador added for this edition. I've been reluctant to pick this up -- I have a lot of respect for Ali as a critic of American empire, but distrust advocacy of politicians even when they build their careers on the rejection of that same power. Still, the independence movements in Latin America make for a remarkable story.

Tariq Ali: The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (2008, Scribner): This, on the other hand, is the book I've been waiting for: Ali's home country, with the Musharraf regime caught between ham-handed American power, popular rebellion of more than one flavor, and its own peculiar interests. Was scheduled for early 2008, but Benazir Bhutto's assassination sent Ali back to the word processor. The situation is still volatile, impossible to keep on top of. This should certainly help one catch up. [On my to-be-read shelf.]

Robert D Auerbach: Deception and Abuse at the Fed: Henry B Gonzalez Battles Alan Greenspan's Bank (2008, University of Texas Press): Gonzalez is a D-TX congressman who chaired the House Financial Services Committee, one of the few politicians who ever tried to exert any oversight on the Fed.

Phoebe Ayers/Charles Matthews/Ben Yates: How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It (paperback, 2008, No Starch Press): Big (600 page) book on Wikipedia. We've been needing some kind of book to provide an intro to the mechanics and conventions of contributing. I've put a couple of little things in, but have generally been inhibited. I bought John Broughton: Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, but haven't read much yet. (Also Mark S Choate: Professional Wikis, which is more about how to set up your own MediaWiki-based site, which may be the hardcore way to do it.)

Andrew J Bacevich, ed: The Long War: A New History of US National Security Policy Since World War II (2007, Columbia University Press): Academics only: 608 pages, list price $77.50. Twelve essays, only a couple of people I've heard of, none other than Bacevich I particularly respect.

Andrew J Bacevich: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008, Metropolitan Books): Surprise bestseller. Looks short, and may idolize Jimmy Carter more than is really decent, but not a bad idea as a corrective. I think the key to the sales burst has been the way Bacevich has avoided any partisan association with the Democrats, who he correctly recognizes are a little too trigger happy. (Come election time we'll have to balance that off against McCain, who's easily the most trigger-happy presidential candidate since James Polk, maybe ever.) [On my to-be-read shelf.]

Dave Barry: Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far) (2007, Putnam): Very funny guy, at least once upon a time. Whether that time includes the present, let alone the recent past, remains to be seen. But his biggest problem is likely the material: much of it is too weird to caricature, and too tragic to reduce to doo doo jokes. Jon Stewart seems to be a better fit for the times. Barry was fine back in the Reagan era when you weren't really sure you had to take it all seriously.

Matthew Connelly: Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2008, Belknap Press): History of the "underside" of the population control movement, especially the tendency to frame such programs in racial terms. Before the US right discovered the political utility of the "right to life" issue, it tended to be the right who promoted population control and the left who resisted them. I'm not sure where this book lands.

Drew Curtis: It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News (2007, Gotham): Easy enough to make that critique, but the main function of the book seems to be to collect as much fark as possible, and its attraction is how readily it digests all this crap that you may not otherwise bother to pay any attention to.

Julian Darley: High Noon for Natural Gas: The New Energy Crisis (paperback, 2004, Chelsea Green): It seems likely that peak oil will be followed by problems in the supply of natural gas, although the picture of how that will play out is less clear. This is one of the few books that specifically addresses natural gas.

Ross Douthat/Reihan Salam: Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (2008, Doubleday): A little cognitive dissonance here. It's not really opposition to "the Democrats' cultural liberalism" that motivates the Republican Party. It's greed. So while they get a kick out of splitting the working class over cultural issues, the principle they're really serious about is picking workers' pockets. Arguing that Republicans should promote workers' economic interests goes so hard against the grain as to be laughable. Of course, if workers want to believe it, they'd be happy to hum a few bars. Just don't expect it to pay off. (In fairness, Kevin Phillips started down this line two decades ago. He never got it to work.)

Robert Engelman: More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want (2008, Island Press): More people, or more for each person? A book on population growth, and how women have throughout history have sought to manage their fertility to optimize their children's future. [Found this in library but didn't finish it.]

Alvin S Felzenberg: The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game (2008, Basic Books): An exercise in such parlor games as "who's the worst president ever?" Breaks them down categorically rather than by just picking them off in order, which makes it more work to use, although possibly more useful to read.

Jonathan Fenby: Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present (2008, Ecco): Big, general history of China since 1850, which doesn't seem like a particularly interesting starting date -- sometime after the humiliation of the Opium Wars, if memory serves. It does sort of fill a need, but with all the new books on China coming out -- the Olympics may have something to do with it, but it's ovedue anyway -- I expect it will take a while to sort out which books are really worthwhile. Just as an indication, there's also Rana Mitter: Modern China: A Very Short Introduction (paperback, 2008, Oxford University Press), which covers the same ground in 144 pages.

Robert Fisk: The Age of the Warrior: Selected Essays (2008, Nation Books): Mostly short columns, 546 pages of them. Not sure how far they go back, but the first section includes one called "Be very afraid: Bush Productions is preparing to go into action." Fisk has covered what he called The Great War for Civilisation at least as far back as the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which he chronicled in Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon. The earlier book is absolutely essential. The later I bought but still haven't found time for. This covers the same ground in small bites, and carries forward -- toward the end is "Who killed Benazir?"

Thomas L Friedman: Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution -- and How It Can Renew America (2008, Farrar Straus and Giroux): More garbled clichés from the New York Times' village idiot. Looks like they copped the cover art from Hieronymous Bosch, another faux pas. A skyline shot of Sao Paulo would be much more effective.

Andrew Gelman: Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do (2008, Princeton University Press): Examines why Democrats win in most relatively wealthy states while Republicans win in most relatively poor states, despite the fact that rich people overwhelmingly vote Republican, and poor people primarily vote Democrat.

Aaron Glantz: Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (paperback, 2008, Haymarket Books): Reports from US soldiers who took part in Iraq and Afghanistan, from hearings held by Iraq Veterans Against the War. Glantz previously wrote How America Lost Iraq, the first of several books on that theme.

Brian Hicks/Chris Nelder: Profit From the Peak: The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century (2008, Wiley): I don't normally go for books that bill themselves as investment guides, even if the occasion is a catastrophe, but is nearly encyclopedic on the peak oil issue, and looks to be pretty level headed. Haven't looked at it close enough to figure out what that investment angle might be. Some of the books in this genre are: Aric McBay: Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life After Gridcrash; Mick Winter: Peak Oil Prep: Prepare for Peak Oil, Climate Change and Economic Collapse; Stephen Leeb: The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrell; Stephen Leeb: The Oil Factor: Protect Yourself and Profit From the Coming Energy Crisis; George Orwel: Black Gold: The New Frontier in Oil for Investors; more generally: Daniel A Arnold: The Great Bust Ahead: The Greatest Depression in American and UK History is Just Several Short Years Away/This is Your Concise Reference Guide to Understanding Why and How Best to Survive It; Peter D Schiff: Crash Proof: How to Profit From the Coming Economic Collapse; James Turk/John Rubino: The Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit from It: Make a Fortune by Investing in Gold and Other Hard Assets; Addison Wiggin: The Demise of the Dollar . . . : And Why It's Even Better for Your Investments; Michael J Panzner: Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future From Four Impending Catastrophes; Howard J Ruff: How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years in the 21st Century. [Got and read this from library.]

Nathan Hodge/Sharon Weinberger: A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry (2008, Bloomsbury): Another history-via-travel book, which includes stops in Pakistan, Iran, India, China, North Korea, Israel, Russia, France, UK, as well as numerous spots in the US. Weinberger previously wrote: Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underground.

Kaylene Johnson: Sarah: How a Small Town Girl Turned Alaska's Political Establishment on Its Ear (paperback, 2008, Epicenter Press): Well, that was quick, even for a scant 159 pages, and no doubt obsolete by the time you read this.

Ishmael Jones: The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture (2008, Encounter Books): Evidently written by a long-time spook who never got his higher-ups to understand anything he was telling them, much less stuff they never found out about.

Sonali Kolhatkar/James Ingalls: Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (paperback, 2006, Seven Stories Press): Co-directors of Afghan Women's Mission, a US-based NGO working with RAWA (Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan). They look to be ahead of the learning curve, but Amazon reviews are very polarized.

Daniel J Levitin: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (2008, Dutton): Follow-up to the author's This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, which I bought but haven't read. Six song classes: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, love.

Elvin T Lim: The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W Bush (2008, Oxford University Press): Lots of things have declined, not least intellectual integrity. Rhetoric, however, still seems to be very much with us -- it's just grown emptier and more clichéd.

Mark London/Brian Kelly: The Last Forest: The Amazon in the Age of Globalization (2007, Random House): Dispatches from the world's largest tropical forest, fast disappearing as it's chewed up to support the local and world economy.

Larry McMurtry: Books: A Memoir (2008, Simon & Schuster): Memoirs of a small-town Texas bookseller, who writes novels and movies on the side.

Karl E Meyer/Shareen Blair Brysac: Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East (2008, WW Norton): Authors of Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia, a 1999 book I bought back when it was still an intellectual curiosity and never got around to reading. Another sweeping history of (mostly English) imperial adventures in the Middle East.

Mark Crispin Miller, ed: Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 (paperback, 2008, Ig): I haven't paid much attention to the various stolen election arguments, which Miller has contributed much to, but this at least is short and convenient and covers a bunch of ground.

Michael Moore: Mike's Election Guide 2008 (paperback, 2008, Grand Central Publishing): A straightforward book, but still feels weird. Moore is a mainstream celebrity, but still is regarded as fringe political, so you never quite know whether his endorsements of relatively mild-mannered Democrats helps or hurts.

Retort: Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (paperback, 2005, Verso): San Francisco-based group, attempts to explain post-9/11 history through the Situationist concept of spectacle. As I recall, the theory's original attraction was its ability to expand upon the ordinary. I'm not sure how that applies here.

Eric Roston: The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat (2008, Walker): A biography of an element, from the origins of life to the threat of global warming.

Michael Schwartz: War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (paperback, 2008, Haymarket Books): Schwartz has written a number of posts at TomDispatch, some of the most insightful analysis on Iraq around. In particular, he was one of the first to point out the economic impact of Bremer's early reforms, which on top of the initial bombing and looting had disastrous effects on the Iraqi economy.

Nancy Soderberg/Brian Katulis: The Prosperity Agenda: What the World Wants From America -- and What We Need in Return (2008, Wiley): Soderberg held NSC and UN Ambassador posts in the Clinton administration. Wrote a previous book, The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might, with foreword by Clinton. Seems like an insider trying to think her way out of the box. Obviously, being a superpower wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Now can we negotiate?

Gary Stewart: Rumba on the River: A History of Popular Music of the Two Congos (paperback, 2004, Verso): Saw this cited in the liner notes to Tabu Ley Rochereau's The Voice of Lightness. Not a lot of good books on African music, but this looks like it might be very useful.

Allegra Stratton: Muhajababes (paperback, 2008, Melville House): 25-year-old reporter tramps all across the Middle East, talking to young women, collecting the stories she finds into a book. Easy as that.

Charles Tripp: A History of Iraq (3rd edition, paperback, 2007, Cambridge University Press): Could have been the standard history when it came out in 2000. A lot has happened since then, resulting in a second edition in 2002, and now this third pass. Tripp also wrote Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism (2006).

Phil Valentine: The Conservative's Handbook: Defining the Right Position on Issues From A to Z (2008, Cumberland House): Some kind of right-wing radio pundit. The A-to-Z approach to the issues gives it a comprehensive air, and it's serious enough and cogent enough -- most likely a combination of half truths and slick posturing -- to tempt one to argue with it instead of dismissing it out of hand. Bible-like binding strikes me as inconvenient and pretentious.

Michael Waldman: A Return to Common Sense: Seven Bold Ways to Revitalize Democracy (2008, Sourcebooks): FYI: End voter registration as we know it; Fix electronic voting; Increase voter turnout; Campaign finance reform; End partisan gerrymandering; End the electoral college; Curb the imperial presidency and fix Congress. Author used to write speeches for Clinton, where I'm sure he was every bit as bold.

Bob W White: Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu's Zaire (paperback, 2008, Duke University Press): Mobutu loved to see his people sing and dance. Kept them from paying too much attention while he stole the country blind.

Robert Christgau on America's Secret Fundamentalists. Book review of Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. The subject is a group of politically engaged Christians who predate and are more influential than the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Christgau writes:

Sharlet establishes that since the end of World War II, The Family, aka The Fellowship, has exerted its influence in an impressive and frightening array of mostly dire events. Its first coup was the wholesale exoneration of minor Nazis and major Nazi collaborators after the war. The addition of under God to the Pledge of Allegiance and In God We Trust to U.S. currency were its initiatives. Its first major government operative was Sen. Frank Carlson, R-Kan., who persuaded Dwight Eisenhower to run as a Republican, purged progressive bureaucrats from his chair at the obscure Civil Service Employees Committee and lobbied for such heads of state as Haiti's "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Other dictators abetted by The Family included Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam, Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Park Chung Hee of South Korea, Artur da Costa e Silva of Brazil, Gen. Suharto of Indonesia, Mohamed Siad Barre of Somalia and Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova of El Salvador, which got its first infusion of special aid at the behest of Jimmy Carter, who has called Family leader Doug Coe a "very important person" in his life. Hillary Clinton has also been a Family "friend," and not just via its major public manifestation, the relatively anodyne annual National Prayer Breakfast. The Family was instrumental in the creation of Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship, and of the Community Bible Study project through which George W. Bush found Jesus in 1985.

Who are the people in this Family?

Yet you won't meet the usual cast of hucksters and theocrats -- James Dobson, Tony Perkins, John Hagee, Rick Warren, Tim LaHaye, whoever. A few politicians pass through, notably Sam Brownback, but for the most part you've never heard of these rather colorless people, every one of whom Sharlet engages on a human level. This failure to flatter stereotype couldn't have helped Sharlet get reviewed and typifies his insight into American Christianity, which subdivides endlessly. The most important such grouping, argues Gallup-pollster-turned-Rice-University-sociologist D. Michael Lindsay in Faith in the Halls of Power (a well-researched -- and widely reviewed -- 2007 overview of American evangelicals whose "sympathetic perspective" Sharlet notes with some asperity), pits populists against cosmopolitans. The populists have become familiar figures in secular humanist folklore. The Family -- which is neither an official organization nor a coherent conspiracy -- enlists only cosmopolitans.

I noticed that in the Recent Reading list over left Geert Mak's In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century is about to slip off. That's a shame for two reasons. One is that I haven't finished the book yet. I got up to page 732, a little more than 100 shy of the end, before I had to put it down to deal with some books that I had picked up on 14-day loan from the library. I'm still in that pile, dealing with them as briskly as I can, and I've just picked up Ahmed Rashid's Descent Into Chaos: The US and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, which seems likely to be one of the more important books of the year. Also have some things that I bought that I'm itching to get into, like James K Galbraith: The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, and Thomas Frank: The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. (Also on order are: Arno J Mayer: Ploughshares Into Swords: From Zionism to Israel, and Andrew J Bacevich: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. So I have plenty on my plate.

The other reason it's a shame is that I've simply gotten more pure pleasure out of Mak's book than any other book I've read this year. It's a travel book across Europe during the fin de siècle year of 1999 to a series of spots selected for what they reveal of the serial history of Europe from 1900 on. Part of the book consists of interviews with witnesses and actors, as interesting as Studs Terkel. Part is a survey of what survived and what did not. Most is relevant history. It's not purely sequential, especially in the thickly eventful interwar years. And it doesn't get to everywhere -- I would have expected a bit on the pre-1914 Balkan Wars. (Post-Tito Yugoslavia might still be in the last 100 pages.) But it's a magnificent book, revelatory, a real delight. I can hardly wait to get back to it.

Andrew J Bacevich: Illusions of Victory. This is an excerpt from Bacevich's new book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008, Metropolitan Books). At least at a high level, Bacevich calls into question just what the US military can do. The following seems a pretty fair synopsis of the last seven years:

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Bush conceived of a bold, offensive strategy, vowing to "take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge." The military offered the principal means for undertaking this offensive, and U.S. forces soon found themselves engaged on several fronts.

Two of those fronts -- Afghanistan and Iraq -- commanded priority attention. In each case, the assigned task was to deliver a knockout blow, leading to a quick, decisive, economical, politically meaningful victory. In each case, despite impressive displays of valor, fortitude, durability, and technological sophistication, America's military came up short. The problem lay not with the level of exertion but with the results achieved.

In Afghanistan, U.S. forces failed to eliminate the leadership of Al Qaeda. Although they toppled the Taliban regime that had ruled most of that country, they failed to eliminate the Taliban movement, which soon began to claw its way back. Intended as a brief campaign, the Afghan War became a protracted one. Nearly seven years after it began, there is no end in sight. If anything, America's adversaries are gaining strength. The outcome remains much in doubt.

In Iraq, events followed a similar pattern, with the appearance of easy success belied by subsequent developments. The U.S. invasion began on March 19, 2003. Six weeks later, against the backdrop of a White House-produced banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," President Bush declared that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended." This claim proved illusory.

Writing shortly after the fall of Baghdad, the influential neoconservatives David Frum and Richard Perle declared Operation Iraqi Freedom "a vivid and compelling demonstration of America's ability to win swift and total victory." General Tommy Franks, commanding the force that invaded Iraq, modestly characterized the results of his handiwork as "unequalled in its excellence by anything in the annals of war." In retrospect, such judgments -- and they were legion -- can only be considered risible. A war thought to have ended on April 9, 2003, in Baghdad's al-Firdos Square was only just beginning. Fighting dragged on for years, exacting a cruel toll. Iraq became a reprise of Vietnam, although in some respects at least on a blessedly smaller scale.

How did the US get into this mess? Bacevich identifies three illusions. The first was the idea that "The Pentagon had devised a new American Way of War, investing its forces with capabilities unlike any the world had ever seen." You know: technology, speed, precision, like that. The second was that "American civilian and military leaders subscribed to a common set of principles for employing their now-dominant forces" -- the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, which was meant to prevent politicians from flying off half-cocked and landing us into future Vietnams, in large part by the politically loaded need to call up reserves in order to implement any significant military action. The third illusion was that "the military and American society had successfully patched up the differences that produced something akin to divorce during the divisive Vietnam years." This was accomplished by switching to an All-Volunteer Force, although the end result of that was to make future military operations optional and incidental to all but the few Americans who volunteered to be in harm's way.

When it came to the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, civilian willingness to conform to its provisions proved to be highly contingent. Confronting Powell in 1993, Madeleine Albright famously demanded to know, "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about, if we can't use it?" Mesmerized by the prospects of putting American soldiers to work to alleviate the world's ills, Albright soon enough got her way. An odd alliance that combined left-leaning do-gooders with jingoistic politicians and pundits succeeded in chipping away at constraints on the use of force. "Humanitarian intervention" became all the rage. Whatever restraining influence the generals exercised during the 1990s did not survive that decade. Lessons of Vietnam that had once seemed indelible were forgotten.

For Bush, 9/11 was an opportunity to make a clean break with all past inhibitions against using military force. In a neat trick, all past U.S. policies were vindicated by the terrorist attack, as opposed to being called into question:

With the president denying any connection between the events of September 11th and past U.S. policies, his declaration of a global war nipped in the bud whatever inclination the public might have entertained to reconsider those policies. In essence, Bush counted on war both to concentrate greater power in his own hands and to divert attention from the political, economic, and cultural bind in which the United States found itself as a result of its own past behavior.

Conclusion:

Between what President Bush called upon America's soldiers to do and what they were capable of doing loomed a huge gap that defines the military crisis besetting the United States today. For a nation accustomed to seeing military power as its trump card, the implications of that gap are monumental.

It is refreshing to look at the failures of the Bush administration as failures of the US military itself. That's a view that no electable Democrat can disclose since "the troops" have been turned into an unquestionable icon. The antiwar side may be most guilty of this. By "support our troops" the prowar side always meant "support our mission"; instead of just pointing out that the hawks are hiding behind the uniforms, and going on to the real front of contention, the mission, too many antiwar spokesfolk have tried to co-opt the slogan, arguing that the best way to support the troops would be to get out of stupid, senseless wars. True enough, but those wars -- the only kind there are -- are the troops' bread and butter.

Bacevich may try to tone down his critique by praising the valor, courage, discipline, etc., of the soldiers, but the key point is that they're not fit for their assigned mission. Again, you can see all aspects of this misfit in HBO's Generation Kill, even without factoring in that what's being shown is pretty much a best case scenario: the early days of the war when there were still clear enemies, a relatively disciplined elite group of Marines, etc. I don't yet know how far Bacevich will go with his critique, but I do know that there is plenty of terrain for someone to light up.

Samantha Power: The Democrats & National Security. Meant to write something on this a while ago, but it's been a long slog just to read it. It's nominally a book review of J Peter Scoblic: US vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security (which I've read and posted notes on -- the book page is here), and Matthew Yglesias: Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats, which I haven't read, although it's piqued my attention. I have been looking at Yglesias's now-discontinued Atlantic blog lately: I've been impressed by the analysis, but perhaps even more so by his ability to put up 8-12 posts per day -- he's so prolific that most people could spend their entire browsing lives just following him around.

Let's start with a couple of Power quotes reviewing Yglesias's book:

Yglesias is persuasive in showing how mainstream Democrats, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, caricatured the antiwar left as a way of flaunting their national security bona fides. The intraparty squabble inhibited the creation of a pluralistic coalition united against the administration's unilateralism and militarism.

Such a "pluralistic coalition" would have had to unite Democrats who were opposed to war as America's default means of dealing with international predicaments and Democrats who had no problem with that concept but merely thought that invading Iraq was insane. In other words, two groups delineated by one spending more time and energy attacking the other than their nominal prowar opponents, in large part because the two groups were separated by more fundamental distance than the latter group had from the warmongers.

Actually, the Democrats split up into four camps: the antiwar people; those who opposed the Iraq war on pragmatic grounds but were at pains to oppose the antiwar people; those who couldn't resist the idea of a popular war (who voted for the Iraq war in 2002 and now mostly oppose it); and Joe Lieberman. The middle groups, including those like Power who love a good humanitarian war, are intrinsically muddled, trying to defend an idealistic vision of war, and therefore of American military might, that is impossible to implement. The net result is that the antiwar people those Democrats ceaselessly attack are the ones who in the end are always proven right.

Yglesias also gives an important account of the different positions that led to Democratic acquiescence in the war in Iraq -- an acquiescence that neutered or delayed many Democrats' criticisms of the President. For some Democrats the Iraq war was the natural culmination of the thinking that earlier gave rise to President Clinton's intervention in Kosovo. [ . . . ]

We don't know how events in 2003 would have progressed without the Kosovo war, but it is hard to imagine that President Bush -- a man who repudiated five treaties in his first year in office and has consistently ridiculed the UN -- would have been deterred in any way by the absence of past precedent.

Moreover, while some prominent "liberal hawks" favored the Iraq war, plenty of those who had supported NATO action in Kosovo for humanitarian reasons opposed the war in Iraq on those or other grounds. Yglesias wrongly implies that support for one war inevitably entailed support for the other; he also unfortunately lends credence to the surprisingly prevalent fiction that Bush invaded Iraq for humanitarian purposes.

People forget that the US was already at war with Iraq before Bush decided to launch his invasion. Clinton and Bush had repeatedly bombed Iraq, in what basically amounted to a less intense version of the Kosovo operation: the aim in Iraq was more to intimidate Saddam than to force any specific action, although had Saddam invaded Kurdistan the Kosovo model could easily have been employed to persuade him to withdraw. Some people opposed invading Iraq precisely because they thought this "containment" war was working perfectly well. To call either operation "humanitarian" was pretty strange, possible only by the distance air forces enjoy from their killing.

Kosovo didn't make much of an antiwar splash -- Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn wrote books about it, but that was about it -- because it never engaged the American people is any practical way. Maybe it should have, but with no political leaders in either party questioning it, there wasn't anything practical to rally around.

Yglesias is most convincing when he discusses the other two factors behind the rush to war -- an international security hawkishness among Democrats, who accepted Kenneth Pollack's argument that Iraq was indeed a "gathering storm"; and domestic political opportunism rooted in the belief that Washington careers would be ruined by the failure to support a war that proved successful (the so-called "Sam Nunn effect," after the Georgia senator whose presidential hopes were widely seen to have been dashed by his opposition to the first Gulf War).

I think of the latter more as the Clinton-Gore effect, since their support of the 1990-91 Gulf War put them in good position to taunt the first Bush for failing to finish off Saddam. Their belligerence resulted in the "containment" operations that kept the Iraq war on a low simmer, ready for the next chef to crank up the fire. Without Clinton and Gore, their political success in 1992 and their preservation of the Iraq issue, Bush would have had a much harder time selling his invasion.

Power quotes Yglesias:

Conservative Republicans have not merely made some mistakes on Iraq, and some other mistakes on Iran, and some other mistakes on North Korea, plus some mistakes on Syria, while mishandling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, by coincidence, damaging our relationships with formerly close allies. Rather, they are making one big mistake in seeking to transform the United States' role in the world . . . to that of an imperial superpower that seeks to use its national strength to dominate the world and needlessly heighten conflicts.

How many Democrats have you ever heard talking about that one big mistake? Something close to a majority of the Democratic Party rank and file would agree with that critique, but it is all but impossible to find a Democrat in Washington to say as much. Bridging that gap strikes me as the real challenge of the antiwar movement right now, because if we can make militarism and war a partisan issue, we can raise the real issue, and in the process separate the enablers from the warmongers.

Unfortunately, if Samantha Power has anything to say about it (and presumably her purge from the campaign will be temporary), Obama won't be the one to "end the mindset that got us into war in the first place" -- as he memorably put it. The last third of the piece is her political platform, with lots of hugs and kisses for the military:

Since Vietnam there has never been a more auspicious time for the Democratic Party to establish close relations with the US military. Building on Obama's October 2002 speech explaining his opposition to the war in Iraq, Democrats can continue to argue that Obama and his party will never do what the Republicans have done: send US service members to fight unnecessary wars. He will not stretch the US military and military families to their breaking points by extending tours of duty beyond what is tolerable. He will not order young cadets and reservists to carry out cruel and inhuman acts against foreign detainees and then abandon them when it becomes politically inconvenient, allowing them to be court-martialed while those who authorized the practices take up high-paying jobs at corporate law firms or prestigious teaching posts at top-flight law schools.

There are lots of problems with this, starting with the fact that the military needs stress to survive and grow, and that means they need war. Officers need war to advance through the ranks. The Marines in Generation Kill need war for their self-identity. The military-industrial complex needs the cash flow, not just for weapons but also to keep the political machine well oiled. You can't take the pain out of the military without questioning why is exists in the first place, and that's the one thing no one with a stake in the racket can risk, because quite frankly there is no good reason for the US Dept. of Defense and its various arms (except maybe the Coast Guard, and some reserves for disaster duty) to exist.

She goes on and on. When she says, "Democrats must play up the sharp differences that exist between the two parties on national security," she's trying to sharpen differences that hardly exist. Coddling the troops doesn't make war less painful, nor does it make war less likely. If anything, the promise of painless war -- what Clinton's nearsightedness thought he had seen in Kosovo -- reduces the inhibitions of future leaders against starting such engagements.

While it's easy to pick on Democrats, I think the antiwar movement is at least partly at fault here as well -- at least those who have tried to justify opposing the war as a means of helping (showing support for) the troops. I don't have a big problem with veterans benefits and such -- other than that I think many non-veterans are at least as worthy of our support -- but we cut the ground out from under ourselves by offering comfort and support for the mechanics of war. Back in the 1960s there was a slogan that went, "suppose they gave a war and nobody came." The fact that people still come out for war, that they sign up and march off, may be a small part of the problem, but it is a real one. I still believe now as I did then: that everyone who does so has acted wrongly, and that it's not too much to expect otherwise.

J Peter Scoblic: US vs Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Underminded America's Security (2008, Viking Books)

Scoblic's basic argument is that the disastrous will to empire that the neoconservatives brought to Washington was nothing new: it was standard conservatism, at least going back to the early days of the Cold War. Take William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater for examples, and throw in their interlocutor L. Brent Bozell (Buckley's brother-in-law, the ghost writer of Goldwater's bestseller).

Looks like it's time for another new book list, even though I posted the last batch of 40 roughly two weeks ago, on July 23. Next one is likely to come shortly, given how much I have left over. The previous posts have been collected here.

John Anderson: Follow the Money: How George W Bush and the Texas Republicans Hog-Tied America (2007, Scribner): Michael Lind's Made in Texas: George W Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics is probably the most convincing Bush book I've read thus far, and this seems to be along those lines. Bush and his Texas political cronies managed to take over the Republican national machine, suddenly pushing the country far right. The more behind the money behind the better.

Jurgen Brauer/Hubert van Tuyll: Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History (2008, University of Chicago Press): Strikes me as a cheap argument, but the juxtaposition of economic and military logic, all those rational actors in pursuit of madness, is likely to offer some peculiar edification. But note that the economics of war has been drenched in even more red ink than blood for a long time now.

Gary Brecher: War Nerd (paperback, 2008, Soft Skull Press): Reportedly a data entry clerk in Fresno, CA, writing a column for the Moscow-based The Exile, Matt Taibbi's home for much of the 1990s. Scattered columns. Loves everything about the history of war. Doesn't think the US is very good at it.

Jerome R Corsi: Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (2008, Threshold Editions): Author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry cashes in on another election. Came out same day as David Freddoso's The Case Against Barack Obama: The Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate, with the same discounts and promo push. At this point Corsi is leading in sales, #7 on Amazon vs. #15 for Freddoso. Both books show extreme 5-star/1-star splits.

Meghnad Desai: Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (2002; paperback, 2004, Verso): Returns to Marx after the collapse of the Soviet Union to find a thinker who saw capitalism as a necessary stage to socialism, not something one can simply oppose but must move through and beyond -- actually, a position broadly understood before Lenin tried to fudge an exception. As far as I understand it, I think Desai is right. However, it's not clear to me what the value might be of trying to salvage Marx from the Marxists. More recently wrote: Rethinking Islam: The Ideology of the New Terror.

Michael Dobbs: One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (2008, Knopf): Looks like a major history on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. I just read Tony Judt's short book review on the subject, and found it gripping. Not that I'm up for 448 pages on the subject.

Richard Ellis: Tuna: A Love Story (2008, Knopf): More prosaically, the story of tuna: oversized, overfished, sooner or later due to be destroyed, either directly or through farming. Ellis previously wrote: The Empty Ocean, which seems to be the basic book on overfishing, although also cf. Charles Clover: The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat (new in paperback from University of California Press), and Paul Molyneaux: Swimming in Circles: Aquaculture and the End of Wild Oceans.

Rick Fantasia/Kim Voss: Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement (paperback, 2004, University of California Press): On the labor movement and its prospects, more basically on the political economics of work, the factors pushing wages down, not least the virtual disappearance of workers from the American social imagination.

Thomas Frank: The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (2008, Metropolitan): I snapped this up and will get to it sooner or later. It's very much up the line of what I've been thinking about, and doubtless has a lot of useful details -- especially on the corruption that has become so rampant under the Republicans. Also picked up James Galbraith's The Predator State, which strikes me as more likely to teach me something I don't already know.

David Freddoso: The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate (2008, Regnery): The right's first big hatchet job on Obama, rushed into print after the expiry date on dozens of Hillary Clinton books lapsed. Bound for the bestseller lists: Borders introduced it with a 40% discount; Amazon with 45%. Same treatment for Swift Boater Jerome R Corsi: Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (2008, Threshold Editions).

Jeffrey A Frieden: Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (2006; paperback, 2007, WW Norton): Global history of capitalism in the 20th century, with its obvious fall in the 1930s and a fairly long stretch of expansion after WWII. Seems like it might be a useful overview.

James K Galbraith: The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008, Free Press): I'm not sure what it means, but the first assertion in the title may help to clear the air. What I suspect is: once they seize power (as they have done), conservatives see the state as a tool for advancing their (and to a lesser extent their sponsors') interests, regardless of whatever propaganda they spewed out on the way to the top. Of course, there are other ways of looking at what they've done, such as the promotion of crony capitalism monopolies, another way their practice runs counter to free markets. Galbraith is a sharp economist; this could be a very important book. (It's already on my shelf.)

Rob Gifford: China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power (paperback, 2008, Random House): Travel book, cuts through a cross section of China from Shanghai to Kazakhstan on China's Mother Road, Route 312.

Steven M Gillon: The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation (2008, Oxford University Press): Not sure what generation Gillon has in mind; mine was more disgusted than defined. As for the "pact": evidently Clinton and Gingrich were on the verge of making some bipartisan (or counterpartisan) deal on Social Security and Medicare in 1997, which got derailed by more pressing matters (Monica Lewinsky). Sounds like a few blow jobs and a splattered dress were all that saved us.

Mike Gravel/Joe Lauria: A Political Odyssey: The Rise of American Militarism and a Man's Fight to Stop It (paperback, 2008, Seven Stories Press): I usually don't bother listing books by politicians, but this one's exceptional, and not just because he isn't much of a politician. Note ghostwriter gets same size type on front cover. Note forward by Daniel Ellsberg.

Chelsea Handler: Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea (2008, Simon Spotlight Entertainment): Noticed this earlier, but figured it was too far off-topic to mention here, until it somehow showed up in my Amazon Recommendations list. Read a few pages in the store, which were funnier than "Sex and the City" but not as funny as Cynthia Heimel. Haven't heard from Heimel in a while, so maybe this fills a void. Handler previously wrote My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands. Heimel, on the other hand, wrote: Sex Tips for Girls (reissued as Advanced Sex Tips for Girls: This Time It's Personal); When Your Phone Doesn't Ring, It'll Be Me; If You Can't Live Without Me, Why Aren't You Dead Yet; and the more poignant Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I'm Kissing You Goodbye!

David Harvey: A Short History of Neoliberalism (paperback, 2007, Oxford University Press): Goes back three decades or so, roughly since 1970, the economic doctrines pushed especially by the US through the IMF, the World Bank, and various trade regimes. Harvey has a lot of books, including Limits to Capital and Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development.

Carl Hiaasen: The Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport (2008, Knopf): My first thought was that this would be another test for George Plimpton's ball-size theory of sports books. I've never read any of the golf books Plimpton so admires, and I doubt that I'll try this one. Grew up thinking that golf was the sport of another class, and I've never overcome that mental framework. A Kenneth Rexroth poem about sneaking into the country club at night and shitting in the golf holes didn't help.

David Lida: First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century (2008, Riverhead): Described as a "literary portrait," a panorama of Mexico City. Subtitle reminds me of Walter Benjamin, who wrote of Paris as the capital of the 19th century.

Craig Miner: Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State, 1854-2000 (paperback, 2005, University Press of Kansas): Wichita State history professor, taught there in my day and still around, has a pile of books on Kansas history, this the most general one. Should probably pick it up for reference some time. But I do recall that we had to spend Fifth Grade doing state history. Fifth grade sucked.

David Model: State of Darkness: US Complicity in Genocides Since 1945 (paperback, 2008, AuthorHouse): Author counts and documents eight genocides since 1945 that the US has been involved in, or perhaps largely responsible for. Less "a problem from hell" (as Samantha Power put it) than a policy for hell. Model has been down this road before; e.g., his previous book, Lying for Empire: How to Commit War Crimes With a Straight Face.

Richard A Muller: Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines (2008, WW Norton): Probably even more useful for citizens wanting to sanity check those future presidents. I think it's obvious that some basic understanding of science is essential for getting any sort of grasp on contemporary issues.

Dennis Perrin: Savage Mules: The Democrats and Endless War (paperback, 2008, Verso): Short (160 pages) book on trigger-happy Democrats, perhaps unfairly starting with Andrew Jackson and no doubt mentioning Henry Jackson with Iraq and Afghanistan of most recent interest. Don't know if this gets into Israel -- that would take a much larger book.

Jonas Pontusson: Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe Vs. Liberal America (paperback, 2005, Cornell University Press): The basic contrast could use more press. Don't know anything about the author, but he's obviously thinking like a European as regards Liberal. Wait till he gets the full measure of Conservative America.

Neil Postman/Steve Powers: How to Watch TV News: Revised Edition (paperback, 2008, Penguin): Postman was one of the most important education and culture critics of our time -- a book he co-wrote with Charles Weingartnet back around 1970, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, had a profound impact on me way back when. He died in 2003, having co-written this book with Powers 10 or so years earlier. Powers has some 45 years of broadcast news experience. He plugs in many recent examples, but I doubt that the critique has changed much.

TR Reid: The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (2004; paperback, 2005, Penguin): Fairly extensive comparisons of US and Europe, favoring the latter. Tony Judt reviewed this in Reappraisals and it seems to have limits but useful info. (Also reviewed, along the same lines, Jeremy Rifkin: The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream; I've long found Rifkin to be extremely unreliable.)

Erik Reinert: How Rich Countries Got Rich . . . and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor (2007, Public Affairs): The history is pretty clear: rich countries today developed behind protectionist trade barriers, which they lowered only once they were positioned to compete in global free trade (and then grudgingly). Developing countries, at least some of them, have been able to accelerate this process through industrial policies. Countries that haven't done this have remained poor (although in many cases local elites have done well -- the OPEC countries are a case in point).

Gregory Rodriguez: Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America (2007, Pantheon): Looks like a substantial history not just of Mexican immigration into the US but of Mexico itself.

Robert J Samuelson: The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement (paperback, 1997, Vintage): Recommended by David Warsh as "the wisest treatment" of the economic, political, and social evolution of the US in the half-century after WWII. Samuelson has a new book scheduled for 11/2008: The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Transformation of America's Economy, Politics, and Society.

Bruce J Schulman/Julian E Zelizer, eds.: Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (paperback, 2008, Harvard University Press): Collection of history essays, edited by a couple of historians. Don't recognize any authors, but titles include "Inventing Family Values," "The White Ethnic Strategy," and "The Conservative Struggle and the Energy Crisis."

Peter Schweizer: Makers and Takers: Why Conservatives Work Harder, Feel Happier, Have Closer Families, Take Fewer Drugs, Give More Generously, Value Honesty More, Are Less Materialistic and Envious, Whine Less . . . and Even Hug Their Children More Than Liberals (2008, Doubleday): Wow. Makes me wonder whether conservatives are conservative because they're perfect, or conservatives are perfect because they're conservative. Sounds like a lot of self-flattery combined with a dose of how to lie with statistics. Still, why is it that most of the conservatives that we actually know about don't exactly fit this profile. Try fitting George Bush into that line. Or Rush Limbaugh (take fewer drugs? whine less?).

Natan Sharansky: Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy (2008, Public Affairs): Reports are that GW Bush's mind got blown by Sharansky's previous book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror -- that set him off on the tangent that led Billmon to dub him "Democracy Boy." But I have to wonder whether even Bush can stomach this one: Sharansky's "democracy" was pure sophistry, but "identity" is his real bread and butter, as it is and has been for fascists and nationalists throughout the ages.

Rob Sheffield: Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (paperback, 2007, Three Rivers Press): I went through a stage in the mid-'70s when I read nothing but rock crit, then a few years later got to where I could read virtually none of it. Sometimes I think I should at least try to keep up, and Sheffield is one of the guys I recognize as worth following. But I don't.

Guy Sorman: Empire of Lies: The Truth About China in the Twenty-First Century (2008, Encounter Books): Very negative account of everyday life in China -- you can guess the laundry list, but probably not all the details -- where Sorman lived 2005-06. May also argue that reporting about China is full of lies too. I'm sure there's something to it, but I always discount books with Truth in the title.

Deborah Stone: The Samaritan's Dilemma: Should Government Help Your Neighbor? (2008, Nation Books): The most impressive arguments conservatives have come up with in recent years are based on the cluster of ideas that self-interest produces best results, that people must enjoy full responsibility for their actions, and that therefore government help is harmful to individuals. This can all be true under certain best case scenarios, but for most people it winds up working very poorly. Stone tackles those ideas in what may be one of the more important books of the year.

Ron Suskind: The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism (2008, Harper): The author's third book on the Bush years, each with a fair amount of original reporting and a few headline-making surprises. Whereas the first two books were largely based on identifiable insiders -- Paul O'Neill and George Tenet -- this one looks to be more scattered, with various CIA threads and something about Benazir Bhutto.

Douglas Valentine: The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs (paperback, 2006, Verso): Not sure that the promised secrets will be all that interesting. The Drug War should be seen as a political issue, turning first on how one sees the role of government in regulating everyday life. The War has consistently failed because not even majority support is sufficient to control a relatively private and personal activity. Yet the War continues because its warriors have managed to keep the issue out of our political discourse.

David Foster Wallace: McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope (paperback, 2008, Back Bay Books): This is Wallace's reporting on McCain's 2000 campaign, reprinted from Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays, with a new foreword by Jacob Weisberg, who evidently also covered McCain in 2000 and wrangled another interview in 2007. Pure opportunism, and a piece of false advertising, as whatever promise McCain seemed to have is ancient history now. Would have made more sense to reprint it as a second volume to Wallace's other 2000 work: Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.

Sheldon S Wolin: Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008, Princeton University Press): Asks the question: "has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled?" Seems like a pretty deep question. I remember Wolin from way back as one of the sharper thinkers to emerge from the new left.

Ming Zeng/Peter J Williamson: Dragons at Your Door: How Chinese Cost Innovation Is Disrupting Global Competition (2007, Harvard Business School Press): The obvious reason to move your manufacturing to China is cost, but it's still remarkable that China has such a substantial advantage on so many products. This digs into why that is, starting with cheap labor, of course, but there seems to be more to it.

Tony Judt: Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (2008, Penguin Books)

Another collection of essays written between 1994 and 2006, mostly book reviews, on scattered subjects, mostly 20th century history, mostly European, by the author of the monumental Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Judt was born in London in 1948. He is Jewish; at one point he explains that his family was involved in the Bund, so he grew up Leftist, Marxist, and Anti-Communist. That may also have given him some distance from Zionism, although he mentions that he went to Israel to help out just before the 1968 war, and that he spent some time on a kibbutz. Two essays are more or less critical of Israel, the later essay much more so. He clearly has a great fondness for Anti-Communist intellectuals, with very sympathetic essays here Arthur Koestler and Whittaker Chambers. Several more essays contrast European and American takes on history, especially regarding the sense of social bonds and security nets. Extensive quotes follow.

Given the length of the quotes, just go the permanent book page.

Michael Kinsley: Please Don't Remain Calm: Provocations and Commentaries (2008, WW Norton)

I occasionally ran across Kinsley on television back during his buckraking days, where he supposedly represented the left end of the political spectrum. He seemed like a MOR Liberal, which meant he typically conceded about 75% of the argument, then got his ass kicked. I never much followed his writings. He was the first editor of Slate, which I never read unless I had a direct link to something reportedly interesting, then he moved on to the Los Angeles Times, ditto there. But I did briefly glance at his previous essay book, Big Babies: Vintage Whines (1995), and found that I thought he had a point -- an interesting take, even.

This is his second essay collection, picking up from where the previous one left off. I figured given the times he'd have plenty to whine about. The serial nature of opinion column books is sort of a memory aid, given as it is to exaggerating the importance of fleeting sensations and exposing short-lived misconceptions. On the other hand, such books are rarely worth hardcover price. But I found this one in the library, and figured this to be my chance. Started out by jotting down all of the section headings (in bold, including subheads), and started flipping the pages, reading bits here and there, copying down what seemed most relevant. Got quite a bit: some good stuff (turns of phrase, a fairly keen sense of Bush's political and moral contradictions), some gaffes (actually, more like errors in judgment). Pretty good writer; pretty fair thinker. More with us than against us, but often tempted to argue the other side, not so much to be ornery as to convince himself that he's fair.

Given the length of the quotes, just go the permanent book page.

I've been collecting these book notes as I go along, and they've been piling up faster than expected. Last time I published them, I speculated that I'd have more come September. I think what I'll do from here on out is to post them whenever I get up to 40. In that case, I should have done this a week or two ago. Again, the previous ones from various posts have been collected here.

Paul Alexander: Machiavelli's Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove (2008, Rodale Books): One advantage this book has over all other Rove books -- for some reason I haven't been collecting them in these notes -- is that it gives us a taste of fall. Still has a good ways to go -- preferably to jail.

Rick Bass: Why I Came West: A Memoir (2008, Houghton Mifflin): I read one of his first books, a novel called Oil Notes that read more like a memoir. He has a long list of short books since then. Always meant to read more.

Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project (paperback, 2002, Belknap Press): A Marxist literary critic of great depth and sweep, this somehow assembles his unfinished, perhaps unfinishable, great project. Back when I was devoted to critical theory I was aware of this, but not as something that actually exists -- an analogy might be the Beach Boys' Smile. Haven't read Benjamin or any other Frankfurt School eminence in 30 years, but regard him as an old, dear friend.

Graydon Carter: What We've Lost: How the Bush Administration Has Curtailed Our Freedoms, Mortgaged Our Economy, Ravaged Our Environment, and Damaged Our Standing in the World (2004, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Vanity Fair editor. Seems like a fair and balanced summary.

Rodney Clapp: Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction: Christianity and the Battle for the Soul of a Nation (paperback, 2008, Westminster): Short book from a writer who specializes in religion -- an interesting past title is: A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society.

Tyler Cowen: Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist (paperback, 2008, Plume): I looked Cowen up after seeing Paul Krugman dis him. Easy to see why. His previous books include In Praise of Commercial Culture and Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures. Even the subtitle of this reductio ad absurdum economicum gives me the shivers: I don't want my dentist motivated; I want him to act like a conscientious professional, not a cash register.

Andres Duany/Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk/Jeff Speck: Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (2000; paperback, 2001, North Point Press): The authors are urban designers, evidently Jane Jacobs fans, upset at what they see in most American suburbs. Just running across a bunch of books on suburbia: James Howard Kunstler: The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, and Home From Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century; Dolores Hayden: Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000, and A Field Guide to Sprawl; Robert Bruegmann: Sprawl: A Compact History; Joel S Hirschhorn: Sprawl Kills: How Blandburbs Steal Your Time, Health and Money; Robert Burchell et al.: Sprawl Costs: Economic Impacts of Unchecked Development; Anthony Flint: This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America; Robert Fishman: Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia; Kenneth T Jackson: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States; Becky Nicolaides/Andrew Wiese, eds: The Sururb Reader; Joel Garreau: Edge City: Life on the New Frontier; Jane Holtz Kay: Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back; Alex Marshall: How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken. And that doesn't begin to scratch the literature of suburban anomie.

Barbara Ehrenreich: This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation (2008, Metropolitan Books): Looks like a short collection of columns from the last few years. Brilliant, I'm sure; I can't think of a deeper or more fearless thinker on the left. Only big mistake she ever made was wasting The Worst Years of Our Lives on the 1980s, not realizing that even worse could still be in the cards.

Tom Engelhardt, ed: The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (paperback, 2008, Verso): 320 pages scraped from one of the best-written, best-edited web sources, consistently ahead of the learning curve on the numerous interlocking threads of the great war of our times (GWOT?).

Marc Gerstein/Michael Ellsberg: Flirting With Disaster: Why Accidents Are Rarely Accidental (2008, Union Square Press): Examples include Chernobyl and Katrina, Vioxx, the Iraq War, Arthur Andersen/Enron, the 1994 Mexican peso crisis, a half dozen more. Gerstein's a management consultant. Ellsberg's an editor who helped his father publish the Pentagon Papers -- the father adds an introduction nominating Vietnam for the list. I'm on record as saying that how we handle disasters will be the most important political issue of the next few decades -- anticipating and preventing disasters looks like too tall an order, but understanding them when they happen is essential. This looks like a good place to start.

Peter Gosselin: High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families (2008, Basic Books): Los Angeles Times reporter tells stories about how the "great risk shift" (Jacob Hacker's term, the title of a good book) has affected dozens of ordinary families. Everyone rates the reporting here as superb, but evidently it doesn't go much into causes -- more interesting to me, since I have no trouble envisioning the problem.

Michael Heller: The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives (2008, Basic Books): Well, one way there's too much ownership is in the way we parcel out legal monopolies known as patents. That's one of Heller's examples, but it looks like he'd like to see more use of eminent domain -- e.g., he complains about the inability to build 25 new runways that would eliminate most air travel delays. You always have conflicts between private ownership and public utilities, and lately we've leaned so far toward the private side that the public has suffered.

Maggie Jackson: Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (2008, Prometheus): There's a growing perception that people are getting dumber, and there are a lot of theories as to why -- some of which can be taken as proof that people are getting dumber. I imagine that a case can be made for distraction (as PW puts it: "our near-religious allegiance to a constant state of motion and addiction to multitasking"). Jackson previously wrote: What's Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life, and Refuge in the Information Age.

Antonia Juhasz: The Bu$h Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time (paperback, 2007, Harper Perennial): Hadn't mentioned this before because it looked like a fairly standard anti-globalization rant -- maybe I was just reacting to the dollar sign, because it shouldn't be hard to make the case, and there are examples that could use some press: Iraq you probably know about, but what about Haiti? She has a new book coming out, another easy mark, even timelier: The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry -- and What We Must Do to Stop It.

Baruch Kimmerling: The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the Military (2001; paperback, 2005, University of California Press): Argues that Israeli identity has broken down into seven major cultures, which fits in with Richard Ben Cramer's argument that post-2000 Israeli hawkishness has been fueled by the disunity of the Israeli polity -- the repression of the Palestinians is the only thing all those Israeli factions can agree on. Like Tom Segev's Elvis in Jerusalem, written at a point when the events of the last 8 years didn't seem inevitable.

Baruch Kimmerling: Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies (2008, Columbia University Press): Looks like a collection assembled over 20 years, updating arguments from Kimmerling's earlier The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the Military.

Mark LeVine: Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (paperback, 2008, Three Rivers Press): Historian, rock guitarist, political activist, sometimes gets his careers confused, although few Middle East scholars are more insightful, or interesting.

Michael Lind: The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (1995; paperback, 1996, Free Press): I only know Lind from his 2004 book, Made in Texas: George W Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics -- as sharp as any book published on Bush around that time. I gather he started as a rabid anti-communist conservative, then started to distance himself from conservatism in the 1990s. This book seems to be transitional, his embrace of liberal nationalism itself a conservative impulse.

Michael Lind: Up From Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America (1996; paperback, 1997, Free Press): Offhand, this one looks prescient. The target is big enough, but at the time it hadn't really sunk in how extreme the Gingrich upheaval was, let alone where it might go once someone like Bush got into the White House. Ariana Huffington's Right Is Wrong had it easy.

Michael Lind: Vietnam: The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict (1999; paperback, 2002, Free Press): Lind argues that it was necessary for the US to intervene in Vietnam -- something about global communist conspiracy -- but that the tactics chosen were all wrong, leading to the disaster. I believe that the Cold War itself was wrong, and Vietnam was just a particularly egregious case of why. Lind may have moved up from his conservatism; he still needs to grow out of liberal interventionism.

Michael Lind: The American Way of Strategy: US Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life (2006, Oxford University Press): Bad as Lind was on the Cold War, he was one of the first to identify the perils the neoconservatives posed in its aftermath. Argues that US policy abroad shouldn't undermine the American way of life at home. Seems obvious, but I can show you 60 years of presidents who didn't get it. (Doubt that Lind agrees on the whole list, but GW Bush is certainly one he has in mind.)

Tom Mast: Over a Barrel: A Simple Guide to the Oil Shortage (2005, Hayden): Short (128 page) primer, probably too basic at this point, unless you're not up on the subject.

Jane Mayer: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (2008, Doubleday): Another book on the chic torture clique in and near the White House. I recoil a bit at the contrast to "American ideals" given the shoddy record self-appointed Real Americans have established. This has gotten some press -- Mayer writes for New Yorker, and this promises to be one of the more definitive books on the subject. She previously wrote Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas.

Nan Mooney: (Not) Keeping Up With Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class (2008, Beacon Press): Probably the most normal thing in the world, at least if you're American, is to think that each generation makes progress moving up the proverbial Dream ladder. Still, I know a lot of people who are old enough to take retirement seriously but are still dependent on their parents for support -- especially true with middle class professionals, who did well for themselves before many conspired to kick the ladders out that might have allowed other people to advance.

Paul Muolo/Mathew Padilla: Chain of Blame: How Wall Street Caused the Mortgage and Credit Crisis (2008, Wiley): Two journalists track down the chain of responsibility for the subprime mortgage meltdown. Looks like the leader in the race to cash in, already joined by: Edward M Gramlich: Subprime Mortgages: America's Latest Boom and Bust; Robert J Shiller: The Subprime Solution: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do About It; Mark Zandi: Financial Shock: A 360° Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis; Richard Bitner: Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider's Tale of Greed, Fraud, and Ignorance. I don't think Dean Baker has a book out yet, but he's been on top of the crisis from before anyone else knew it was happening.

Kenneth Pollack: A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East (2008, Random House): As an Iraq War hawk, Pollack did much to get us into the mess he now feels so eminently qualified to get us out of. Favors a humbler, more humane, more realistic, and more cohesive set of policies. Evidently he gets paid for such profound insights.

Jules Pretty: The Earth Only Endures: On Reconnecting With Nature and Our Place in It (2007, Earthscan): Author is an expert in sustainable agriculture, which he has written several books on. Collection of essays, ranges wider.

Dani Rodrik: One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth (2007, Princeton University Press): Argues that there is no one single formula for development success, but all recipes that have worked are rooted in economics fundamentals, which themselves imply no single development path. Puts him in a good position to pick on everyone else's pet theory. Previously wrote: Has Globalization Gone Too Far?; The New Global Economy and Developing Countries: Making Openness Work; In Search of Prosperity: Analytic Narratives on Economic Growth.

Fernando Romero/LAR: Hyperborder: The Contemporary US-Mexico Border and Its Future (paperback, 2007, Princeton Architectural Press): Robert D Kaplan described the US-Mexico border as the starkest dividing line on the planet. This provides pictures, diagrams, details covering all aspects of cross-border interaction. Author is an architect, based in Mexico City.

Jacqueline Rose: The Question of Zion (paperback, 2007, Princeton University Press): Another in the growing list of histories and critiques of the Zionist idea. Rose has several other recent books, including The Last Resistance (on Israel) and Sexuality in the Field of Vision, both published by Verso.

Robert Scheer: Playing President: My Close Ecounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan, and Clinton -- and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W Bush (paperback, 2006, Akashic Books): Scheer starts his new The Pornography of Power off with a story about Nixon that concedes that even the Madman Theorist had a clue about toning down a confrontation. The thesis here seems to be that the second Bush is flat out off the scales, and that thesis seems well-founded.

Raja Shehadeh: Palestinian Walks: Forays Into a Vanishing Landscape (paperback, 2008, Scribner): Ostensibly a travel book, a series of hikes through the occupied landscape of the Jordan's west bank. Shehadeh's memoir, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine, is one of the few books on the subject that can really turn heads. Also wrote When the Birds Stopped Singing: Life in Ramallah Under Siege.

Rob Simpson: What We Could Have Done With the Money: 50 Ways to Spend the Trillion Dollars We've Spent on Iraq (paperback, 2008, Hyperion): Short book throws some alternatives out, ranging from the silly ("pave every highway in America with gold leaf") to serious. The underlying principle is what economists call opportunity costs: when we spend money on one thing, we forego other possible uses for that money, some of which would have turned out to be much better.

Lewis Sorley: A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (1999; paperback, 2007, Harvest Books): Tries to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in Vietnam, touting the modest successes of Gen. Creighton Abrams and how they were undermined by the loss of political will in Washington. This is the fount of the argument that the antiwar movement (not the warmakers themselves) lost us the war -- although it should be noted that that argument was already an article of faith on the right, no matter what happened in Vietnam.

Cass R Sunstein: Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America (2005, Basic Books): Prolific writer, both on law and economics; strikes me as a centrist, but smart enough to tear through nonsense on the right, which makes this potentially useful. More recently wrote Worst-Case Scenarios, Republic.com 2.0, and co-wrote Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

Cass R Sunstein: The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution -- And Why We Need It More Than Ever (2004; paperback, 2006, Basic Books): I've been thinking lately about how quickly the US dropped two of Roosevelt's "four freedoms" and what the implications of that shuffle have been. Parts of Roosevelt's thinking did slip into the early construction of the postwar institutions, particularly the UN. A move to back them up instead of curtailing them to fight communism and restore imperialism would have profoundly changed postwar history.

John R Talbott: Obamanomics: How Bottom-Up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-Down Economics (paperback, 2008, Seven Stories Press): Former investment banker, writing for a lefty publisher, not sure how that all adds up, but Obama's take on business issues and choice of economics advisers is somewhat idiosyncratic. Talbott has a couple of previous books, like The Coming Crisis in the Housing Market: 10 Things You Can Do Now to Protect Your Most Valuable Investment, and Sell Now! The End of the Housing Bubble. Those books came out in 2003 and 2006 respectively, so you have to give him some credit there.

Jeffrey Toobin: The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (2007, Doubleday): New Yorker writer, probably a good narrative portrait of the court and all its warts, including Roberts and Alito.

Philip C Winslow: Victory for Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis (2007, Beacon Press): Most reviews see this as an intensely personal account. Seems to me that he's found an essential, deeply troubling, truth.

David S Wyman: The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (paperback, 2007, New Press): Looks at what the Roosevelt administration actually knew about Hitler's "final solution" and what little the US did about it. Several other books on this general topic: Robert Beir: Roosevelt and the Holocaust; Arthur D Morse: While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy; Robert N Rosen: Saving the Jews: Franklin D Roosevelt and the Holocaust; Henry L Feingold: Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust; also, William D Rubinstein: The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews From the Nazis.

Allen Lowe: That Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History, 1900-1950 (paperback, 1999, Music and Arts Program of America)

A saxophonist of some note, Lowe now has two books of American music history tied to extensive CD sets, or vice versa. His first effort was American Pop: From Minstrel to Mojo: On Record 1893-1956 (1997, Cadence Jazz Books), which turned into a slightly more limited (cutoff date 1946) 9-CD box set, which interleaves jazz, country, folk, blues, and pop in no special order, the juxtapositions the raw stuff of history. In a gross case of Second System Complex he soon followed that up with a 36-CD history of jazz, again somewhat broadly considered. The book itself came out in 1999, but the CDs (4 boxes of 9 each, each box with a quarter of the book text reset in tiny type) didn't appear until 2007.

Not an easy book to find. I got my copy from Cadence/NMDS. Had to make my own scan of the cover.

Gordon S Wood: The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (2008, Penguin Press)

Wood is possibly the most eminent historian of the period of the American Revolution, at least since Bernard Bailyn, to whom this book is dedicated. He burst onto the scene in 1969 with his magisterial The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, promptly winning a Bancroft Prize. His second book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991), had to settle for a Pulitzer Prize. Since 2000 he's been publishing more regularly, partly because the books have become narrower or at least easier. The American Revolution: A History is a short primer on the period. Revolutionary Characters is a collection of character studies, mostly gleaned from his numerous book reviews. This new book is also a collection of book reviews, these ones selected for lessons in historiograpy. I discovered rather early on that the fastest way to learn about history was not to tackle huge piles of grand books but to read around them: to scour through the acknowledgments and footnotes for hints about how working historians view each other, and where possible picking up reviews and interviews. I probably learned more about American history from John A. Garraty's Interpreting American History: Conversations with Historians than any other single book. David Hackett Fischer's Historians' Fallacies was pure candy to me. Wood's new collection is another chance to get two-for-one: capsule summaries of more than a dozen books, plus the mediating framework of putting them into the context of contemporary historiography. Quite a deal.

In what follows, the chapter titles are in bold, followed by the reviewed books. The review dates are in brackets. A couple of reviews are followed by correspondence -- critiques of the reviews followed by Wood's replies. Each review is followed by a short afterword -- the latter all noted as [2008].

James Gustave Speth: The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing From Crisis to Sustainability (2008, Yale University Press)

Speth was Chairman of the President's Council on Environmental Quality (the president was Carter), and founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute -- unusually establishmentarian credentials for one who has come to see today's "pragmatic and incrementalist" environment movement as inadequate, who is willing to go so far as to cite capitalism itself as the problem that prevents us from moving towards any sort of sustainable economics. He could, of course, go further, but he is certainly on to something. We've seen that the class struggle between labor and capital can be mitigated by a more equitable political division of the pie. However, sustainability cuts far deeper into the essence of capitalism. A sustainable economy may retain aspects of private property and markets, but losing the prospect of endless growth certainly changes its nature.

Mark Engler: How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (paperback, 2008, Nation Books)

What politely goes under the name of globalization is much more like transnational corporatist capitalism. It is a force likely to be a good deal more resilient than the wreck known as the Bush Administration. So it makes sense to try to take a look beyond Bush, but it isn't all that easy to do so. Engler pokes and jabs at it without connecting much of substance -- e.g., a relatively large percentage of the following quotes do little more than lambast easy targets like Thomas Friedman -- see Matt Taibbi's review for the definitive skewering.